Subject and Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method 9781441137289, 9781441122865, 9781501302244, 9781623565312

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Subject and Object

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Subject and Object Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method

EDITED BY RUTH GROFF

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Ruth Groff, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Subject and object : Frankfurt School writings on epistemology, ontology, and method / edited By Ruth Groff. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-3728-9 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-2286-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Institut f?r Sozialforschung (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) 2. Frankfurt school of sociology. 3. Knowledge, Theory of. 4. Ontology. 5. Critical theory. I. Groff, Ruth, 1963editor of compilation. HM467.S85 2014 121--dc 3 2013043084

ISBN: ePDF: 978-1-6235-6531-2

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

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For Asher Horowitz, with whom I first read critical theory, and for my dear friend Kurt Tauber, sharp as a tack at 91.

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CONTENTS

Foreword by David McNally  viii Acknowledgments  x Introduction  xii

PART ONE Epistemology 1 1 “Means and Ends” Max Horkheimer   3 2 “Industrialization and Capitalism in Max Weber” Herbert Marcuse  37 3 “On the Problem of Truth” Max Horkheimer  55 4 “A Note on Dialectic” Herbert Marcuse  91 5 Negative Dialectics, selections Theodor Adorno  99

PART TWO Ontology 113 6 “The Concept of Essence” Herbert Marcuse  115 7 “Subject and Object” Theodor Adorno  149 8 Negative Dialectics, selections Theodor Adorno  165

PART THREE Method 183 9 “Traditional and Critical Theory” Max Horkheimer  185 10 “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” Max Horkheimer  233 11 “Philosophy and Critical Theory” Herbert Marcuse  277 Index  297 Permissions  308

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FOREWORD David McNally

Critical theory can be daunting. Confronted by dense texts steeped in German idealism, aesthetics, psychoanalytic theory, and HegelianMarxism, many a reader has recoiled. Yet, critical theory matters—not least because it speaks powerfully to the most urgent of philosophical and political questions: reason, truth, and freedom. However, because our society represses the struggle toward these, because it collapses their genuine meanings into their opposites, critical theory needs a vocabulary and a conceptual form that appear strange to the prevailing patterns of thought. This is why critical theory seeks to estrange us from everyday appearances. The pursuit of truth requires that thought should be alienated from the reigning untruth (and the forms of thought upon which it rests), just as the movement toward human freedom can only be accomplished via a rupture from our current unfreedom. To step into the texts of critical theory is thus to enter a conceptual universe that deliberately resists integration into traditional categories of thought. And therein reside both its importance and its strangeness. For only in turning against the dominant ways of thinking might critical theory open a space of freedom. To be sure, the space of freedom to which radical thought aspires is fleeting and precarious. Yet, this simply testifies to the limited powers of any intellectual practice that remains disconnected from a mass movement to change the world. Indeed, critical theory lives in the shadow of the failure of such movements. It moves in the space of a defeat whose finality it resists. This is why it persists in a form that appears philosophical as much as it seeks to transcend philosophy in the direction of an emancipatory social theory and practice. But move within the orbit of philosophy it must, not least because philosophy in its most genuine sense preserves the aspirations of reason, truth, and freedom. At the same time, philosophy is implicated in suffering and oppression. It subsists on the division between mental and manual labor, and it has been enlisted in the service of domination and empire. For this reason, critical theory turns philosophy against itself, hoping that the

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Foreword

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sparks generated in this collision might illuminate new paths for thought and praxis. And here we encounter dialectics—the very source of critical theory. For dialectics, as several texts in this wonderful collection remind us, lives in the space of negative thinking. Dialectics operate in the very act of thinking against ourselves, of estranging ourselves from the modes of thought and forms of life that are inimical to truth and freedom. Yet, critical theory resists the imperial pretensions of philosophy, its grandiose claim to generate a transcendence of that which is via the act of thinking alone. Dialectics in critical theory thus remain materialist in inspiration— oriented to the transformation of our very forms of social life as the only register in which transcendence is possible. So, in seeking tendencies that point beyond the existing state of affairs, in excavating possibilities that the dominant social order and traditional theory repress, critical theory persists through negation. Thus, while theory cannot pose a positive program, it can nourish resources of hope that live in the very activity of thought resisting the prevailing forms of domination. That is what this stunning collection of texts implores us to do. Not only has Ruth Groff chosen wisely by bringing together some truly outstanding contributions by the “first generation” of Frankfurt School theorists, she has also provided strikingly clear and insightful introductions that situate each text, not merely with respect to its composition, but also in relation to contemporary theory. Readers curious as to how critical theory differs from the likes of pragmatism, skepticism and neo-Aristotelianism will discover dazzling gems sprinkled throughout her presentations. Moving between concerns with questions of epistemology, ontology, and method, Groff gives us critical theory in action, shifting across theoretical idioms in order to demonstrate the power of negative thinking. That power, she reminds us, lies in the enduring resources these texts provide for a kind of thinking that keeps alive the promises of reason, truth, and freedom.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is nothing like editing a Frankfurt School reader to make one feel very small. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse were the silent intellectual giants of my undergraduate philosophical training at Swarthmore College. The Critical Modern Social Theory seminar, then taught by Braulio Munoz, was the one that I never got to take. By the time that I had acquired what my youthful self believed to be the minimum necessary background to do so, it was time to graduate. In a real sense, I went on to graduate school in order to finally get to take a class on the Frankfurt School. I was fortunate that I had, indeed, been sufficiently prepared by several truly legendary teachers: Braulio Munoz (who also taught Modern Social Theory), Hugh Lacey, Ken Sharpe, and Rich Schuldenfrei. I was equally fortunate to have studied the material for the first time, when I finally did, with Asher Horowitz—to whom, along with my dear friend Kurt Tauber, this volume is gratefully and affectionately dedicated. In more recent years I have talked about the work of the Frankfurt School with two wonderful interlocutors in particular, in addition to Asher: David McNally and Christian Thorne. David has generously agreed to write a short Foreword, and Christian was prepared to re-translate “Subject and Object” had I been able to secure the required rights from the German publisher. I want to thank both of them for their friendship and invaluable intellectual company. I would also like to thank Catherine Kellogg for sharing her syllabus with me when I first undertook to design my own Frankfurt School seminar. Catherine’s syllabus influenced mine, and it was when I was creating that first course kit that I conceived of this volume. Marie-Claire Antoine, the original acquisitions editor for Continuum, encouraged the proposal and delivered the contract. (I will get to Matthew Kopel, who took over when Continuum was incorporated into Bloomsbury.) Kaitlin Fontana, Kim Storry and James Tupper saw to it that the book was produced and publicized, handling every aspect of the process with care and good cheer. I’d also like to express thanks to two graduate assistants who have helped with the project, Everett Fulmer and Jeremy Tauzer, and to Peter and Harold Marcuse for their kind and supportive response to my requests for permissions for several out-of-print pieces.

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Acknowledgments

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Maybe there are people whose intellectual lives do not presuppose, at every turn, their relationships with friends, family, colleagues, and students. But I am not one of them. I can’t come close to listing every name here that I wish that I could, but I would like to thank Alexander Bird, Otha Day, Noah Efron, Howard Engelskirchen, Elizabeth Foreman, Meg and Jim Groff, Janet Jackel, Diane and Gary Laison, Patricia Montoya, Paul Park, Jim Rhodes, Becky Robin, Jonathan Sher, Judy Sloan, Irem Kurtsal Steen, Kurt Tauber, and Christian Thorne for the roles that they play as bedrock. Thank you also to core communities on both Facebook and Twitter— and to Stella Gaon, for explaining the opening sentences of “Subject and Object” to me when we were both still at OISE. Finally, I simply cannot thank Matthew Kopel at Bloomsbury enough. He is the Editor from God. Or otherwise from Krypton.

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INTRODUCTION

This volume grew out of my experience putting together the materials for a seminar that I teach on the Frankfurt School. In preparing the syllabus for the first time, I saw that the pieces that I wanted students to read were scattered across a number of original texts and earlier collections. No single anthology was suitable. “These should all be together in one place,” I thought. When I realized that many of the works in question are now out of print, it no longer seemed just a matter of convenience and intellectual good sense that this should be so, but instead a kind of moral imperative, if only a small one. I quickly went from wondering why no one had ever published the kind of collection that I had in mind, to thinking that it was important that someone did, and that I would do my best to make it happen. My hope is that this new anthology will serve several intellectual purposes. First, the philosophical concerns that I’ve tried to highlight— from reflections on the nature of reason, to assessments of the concepts of essence and truth, to critiques of positivist methodology—go to the heart of the project of critical theory as the principal members of the Frankfurt School themselves understood it. Critical theory was viewed by all three as a position whose proponents ought to be attentive not just to the relationship between social theory and the organization of society at large, but also to the underlying epistemological, ontological and methodological commitments implicit in any given bit of thought, including thought about social reality. Indeed, in an important sense, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse all took social theory to be applied philosophy—even if philosophy, in turn, is always a social-historical product that bears the marks of its material conditions of possibility. One reason to direct readers to these authors’ philosophical writing on epistemology, ontology, and method, therefore, is that understanding the Frankfurt School members’ views in these areas is, by their own standards, essential to understanding their social, cultural, and political-economic critiques. This is a point that may be under-appreciated by readers whose interests are not primarily philosophical. Moreover, these authors’ philosophical and meta-philosophical insights are relevant to debates in contemporary philosophy. Anglo-analytic thinkers can sometimes be slow to appreciate the value of Hegelian-inflected philosophical argument. This tendency is exacerbated in the case of the Frankfurt School, whose members are apt to be assumed to be “mere” social theorists.

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Introduction

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But the Frankfurt School material bears directly upon current analytic work on topics such as social epistemology, social ontology, free will, realism, and causal explanation in the social sciences. That this is so may not be immediately apparent to professional philosophers who specialize in these areas. However, this fact itself can be seen to be a product of assumptions of precisely the type rendered explicit and addressed critically by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus philosophers too, and not just social theorists, may benefit from the thematic focus of this collection. Finally, I have included relatively short reconstructions of each of the pieces, designed to make them as accessible as possible rhetorically. I have described the process of creating these blurbs as being akin to turning a three-dimensional Escher print into a set of propositions. Much is lost, necessarily. So be it. All three of these authors thought that reasoning, their own included, has an important role to play in the bringing about of better conditions. As a function, this stands in sharp contrast to that which their work has too often taken on in academic circles, which is to allow for the signaling, via the cultivated repetition of opaque language, that one is in the know. Ever since the translation into English of Adorno’s lectures from the late 1950s and early 1960s, English readers too have been able to see that even Adorno was entirely capable of stating his views in direct, transparent language. My hope is that providing readers with points of entry for each of the pieces will lead, in the end, to more rather than less sophisticated engagements with the material.

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PART ONE

Epistemology

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CHAPTER ONE

“Means and Ends” Max Horkheimer “Means and Ends” is the first chapter of Eclipse of Reason, published in 1947, in English. The governing device of the book is a dichotomy between what Horkheimer calls “objective reason” and “subjective reason.” In this first chapter Horkheimer tracks the devolution of the former into the latter— which, expressed as pragmatism, he then criticizes. While he does not call for a return to the past, he does make plain the ways in which he believes the concept objective reason to be superior to that of subjective reason, and what the philosophical and political consequences have been of its eclipse. The concept of objective reason is first and foremost an epistemological term: it refers to a posited intellectual capacity. However, insofar as the capacity is precisely that of being able to discern an external, metaphysicallygiven order, the concept brings realist ontological commitments along with it. Locke, for instance (to use Horkheimer’s example) took reason to be the ability to discern God’s will, as expressed in the Laws of Nature. Moreover, the order to be grasped is not just external, vis-à-vis the subject. It is also normative. While it is the order itself that compels action of one type or another, (rather than the faculty by which it is known), objective reason is therefore an organ of moral perception. As such, it yields knowledge of ends. Subjective reason, by contrast, does not. Subjective reason is purely instrumental. Horkheimer sketches a trajectory in which objective reason first supplanted religious belief, allowing for a “softer,” more tolerant form of moral knowledge, but then itself gave way to subjective reason. The problem with the outcome is that subjective reason cannot help us to assess ends. It is simply the ability to calculate means. As Horkheimer observes, it is a kind of reason that cannot tell us if fascism is wrong. Nor, can it underwrite a defense of democracy. Classical arguments on behalf of consent, he reminds us, presupposed that we are bearers of objective reason. Authority is derived from the ruled not because the majority are fans of democracy, but because—

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as Locke would have it—everyone has the ability to discern God’s will (or at least adult Englishmen do). If reason is mere cleverness, then the normative situation is just as Hobbes said: “tyranny” can mean only “not to my liking.” Objective reason having “liquidated itself,” as Horkheimer puts it, we are left with self-interest as “the core of the official ideology of liberalism.” The version of the ideology that Horkheimer criticizes here is pragmatism. At the level of practice, the issue is the direct equation of reason with efficiency—which is to say, efficiency in the service of the status quo. In the present case, reason-as-means comes to be identified with whatever is functional for “the reifying mechanisms of the anonymous economic apparatus.” (There is an irony in Horkheimer’s appeal to Locke, of course, in that Locke insisted that what objective reason reveals is an inviolable right to private property. But at least in the case of objective reason, such commitments are explicit.) At the level of philosophy, meanwhile, Horkheimer objects to a set of claims associated with James and Dewey, ranging from the “the opinion that an idea, a concept, or a theory is nothing but a scheme or plan of action, and therefore truth is nothing but the successfulness of the idea” to the thesis that the existential relevance of objects is exhausted by their effects upon us. At both levels, the concern is that reason as defined by pragmatists is no longer critical. Horkheimer first considers the moral implications of the pragmatist conception, then goes on to ask if the approach is otherwise sound. With respect to the former, he writes: “If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about […] metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas’ or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody.’” But it is not just that pragmatism is in principle morally mute, and therefore morally deficient. In further interrogating the thesis that “each thought must have an alibi, must present a record of its expediency,” Horkheimer raises the following objections. First, the very experimental situations to which classical pragmatists appeal (likening all thought to the activity of determining “what works,” in the laboratory) – those situations are themselves shaped by social forces. This is so in a general sense, insofar as the goal of controlling nature is built into the project of modern science, but also more narrowly, in terms of the selection, design and funding of research programs. Thus, even at the philosophical level, identifying reason itself with the “utility” of science (science already conceived in Baconian terms) will have the effect of aligning a potentially critical faculty with prevailing interests, not just contingently but in principle. Second, the pragmatist has a regress problem when it comes to the idea that meaningful concepts are akin to successful experiments. For the very concepts that would figure in an effort to test the cognitive mettle

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of a given term via the experimental method will themselves be meaningful only qua results of other experiments. Finally, and perhaps most important, reason defined in instrumental terms has already lost much of its vaunted utility for moral beings such as ourselves. “Means and Ends” can be usefully read along-side “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” and/or “On the Problem of Truth,” both also by Horkheimer, and/or “The Concept of Essence,” by Herbert Marcuse. The first is an analysis of positivism that is similar to the critique of pragmatism; the second is another go at pragmatism; the third is Marcuse doing for the concept of essence what Horkheimer does for that of objective reason: namely, showing it to be a necessary aspect of genuinely radical thought, not merely a relic of a reactionary past.

“Means and Ends” When the ordinary man is asked to explain what is meant by the term reason, his reaction is almost always one of hesitation and embarrassment. It would be a mistake to interpret this as indicating wisdom too deep or thought too abstruse to be put into words. What it actually betrays is the feeling that there is nothing to inquire into, that the concept of reason is self-explanatory, that the question itself is superfluous. When pressed for an answer, the average man will say that reasonable things are things that are obviously useful, and that every reasonable man is supposed to be able to decide what is useful to him. Naturally the circumstances of each situation, as well as laws, customs, and traditions, should be taken into account. But the force that ultimately makes reasonable actions possible is the faculty of classification, inference, and deduction, no matter what the specific content—the abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism. This type of reason may be called subjective reason. It is essentially concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory. It attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable. If it concerns itself at all with ends, it takes for granted that they too are reasonable in the subjective sense, i.e. that they serve the subject’s interest in relation to self-preservation—be it that of the single individual, or of the community on whose maintenance that of the individual depends. The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake—on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself—without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflections about the social order as a whole.

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However naive or superficial this definition of reason may seem, it is an important symptom of a profound change of outlook that has taken place in Western thinking in the course of the last centuries. For a long time, a diametrically opposite view of reason was prevalent. This view asserted the existence of reason as a force not only in the individual mind but also in the objective world—in relations among human beings and between social classes, in social institutions, and in nature and its manifestations. Great philosophical systems, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism, and German idealism were founded on an objective theory of reason. It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man’s life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were derived. The emphasis was on ends rather than on means. The supreme endeavor of this kind of thinking was to reconcile the objective order of the ‘reasonable,’ as philosophy conceived it, with human existence, including self-interest and self-preservation. Plato, for instance, undertakes in his Republic to prove that he who lives in the light of objective reason also lives a successful and happy life. The theory of objective reason did not focus on the co-ordination of behavior and aim, but on concepts—however mythological they sound to us today—on the idea of the greatest good, on the problem of human destiny, and on the way of realization of ultimate goals. There is a fundamental difference between this theory, according to which reason is a principle inherent in reality, and the doctrine that reason is a subjective faculty of the mind. According to the latter, the subject alone can genuinely have reason: if we say that an institution or any other reality is reasonable, we usually mean that men have organized it reasonably, that they have applied to it, in a more or less technical way, their logical, calculative capacity. Ultimately subjective reason proves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end. This definition seems to be in harmony with the ideas of many outstanding philosophers, particularly of English thinkers since the days of John Locke. Of course, Locke did not overlook other mental functions that might fall into the same category, for example discernment and reflection. But these functions certainly contribute to the co-ordination of means and ends, which is, after all, the social concern of science and, in a way, the raison d’être of theory in the social process of production. In the subjectivist view, when ‘reason’ is used to connote a thing or an idea rather than an act, it refers exclusively to the relation of such an object or concept to a purpose, not to the object or concept itself. It means that

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the thing or the idea is good for something else. There is no reasonable aim as such, and to discuss the superiority of one aim over another in terms of reason becomes meaningless. From the subjective approach, such a discussion is possible only if both aims serve a third and higher one, that is, if they are means, not ends.1 The relation between these two concepts of reason is not merely one of opposition. Historically, both the subjective and the objective aspect of reason have been present from the outset, and the predominance of the former over the latter was achieved in the course of a long process. Reason in its proper sense of logos, or ratio, has always been essentially related to the subject, his faculty of thinking. All the terms denoting it were once subjective expressions; thus the Greek term stems from legein, ‘to say,’ denoting the subjective faculty of speech. The subjective faculty of thinking was the critical agent that dissolved superstition. But in denouncing mythology as false objectivity, i.e. as a creation of the subject, it had to use concepts that it recognized as adequate. Thus it always developed an objectivity of its own. In Platonism, the Pythagorean theory of numbers, which originated in astral mythology, was transformed into the theory of ideas that attempts to define the supreme content of thinking as an absolute objectivity ultimately beyond, though related to, the faculty of thinking. The present crisis of reason consists fundamentally in the fact that at a certain point thinking either became incapable of conceiving such objectivity at all or began to negate it as a delusion. This process was gradually extended to include the objective content of every rational concept. In the end, no particular reality can seem reasonable per se; all the basic concepts, emptied of their content, have come to be only formal shells. As reason is subjectivized, it also becomes formalized.2 The formalization of reason has far-reaching theoretical and practical implications. If the subjectivist view holds true, thinking cannot be of any The difference between this connotation of reason and the objectivistic conception resembles to a certain degree the difference between functional and substantial rationality as these words are used in the Max Weber school. Max Weber, however, adhered so definitely to the subjectivistic trend that he did not conceive of any rationality—not even a ‘substantial’ one by which man can discriminate one end from another. If our drives, intentions, and finally our ultimate decisions must a priori be irrational, substantial reason becomes an agency merely of correlation and is therefore itself essentially ‘functional.’ Although Weber’s own and his followers’ descriptions of the bureaucratization and monopolization of knowledge have illuminated much of the social aspect of the transition from objective to subjective reason (cf. particularly the analyses of Karl Mannheim in Man and Society, London, 1940), Max Weber’s pessimism with regard to the possibility of rational insight and action, as expressed in his philosophy (cf., e.g., ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf,’ in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen, 1922), is itself a stepping-stone in the renunciation of philosophy and science as regards their aspiration of defining man’s goal. 2 The terms subjectivization and formalization, though in many respects not identical in meaning, will be used as practically equivalent throughout this book. 1

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help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral, or esthetic decisions. ‘A judgment of fact,’ says Russell,3 one of the most objectivist thinkers among subjectivists, ‘is capable of a property called “truth,” which it has or does not have quite independently of what any one may think about it. . . . But . . . I see no property, analogous to “truth,” that belongs or does not belong to an ethical judgment. This, it must be admitted, puts ethics in a different category from science.’ However, Russell, more than others, is aware of the difficulties in which such a theory necessarily becomes involved. ‘An inconsistent system may well contain less falsehood than a consistent one.’4 Despite his philosophy, which holds ‘ultimate ethical values to be subjective,’5 he seems to differentiate between the objective moral qualities of human actions and our perception of them: ‘What is horrible I will see as horrible.’ He has the courage of inconsistency and thus, by disavowing certain aspects of his anti-dialectical logic, remains indeed a philosopher and a humanist at the same time. If he were to cling to his scientistic theory consistently, he would have to admit that there are no horrible actions or inhuman conditions, and that the evil he sees is just an illusion. According to such theories, thought serves any particular endeavor, good or bad. It is a tool of all actions of society, but it must not try to set the patterns of social and individual life, which are assumed to be set by other forces. In lay discussion as well as in scientific, reason has come to be commonly regarded as an intellectual faculty of co-ordination, the efficiency of which can be increased by methodical use and by the removal of any non-intellectual factors, such as conscious or unconscious emotions. Reason has never really directed social reality, but now reason has been so thoroughly purged of any specific trend or preference that it has finally renounced even the task of passing judgment on man’s actions and way of life. Reason has turned them over for ultimate sanction to the conflicting interests to which our world actually seems abandoned. This relegation of reason to a subordinate position is in sharp contrast to the ideas of the pioneers of bourgeois civilization, the spiritual and political representatives of the rising middle class, who were unanimous in declaring that reason plays a leading role in human behavior, perhaps even the predominant role. They defined a wise legislature as one whose laws conform to reason; national and international policies were judged ‘Reply to Criticisms,’ in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Chicago, 1944, p. 723. Ibid. p. 720. 5 Ibid. 3 4

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according to whether they followed the lines of reason. Reason was supposed to regulate our preferences and our relations with other human beings and with nature. It was thought of as an entity, a spiritual power living in each man. This power was held to be the supreme arbiter—nay, more, the creative force behind the ideas and things to which we should devote our lives. Today, when you are summoned into a traffic court, and the judge asks you whether your driving was reasonable, he means: Did you do everything in your power to protect your own and other people’s lives and property, and to obey the law? He implicitly assumes that these values must be respected. What he questions is merely the adequacy of your behavior in terms of these generally recognized standards. In most cases, to be reasonable means not to be obstinate, which in turn points to conformity with reality as it is. The principle of adjustment is taken for granted. When the idea of reason was conceived, it was intended to achieve more than the mere regulation of the relation between means and ends: it was regarded as the instrument for understanding the ends, for determining them. Socrates died because he subjected the most sacred and most familiar ideas of his community and his country to the critique of the daimonion, or dialectical thought, as Plato called it. In doing so, he fought against both ideologic conservatism and relativism masked as progressiveness but actually subordinated to personal and professional interests. In other words, he fought against the subjective, formalistic reason advocated by the other Sophists. He undermined the sacred tradition of Greece, the Athenian way of life, thus preparing the soil for radically different forms of individual and social life. Socrates held that reason, conceived as universal insight, should determine beliefs, regulate relations between man and man, and between man and nature. Although his doctrine might be considered the philosophical origin of the concept of the subject as ultimate judge of good and evil, he spoke of reason and of its verdicts not as mere names or conventions, but as reflecting the true nature of things. As negativistic as his teachings may have been, they implied the idea of absolute truth and were put forward as objective insights, almost as revelations. His daimonion was a more spiritual god, but he was not less real than the other gods were believed to be. His name was supposed to denote a living force. In Plato’s philosophy the Socratic power of intuition or conscience, the new god within the individual subject, has dethroned or at least transformed his rivals in Greek mythology. They have become ideas. There is no question whether they are simply his creatures, products or contents similar to the sensations of the subject according to the theory of subjective idealism. On the contrary, they still preserve some of the prerogatives of the old gods: they occupy a higher and nobler sphere than humans, they are models, they are immortal. The daimonion in turn has changed into the soul, and the soul is the eye that can perceive the ideas. It reveals itself as the vision of truth or as the individual subject’s faculty to

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perceive the eternal order of things and consequently the line of action that must be followed in the temporal order. The term objective reason thus on the one hand denotes as its essence a structure inherent in reality that by itself calls for a specific mode of behavior in each specific case, be it a practical or a theoretical attitude. This structure is accessible to him who takes upon himself the effort of dialectical thinking, or, identically, who is capable of eros. On the other hand, the term objective reason may also designate this very effort and ability to reflect such an objective order. Everybody is familiar with situations that by their very nature, and quite apart from the interests of the subject, call for a definite line of action—for example, a child or an animal on the verge of drowning, a starving population, or an individual illness. Each of these situations speaks, as it were, a language of itself. However, since they are only segments of reality, each of them may have to be neglected because there are more comprehensive structures demanding other lines of action equally independent of personal wishes and interests. The philosophical systems of objective reason implied the conviction that an all-embracing or fundamental structure of being could be discovered and a conception of human destination derived from it. They understood science, when worthy of this name, as an implementation of such reflection or speculation. They were opposed to any epistemology that would reduce the objective basis of our insight to a chaos of uncoordinated data, and identify our scientific work as the mere organization, classification, or computation of such data. The latter activities, in which subjective reason tends to see the main function of science, are in the light of the classical systems of objective reason subordinate to speculation. Objective reason aspires to replace traditional religion with methodical philosophical thought and insight and thus to become a source of tradition all by itself. Its attack on mythology is perhaps more serious than that of subjective reason, which, abstract and formalistic as it conceives itself to be, is inclined to abandon the fight with religion by setting up two different brackets, one for science and philosophy, and one for institutionalized mythology, thus recognizing both of them. For the philosophy of objective reason there is no such way out. Since it holds to the concept of objective truth, it must take a positive or a negative stand with regard to the content of established religion. Therefore the critique of social beliefs in the name of objective reason is much more portentous—although it is sometimes less direct and aggressive—than that put forward in the name of subjective reason. In modern times, reason has displayed a tendency to dissolve its own objective content. It is true that in sixteenth-century France the concept of a life dominated by reason as the ultimate agency was again advanced. Montaigne adapted it to individual life, Bodin to the life of nations, and De l’Hôpital practiced it in politics. Despite certain skeptical declarations

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on their part, their work furthered the abdication of religion in favor of reason as the supreme intellectual authority. At that time, however, reason acquired a new connotation, which found its highest expression in French literature and in some degree is still preserved in modern popular usage. It came to signify a conciliatory attitude. Differences over religion, which with the decline of the medieval church had become the favorite ground on which to thrash out opposing political tendencies, were no longer taken seriously, and no creed or ideology was considered worth defending to the death. This concept of reason was doubtless more humane but at the same time weaker than the religious concept of truth, more pliable to prevailing interests, more adaptable to reality as it is, and therewith from the very beginning in danger of surrendering to the ‘irrational.’ Reason now denoted the point of view of scholars, statesmen, and humanists, who deemed the conflicts in religious doctrine more or less meaningless in themselves and looked upon them as slogans or propaganda devices of various political factions. To the humanists there was no incongruity about a people living under one government, within given boundaries, and yet professing different religions. Such a government had purely secular purposes. It was not intended, as Luther thought, to discipline and castigate the human beast, but to create favorable conditions for commerce and industry, to solidify law and order, to assure its citizens peace inside and protection outside the country. With regard to the individual, reason now played the same part as that held in politics by the sovereign state, which was concerned with the well-being of the people and opposed to fanaticism and civil war. The divorce of reason from religion marked a further step in the weakening of its objective aspect and a higher degree of formalization, as became manifest later during the period of the Enlightenment. But in the seventeenth century the objective aspect of reason still predominated, because the main effort of rationalist philosophy was to formulate a doctrine of man and nature that could fulfil the intellectual function, at least for the privileged sector of society, that religion had formerly fulfilled. From the time of the Renaissance, men have tried to excogitate a doctrine as comprehensive as theology entirely on their own, instead of accepting their ultimate goals and values from a spiritual authority. Philosophy prided itself on being the instrument for deriving, explaining, revealing the content of reason as reflecting the true nature of things and the correct pattern of living. Spinoza, for example, thought that insight into the essence of reality, into the harmonious structure of the eternal universe, necessarily awakens love for this universe. For him, ethical conduct is entirely determined by such insight into nature, just as our devotion to a person may be determined by insight into his greatness or genius. Fears and petty passions, alien to the great love of the universe, which is logos itself, will vanish, according to Spinoza, once our understanding of reality is deep enough.

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The other great rationalist systems of the past also emphasize that reason will recognize itself in the nature of things, and that the right human attitude springs from such insight. This attitude is not necessarily the same for every individual, because the situation of each is unique. There are geographical and historical differences, as well as differences of age, sex, skill, social status, et cetera. However, such insight is universal in so far as its logical connection with the attitude is theoretically self-evident for each imaginable subject endowed with intelligence. Under the philosophy of reason, insight into the plight of an enslaved people, for instance, might induce a young man to fight for its liberation, but would allow his father to stay at home and till the land. Despite such differences in its consequences, the logical nature of this insight is felt to be intelligible to all people in general. Although these rationalist philosophical systems did not command as wide allegiance as religion had claimed, they were appreciated as efforts to record the meaning and exigencies of reality and to present truths that are binding for everybody. Their authors thought that the lumen naturale, natural insight or the light of reason, was sufficient also to penetrate so deeply into creation as to provide us with keys for harmonizing human life with nature both in the external world and within man’s own being. They retained God, but not grace; they thought that for all purposes of theoretical knowledge and practical decision, man could do without any lumen supranaturale. Their speculative reproductions of the universe, not the sensualistic epistemologies—Giordano Bruno and not Telesio, Spinoza and not Locke—clashed directly with traditional religion, because the intellectual aspirations of the metaphysicians were much more concerned with the doctrines of God, creation, and the meaning of life than were the theories of the empiricists. In the philosophical and political systems of rationalism, Christian ethics was secularized. The aims pursued in individual and social activity were derived from the assumption of the existence of certain innate ideas or self-evident intuitions, and thus linked to the concept of objective truth, although this truth was no longer regarded as being guaranteed by any dogma extraneous to the exigencies of thinking itself. Neither the church nor the rising philosophical systems separated wisdom, ethics, religion, and politics. But the fundamental unity of all human beliefs, rooted in a common Christian ontology, was gradually shattered, and the relativist tendencies that had been explicit in the pioneers of bourgeois ideology such as Montaigne, but had later been temporarily pushed into the background by rationalist metaphysics, asserted themselves victoriously in all cultural activities. Of course, as suggested above, when philosophy began to supplant religion, it did not intend to abolish objective truth, but was attempting only to give it a new rational foundation. The contention in regard to the nature of the absolute was not the main ground on which metaphysicians were

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persecuted and tortured. The real issue was whether revelation or reason, whether theology or philosophy, should be the agency for determining and expressing ultimate truth. Just as the church defended the ability, the right, the duty of religion to teach the people how the world was created, what its purpose is, and how they should behave, so philosophy defended the ability, the right, the duty of the mind to discover the nature of things and to derive the right modes of activity from such insight. Catholicism and European rationalist philosophy were in complete agreement regarding the existence of a reality about which such insight could be gained; indeed, the assumption of this reality was the common ground on which their conflicts took place. The two intellectual forces that were at odds with this particular presupposition were Calvinism, through its doctrine of Deus absconditus, and empiricism, through its notion, first implicit and later explicit, that metaphysics is concerned exclusively with pseudo-problems. But the Catholic Church opposed philosophy precisely because the new metaphysical systems asserted the possibility of an insight that should itself determine the moral and religious decisions of man. Eventually the active controversy between religion and philosophy ended in a stalemate because the two were considered as separate branches of culture. People have gradually become reconciled to the idea that each lives its own life within the walls of its cultural compartment, tolerating the other. The neutralization of religion, now reduced to the status of one cultural good among others, contradicted its ‘total’ claim that it incorporates objective truth, and also emasculated it. Although religion remained respected on the surface, its neutralization paved the way for its elimination as the medium of spiritual objectivity and ultimately for the abolition of the concept of such an objectivity, itself patterned after the idea of the absoluteness of religious revelation. In reality the contents of both philosophy and religion have been deeply affected by this seemingly peaceful settlement of their original conflict. The philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked religion in the name of reason; in the end what they killed was not the church but metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself, the source of power of their own efforts. Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete. Speculation is synonymous with metaphysics, and metaphysics with mythology and superstition. We might say that the history of reason or enlightenment from its beginnings in Greece down to the present has led to a state of affairs in which even the word reason is suspected of connoting some mythological entity. Reason has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral, and religious insight. Bishop Berkeley, legitimate son of nominalism, Protestant zealot, and positivist enlightener all in one, directed an attack against such general concepts, including the concept of

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a general concept, two hundred years ago. In fact, the campaign has been victorious all along the line. Berkeley, in partial contradiction of his own theory, retained a few general concepts, such as mind, spirit, and cause. But they were efficiently eliminated by Hume, the father of modern positivism. Religion seemingly profited from this development. The formalization of reason has made it safe from any serious attack on the part of metaphysics or philosophical theory, and this security seems to make it an extremely practical social instrument. At the same time, however, its neutrality means the wasting away of its real spirit, its relatedness to truth, once believed to be the same in science, art, and politics, and for all mankind. The death of speculative reason, at first religion’s servant and later its foe, may prove catastrophic for religion itself. All these consequences were contained in germ in the bourgeois idea of tolerance, which is ambivalent. On the one hand, tolerance means freedom from the rule of dogmatic authority; on the other, it furthers an attitude of neutrality toward all spiritual content, which is thus surrendered to relativism. Each cultural domain preserves its ‘sovereignty’ with regard to universal truth. The pattern of the social division of labor is automatically transferred to the life of the spirit, and this division of the realm of culture is a corollary to the replacement of universal objective truth by formalized, inherently relativist reason. The political implications of rationalist metaphysics came to the fore in the eighteenth century, when, through the American and French revolutions, the concept of the nation became a guiding principle. In modern history this concept has tended to displace religion as the ultimate, supraindividual motive in human life. The nation draw its authority from reason rather than from revelation, reason being thus conceived as an aggregate of fundamental insights, innate or developed by speculation, not as an agency concerned merely with the means for putting them into effect. Self-interest, on which certain theories of natural law and hedonistic philosophies have tried to place primary emphasis, was held to be only one such insight, regarded as rooted in the objective structure of the universe and thus forming a part in the whole system of categories. In the industrial age, the idea of self-interest gradually gained the upper hand and finally suppressed the other motives considered fundamental to the functioning of society; this attitude dominated in the leading schools of thought and, during the liberalistic period, in the public mind. But the same process brought to the surface the contradictions between the theory of self-interest and the idea of the nation. Philosophy then was confronted with the alternative of accepting the anarchistic consequences of this theory or of falling prey to an irrational nationalism much more tainted with romanticism than were the theories of innate ideas that prevailed in the mercantilist period. The intellectual imperialism of the abstract principle of self-interest—the core of the official ideology of liberalism—indicated the growing schism

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between this ideology and social conditions within the industrialized nations. Once the cleavage becomes fixed in the public mind, no effective rational principle of social cohesion remains. The idea of the national community (Volksgemeinschaft), first set up as an idol, can eventually be maintained only by terror. This explains the tendency of liberalism to tilt over into fascism and of the intellectual and political representatives of liberalism to make their peace with its opposites. This tendency, so often demonstrated in recent European history, can be derived, apart from its economic causes, from the inner contradiction between the subjectivistic principle of self-interest and the idea of reason that it is alleged to express. Originally the political constitution was thought of as an expression of concrete principles founded in objective reason; the ideas of justice, equality, happiness, democracy, property, all were held to correspond to reason, to emanate from reason. Subsequently, the content of reason is reduced arbitrarily to the scope of merely a part of this content, to the frame of only one of its principles; the particular pre-empts the place of the universal. This tour de force in the realm of the intellectual lays the ground for the rule of force in the domain of the political. Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument. In the formalistic aspect of subjective reason, stressed by positivism, its unrelatedness to objective content is emphasized; in its instrumental aspect, stressed by pragmatism, its surrender to heteronomous contents is emphasized. Reason has become completely harnessed to the social process. Its operational value, its role in the domination of men and nature, has been made the sole criterion. Concepts have been reduced to summaries of the characteristics that several specimens have in common. By denoting a similarity, concepts eliminate the bother of enumerating qualities and thus serve better to organize the material of knowledge. They are thought of as mere abbreviations of the items to which they refer. Any use transcending auxiliary, technical summarization of factual data has been eliminated as a last trace of superstition. Concepts have become ‘streamlined,’ rationalized, labor-saving devices. It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule—in short, made part and parcel of production. Toynbee6 has described some of the consequences of this process for the writing of history,. He speaks of the ‘tendency for the potter to become the slave of his clay. . . . In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should be suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?’ The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are

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A Study of History, 2d ed., London, 1935, vol. i, p. 7.

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considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society. Every sentence that is not equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman just as meaningless as it is held to be by contemporary semanticists who imply that the purely symbolic and operational, that is, the purely senseless sentence, makes sense. Meaning is supplanted by function or effect in the world of things and events. In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, among which even relaxation is included, they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind, for truth is no end in itself. In the era of relativism, when even children look upon ideas as advertisements or rationalizations, the very fear that language might still harbor mythological residues has endowed words with a new mythological character. True, ideas have been radically functionalized and language is considered a mere tool, be it for the storage and communication of the intellectual elements of production or for the guidance of the masses. At the same time, language takes its revenge, as it were, by reverting to its magic stage. As in the days of magic, each word is regarded as a dangerous force that might destroy society and for which the speaker must be held responsible. Correspondingly, the pursuit of truth, under social control, is curtailed. The difference between thinking and acting is held void. Thus every thought is regarded as an act; every reflection is a thesis, and every thesis is a watchword. Everyone is called on the carpet for what he says or does not say. Everything and everybody is classified and labeled. The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with a class is ‘metaphysical’ and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeonhole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate. As soon as a thought or a word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of all the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. Such mechanization is indeed essential to the expansion of industry; but if it becomes the characteristic feature of minds, if reason itself is instrumentalized, it takes on a kind of materiality and blindness, becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced. What are the consequences of the formalization of reason? Justice, equality, happiness, tolerance, all the concepts that, as mentioned, were in preceding centuries supposed to be inherent in or sanctioned by reason, have lost their intellectual roots. They are still aims and ends, but there is no rational agency authorized to appraise and link them to an objective

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reality. Endorsed by venerable historical documents, they may still enjoy a certain prestige, and some are contained in the supreme law of the greatest countries. Nevertheless, they lack any confirmation by reason in its modern sense. Who can say that any one of these ideals is more closely related to truth than its opposite? According to the philosophy of the average modern intellectual, there is only one authority, namely, science, conceived as the classification of facts and the calculation of probabilities. The statement that justice and freedom are better in themselves than injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and useless. It has come to sound as meaningless in itself as would the statement that red is more beautiful than blue, or that an egg is better than milk. The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. The advance of enlightenment dissolves the idea of objective reason, dogmatism, and superstition; but often reaction and obscurantism profit most from this development. Vested interests opposed to the traditional humanitarian values will appeal to neutralized, impotent reason in the name of ‘common sense.’ This devitalization of basic concepts can be followed through political history. In the American Constitutional Convention of 1787, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania contrasted experience with reason when he said: ‘Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.’7 He wished to caution against a too radical idealism. Later the concepts became so emptied of substance that they could be used synonymously to advocate oppression. Charles O’Conor, a celebrated lawyer of the period before the Civil War, once nominated for the presidency by a faction of the Democratic party, argued (after outlining the blessings of compulsory servitude): ‘I insist that negro slavery is not unjust; it is just, wise, and beneficent . . . I insist that negro slavery . . . is ordained by nature . . . Yielding to the clear decree of nature, and the dictates of sound philosophy, we must pronounce that institution just, benign, lawful and proper.’8 Though O’Conor still uses the words nature, philosophy, and justice, they are completely formalized and cannot stand up against what he considers to be facts and experience. Subjective reason conforms to anything. It lends itself as well to the uses of the adversaries as of the defenders of the traditional humanitarian values. It furnishes, as in O’Conor’s instance, the ideology for profit and reaction as well as the ideology for progress and revolution. Another spokesman for slavery, Fitzhugh, author of Sociology for the South, seems to remember that once philosophy stood for concrete ideas and principles and therefore attacks it in the name of common sense. He Cf. Morrison and Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, New York, 1942, vol. i, p. 281. 8 A Speech at the Union Meeting—at the Academy of Music, New York City, December 19, 1859, reprinted under title, ‘Negro Slavery Not Unjust,’ by the New York Herald Tribune. 7

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thus expresses, though in a distorted form, the clash between the subjective and objective concepts of reason. Men of sound judgments usually give wrong reasons for their opinions because they are not abstractionists. . . . Philosophy beats them all hollow in argument, yet instinct and common sense are right and philosophy wrong. Philosophy is always wrong and instinct and common sense always right, because philosophy is unobservant and reasons from narrow and insufficient premises.9 Fearing idealistic principles, thinking as such, and intellectuals and utopians, the writer prides himself on his common sense, which sees no wrong in slavery. The basic ideals and concepts of rationalist metaphysics were rooted in the concept of the universally human, of mankind, and their formalization implies that they have been severed from their human content. How this dehumanization of thinking affects the very foundations of our civilization, can be illustrated by analysis of the principle of the majority, which is inseparable from the principle of democracy. In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. However, the contradiction between intuition and the democratic principle, conceived in such crude terms, is only imaginary. For what does it mean to say that ‘a man knows his own interests best’—how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, ‘A man knows . . . best,’ there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary and that is incidental to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology. The great philosophical tradition that contributed to the founding of modern democracy was not guilty of this tautology, for it based the principles of government upon more or less speculative assumptions— for instance, the assumption that the same spiritual substance or moral consciousness is present in each human being. In other words, respect for the majority was based on a conviction that did not itself depend on the resolutions of the majority. Locke still spoke of natural reason’s agreeing with revelation in regard to human rights.10 His theory of government refers to the affirmations of both reason and revelation. They are supposed to teach that men are ‘by nature all free, equal, and independent.’11 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society, Richmond, VA, 1854, pp. 118–19. 10 Locke on Civil Government, Second Treatise, chap. v, Everyman’s Library, p. 129. 11 Ibid. chap. viii, p. 164. 9

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Locke’s theory of knowledge is an example of that treacherous lucidity of style which unites opposites by simply blurring the nuances. He did not care to differentiate too clearly between sensual and rational, atomistic and structural experience, nor did he indicate whether the state of nature from which he derived the natural law was inferred by logical processes or intuitively perceived. However, it seems to be sufficiently clear that freedom ‘by nature’ is not identical with freedom in fact. His political doctrine is based on rational insight and deductions rather than on empirical research. The same may be said of Locke’s disciple, Rousseau. When the latter declared that the renunciation of liberty is against the nature of man, because thereby ‘man’s actions would be deprived of all morality and his will deprived of all liberty’12 he knew very well that the renunciation of liberty was not against the empirical nature of man; he himself bitterly criticized individuals, groups, and nations for renouncing their freedom. He referred to man’s spiritual substance rather than to a psychological attitude. His doctrine of the social contract is derived from a philosophical doctrine of man, according to which the principle of the majority rather than that of power corresponds to human nature as it is described in speculative thinking. In the history of social philosophy even the term ‘common sense’ is inseparably linked to the idea of self-evident truth. It was Thomas Reid who, twelve years before the time of Paine’s famous pamphlet and the Declaration of Independence, identified the principles of common sense with self-evident truths and thus reconciled empiricism with rationalistic metaphysics. Deprived of its rational foundation, the democratic principle becomes exclusively dependent upon the so-called interests of the people, and these are functions of blind or all too conscious economic forces. They do not offer any guarantee against tyranny.13 In the period of the free market system, for instance, institutions based on the idea of human rights were accepted by many people as a good instrument for controlling the government and maintaining peace. But if the situation changes, if powerful economic groups find it useful to set up a dictatorship and abolish majority rule, no objection founded on reason can be opposed to their action. If they have a real chance of success, they would simply be foolish not to take it. Contrat social, vol. i, p. 4. The anxiety of the editor of Tocqueville, in speaking of the negative aspects of the majority principle, was superfluous (cf. Democracy in America, New York, 1898, vol. i, pp. 334–5, note). The editor asserts that ‘it is only a figure of speech to say that the majority of the people makes the laws,’ and among other things reminds us that this is done in fact by their delegates. He could have added that if Tocqueville spoke of the tyranny of the majority, Jefferson, in a letter quoted by Tocqueville, spoke of ‘the tyranny of the legislatures,’ The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Definitive Edition, Washington, D. C., 1905, vol. vii, p. 312. Jefferson was so suspicious of either department of government in a democracy, ‘whether legislative or executive,’ that he was opposed to maintenance of a standing army. Cf. ibid. p. 323.

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The only consideration that could prevent them from doing so would be the possibility that their own interests would be endangered, and not concern over violation of a truth, of reason. Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite. The men who made the Constitution of the United States considered ‘the fundamental law of every society, the lex majoris partis,’14 but they were far from substituting the verdicts of the majority for those of reason. When they incorporated an ingenious system of checks and balances in the structure of government, they held, as Noah Webster put it, that ‘the powers lodged in Congress are extensive, but it is presumed that they are not too extensive.’15 He called the principle of the majority ‘a doctrine as universally received as any intuitive truth’16 and saw in it one among other natural ideas of similar dignity. For these men there was no principle that did not derive its authority from a metaphysical or religious source. Dickinson regarded the government and its trust as ‘founded on the nature of man, that is, on the will of his Maker and . . . therefore sacred. It is then an offence against Heaven to violate that trust.’17 The majority principle in itself was certainly not considered to be a guarantee of justice. ‘The majority,’ says John Adams,18 ‘has eternally and without one exception, usurped over the rights of the minority.’ These rights and all other fundamental principles were believed to be intuitive truths. They were taken over directly or indirectly from a philosophical tradition that at the time was still alive. They can be traced back through the history of Western thought to their religious and mythological roots, and it is from these origins that they had preserved the ‘awfulness’ that Dickinson mentions. Subjective reason has no use for such inheritance. It reveals truth as habit and thereby strips it of its spiritual authority. Today the idea of the majority, deprived of its rational foundations, has assumed a completely irrational aspect. Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea—its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed—has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle, in the form of popular verdicts on each and every matter, implemented by all kinds of polls and modern Ibid. p. 324. ‘An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution . . .,’ in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States, ed. by Paul L. Ford, Brooklyn, NY, 1888, p. 45. 16 Ibid. p. 30. 17 Ibid. ‘Letters of Fabius,’ p. 181. 18 Charles Beard, Economic Origin of Jeffersonian Democracy, New York, 1915, p. 305. 14 15

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techniques of communication, has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform. The more the judgment of the people is manipulated by all kinds of interests, the more is the majority presented as the arbiter in cultural life. It is supposed to justify the surrogates of culture in all its branches, down to the mass-deceiving products of popular art and literature. The greater the extent to which scientific propaganda makes of public opinion a mere tool for obscure forces, the more does public opinion appear a substitute for reason. This illusory triumph of democratic progress consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived. Not only the guiding concepts of morals and politics, such as liberty, equality, or justice, but all specific aims and ends in all walks of life are affected by this dissociation of human aspirations and potentialities from the idea of objective truth. According to current standards, good artists do not serve truth better than good prison wardens or bankers or housemaids. If we tried to argue that the calling of an artist is nobler, we would be told that the contention is meaningless—that while the efficiency of two housemaids can be compared on the basis of their relative cleanliness, honesty, skill, et cetera, there is no way of comparing a housemaid and an artist. However, thorough analysis would show that in modern society there is one implicit yardstick for art as well as for unskilled labor, namely time, for goodness in the sense of a specific efficiency is a function of time. It may be just as meaningless to call one particular way of living, one religion, one philosophy better or higher or truer than another. Since ends are no longer determined in the light of reason, it is also impossible to say that one economic or political system, no matter how cruel and despotic, is less reasonable than another. According to formalized reason, despotism, cruelty, oppression are not bad in themselves; no rational agency would endorse a verdict against dictatorship if its sponsors were likely to profit by it. Phrases like ‘the dignity of man’ either imply a dialectical advance in which the idea of divine right is preserved and transcended, or become hackneyed slogans that reveal their emptiness as soon as somebody inquires into their specific meaning. Their life depends, so to speak, on unconscious memories. If a group of enlightened people were about to fight even the greatest evil imaginable, subjective reason would make it almost impossible to point simply to the nature of the evil and to the nature of humanity, which make the fight imperative. Many would at once ask what the real motives are. It would have to be asserted that the reasons are realistic, that is to say, correspond to personal interests, even though, for the mass of the people, these latter may be more difficult to grasp than the silent appeal of the situation itself.

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The fact that the average man still seems to be attached to the old ideals might be held to contradict this analysis. Formulated in general terms, the objection might be that there is a force that outweighs the destructive effects of formalized reason; namely, conformity to generally accepted values and behavior. After all, there is a large number of ideas that we have been taught to cherish and respect from our earliest childhood. Since these ideas and all the theoretical views connected with them are justified not by reason alone but also by almost universal consent, it would seem that they cannot be affected by the transformation of reason into a mere instrument. They draw their strength from our reverence for the community in which we live, from men who have given their lives for them, from the respect we owe to the founders of the few enlightened nations of our time. This objection actually expresses the weakness of the justification of allegedly objective content by past and present reputation. If tradition, so often denounced in modern scientific and political history, is now invoked as the measure of any ethical or religious truth, this truth has already been affected and must suffer from a lack of authenticity no less acutely than the principle that is supposed to justify it. In the centuries in which tradition still could play the role of evidence, the belief in it was itself derived from the belief in an objective truth. By now, the reference to tradition seems to have preserved but one function from those older times: it indicates that the consensus behind the principle that it seeks to reaffirm is economically or politically powerful. He who offends it is forewarned. In the eighteenth century the conviction that man is endowed with certain rights was not a repetition of beliefs that were held by the community, nor even a repetition of beliefs handed down by forefathers. It was a reflection of the situation of the men who proclaimed these rights; it expressed a critique of conditions that imperatively called for change, and this demand was understood by and translated into philosophical thought and historical actions. The pathfinders of modern thought did not derive what is good from the law—they even broke the law—but they tried to reconcile the law with the good. Their role in history was not that of adapting their words and actions to the text of old documents or generally accepted doctrines: they themselves created the documents and brought about the acceptance of their doctrines. Today, those who cherish these doctrines and are deprived of an adequate philosophy may regard them either as expressions of mere subjective desires or as an established pattern deriving authority from the number of people who believe in it and the length of time of its existence. The very fact that tradition has to be invoked today shows that it has lost its hold on the people. No wonder that whole nations—and Germany is not alone in this—seem to have awakened one morning only to discover that their most cherished ideals were merely bubbles. It is true that although the progress of subjective reason destroyed the theoretical basis of mythological, religious, and rationalist ideas, civilized

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society has up until now been living on the residue of these ideas. But they tend to become more than ever a mere residue and are thus gradually losing their power of conviction. When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle. Not only were the highest aims thought of as having an objective meaning, an inherent significance, but even the humblest pursuits and fancies depended on a belief in the general desirability, the inherent value of their objects. Mythological, objective origins, as they are being destroyed by subjective reason, do not merely pertain to great universal concepts, but are also at the bottom of apparently personal, entirely psychological behaviors and actions. They are all—down to the very emotions—evaporating, as they are being emptied of this objective content, this relation to supposedly objective truth. As children’s games and adults’ fancies originate in mythology, each joy was once related to a belief in an ultimate truth. Thorstein Veblen unveiled the distorted medieval motives in nineteenthcentury architecture.19 He found the longing for pomp and ornament to be a residue of feudal attitudes. However, the analysis of so-called honorific waste leads to the discovery not only of certain aspects of barbaric oppression surviving in modern social life and individual psychology, but also of the continued operation of long-forgotten lines of worship, fear, and superstition. They express themselves in the most ‘natural’ preferences and antipathies and are taken for granted in civilization. Because of the apparent lack of rational motive they become rationalized according to subjective reason. The fact that in any modern culture ‘high’ ranks before ‘low,’ that the clean is attractive and dirt repugnant, that certain smells are experienced as good, others as disgusting, that certain kinds of food are cherished, others abhorred, is due to old taboos, myths, and devotions and to their fate in history, rather than to the hygienic or other pragmatistic reasons that enlightened individuals or liberal religions may try to put forward. These old forms of life smoldering under the surface of modern civilization still provide, in many cases, the warmth inherent in any delight, in any love of a thing for its own sake rather than for that of another thing. The pleasure of keeping a garden goes back to ancient times when gardens Cf. T. W. Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture,’ in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York, 1941, vol. ix, pp., 392–3.

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belonged to the gods and were cultivated for them. The sense of beauty in both nature and art is connected, by a thousand delicate threads, to these old superstitions.20 If, by either flouting or flaunting the threads, modern man cuts them, the pleasure may continue for a while but its inner life is extinguished. We cannot credit our enjoyment of a flower or of the atmosphere of a room to an autonomous esthetic instinct. Man’s esthetic responsiveness relates in its prehistory to various forms of idolatry; his belief in the goodness or sacredness of a thing precedes his enjoyment of its beauty. This applies no less to such concepts as freedom and humanity. What has been said about the dignity of man is certainly applicable to the concepts of justice and equality. Such ideas must preserve the negative element, as the negation of the ancient stage of injustice or inequality, and at the same time conserve the original absolute significance rooted in their dreadful origins. Otherwise they become not only indifferent but untrue. All these cherished ideas, all the forces that, in addition to physical force and material interest, hold society together, still exist, but have been undermined by the formalization of reason. This process, as we have seen, is connected with the conviction that our aims, whatever they are, depend upon likes and dislikes that in themselves are meaningless. Let us assume that this conviction really penetrates the details of daily life—and it has already penetrated deeper than most of us realize. Less and less is anything done for its own sake. A hike that takes a man out of the city to the banks of a river or a mountain top would be irrational and idiotic, judged by utilitarian standards; he is devoting himself to a silly or destructive pastime. In the view of formalized reason, an activity is reasonable only if it serves another purpose, e.g. health or relaxation, which helps to replenish his working power. In other words, the activity is merely a tool, for it derives its meaning only through its connection with other ends. We cannot maintain that the pleasure a man gets from a landscape, let us say, would last long if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing. If such pleasures have become habitual he may go on enjoying them for the rest of his life, or he may never fully realize the meaninglessness of the things Even the penchant for tidiness, a modern taste par excellence, seems to be rooted in the belief in magic. Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough, vol. i, part i, p. 175) quotes a report on the natives of New Britain which concludes that ‘the cleanliness which is usual in the houses, and consists in sweeping the floor carefully every day, is by no means based on a desire for cleanliness and neatness in themselves, but purely on the effort to put out of the way anything that might serve the ill-wisher as a charm.’

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he adores. Our tastes are formed in early childhood; what we learn later influences us less. The children may imitate the father who was addicted to long walks, but if the formalization of reason has progressed far enough, they will consider that they have done their duty by their bodies if they go through a set of gymnastics to the commands of a radio voice. No walk through the landscape is necessary any longer; and thus the very concept of landscape as experienced by a pedestrian becomes meaningless and arbitrary. Landscape deteriorates altogether into landscaping. The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, ‘spleen.’ The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its ‘absurdity,’ ‘perverseness,’ as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way—service for a purpose. Likes and dislikes that under mass culture have become meaningless are either relegated under the head of amusements, leisure-time activities, social contacts, etc., or left to die out gradually. Spleen, the protest of nonconformism, of the individual, has itself become regimented: the obsession of the dandy turns into the hobby of Babbitt. The idea of the hobby, of a ‘good time,’ or ‘fun,’ expresses no regret whatsoever for the vanishing of objective reason and the stripping from reality of any inherent ‘sense.’ The person who indulges in a hobby does not even make believe that it has any relation to ultimate truth. When asked in a questionnaire to state your hobby, you put down golf, books, photography, or what not, as unthinkingly as you enter the figure of your weight. As recognized, rationalized predilections, considered necessary to keep people in good humor, hobbies have become an institution. Even stereotyped good humor, which is nothing better than a psychological precondition of efficiency, may fade away together with all other emotions as soon as we lose the last trace of recollection that it once was related to the idea of divinity. Those who ‘keep smiling’ begin to look sad and perhaps even desperate. What has been said in regard to the smaller delights holds true also for the higher aspirations in relation to achieving the good and beautiful. Quick grasp of facts replaces intellectual penetration of the phenomena of experience. The child who knows Santa Claus as an employee of a department store and grasps the relation between sales figures and Christmas, may take it as a matter of course that there is an interaction between religion and business as a whole. Emerson in his time observed it with considerable bitterness: ‘Religious institutions . . . have already acquired a market value as conservators of property; if priests and church

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members should not be able to maintain them the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the banks, the very innholders and landlords of the country, would muster with fury to their support.’21 Today such interconnections as well as the heterogeneity of truth and religion are taken for granted. The child learns early to be a good sport; he may continue to play his role as a naive child, at the same time naturally exhibiting his shrewder insight as soon as he is alone with other boys. This kind of pluralism, which results from modern education with respect to all ideal principles, democratic or religious, namely, from the fact that they are referred strictly to specific occasions, universal as their meaning may be, makes for a schizophrenic trait in modern life. A work of art once aspired to tell the world what it is, to formulate an ultimate verdict. Today it is completely neutralized. Take, for example, Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. The average concertgoer today is unable to experience its objective meaning. He listens to it as though it had been written to illustrate the program annotator’s comments. It is all set down in black and white—the tension between the moral postulate and social reality, the fact that, in contrast to the situation in France, spiritual life in Germany could not express itself politically but had to seek an outlet in art and music. The composition has been reified, made a museum piece, and its performance a leisure-time occupation, an event, an opportunity for star performances, or a social gathering that must be attended if one belongs to a certain group. But no living relation to the work in question, no direct, spontaneous understanding of its function as an expression, no experience of its totality as an image of what once was called truth, is left. This reification is typical of the subjectivization and formalization of reason. It transforms works of art into cultural commodities, and their consumption into a series of haphazard emotions divorced from our real intentions and aspirations. Art has been severed from truth as well as politics or religion. Reification is a process that can be traced back to the beginnings of organized society and the use of tools. However, the transformation of all products of human activity into commodities was achieved only with the emergence of industrialist society. The functions once performed by objective reason, by authoritarian religion, or by metaphysics have been taken over by the reifying mechanisms of the anonymous economic apparatus. It is the price paid on the market that determines the salability of merchandise and thus the productiveness of a specific kind of labor. Activities are branded as senseless or superfluous, as luxuries, unless they are useful or, as in wartime, contribute to the maintenance and safeguarding of the general conditions under which industry can flourish. Productive work, manual or intellectual, has become respectable, indeed the only The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, Boston and New York, 1903, vol. i, p. 321.

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accepted way of spending one’s life, and any occupation, the pursuit of any end that eventually yields an income, is called productive. The great theoreticians of middle-class society, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others, called the feudal lords and medieval clergymen parasites because their ways of living depended on but did not contribute directly to production. The clergy and the aristocrats were supposed to devote their lives respectively to God and to chivalry or amours. By their mere existence and activities, they created symbols admired and cherished by the masses. Machiavelli and his disciples recognized that times had changed and showed how illusory were the values of the things to which the old rulers had devoted their time. Machiavelli has been followed through down to the doctrine of Veblen. Today luxury is not ruled out, at least not by the producers of luxury goods. However, it finds its justification not in its own existence, but in the opportunities it creates for commerce and industry. Luxuries are either adopted as necessities by the masses or regarded as a means of relaxation. Nothing, not even material well-being, which has allegedly replaced the salvation of the soul as man’s highest goal, is valuable in and for itself, no aim as such is better than another. Modern thought has tried to make a philosophy out of this view, as represented in pragmatism.22 The core of this philosophy is the opinion that an idea, a concept, or a theory is nothing but a scheme or plan of action, and therefore truth is nothing but the successfulness of the idea. In an analysis of William James’s Pragmatism, John Dewey comments upon the concepts of truth and meaning. Quoting James, he says: ‘True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters, as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability, and flowing intercourse.’ An idea, Dewey explains, is ‘a draft drawn upon existing things and intention to act so as to arrange them in a certain way. From which it follows that if the draft is honored, if existences, following upon the actions, rearrange or re-adjust themselves in the way the idea intends, the idea is true.’23 If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Peirce, who has told us that he ‘learned philosophy out of Kant,’24 one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not Pragmatism has been critically examined by many schools of thought, e.g. from the standpoint of voluntarism by Hugo Münsterberg in his Philosophie der Werte, Leipzig, 1921; from the standpoint of objective phenomenology in the elaborate study of Max Scheler, ‘Erkenntis und Arbeit’ in his Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, Leipzig, 1926 (cf. particularly pp. 259–324); from the standpoint of a dialectical philosophy by Max Horkheimer in ‘Der Neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik,’ Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 1937, vol. vi, pp. 4–53, and in ‘Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie,’ ibid. pp. 245–94. The remarks in the text are intended only to describe the role of pragmatism in the process of the subjectivization of reason. 23 Essays in Experimental Logic, Chicago, 1916, pp. 310 and 317. 24 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge, MA, 1934, vol. v, p. 274. 22

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that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful. Indeed, it would be doing Kant an injustice to make him responsible for this development. He made scientific insight dependent upon transcendental, not upon empirical functions. He did not liquidate truth by identifying it with the practical actions of verification, nor by teaching that meaning and effect are identical. He tried ultimately to establish the absolute validity of certain ideas per se, for their own sake. The pragmatistic narrowing of the field of vision reduces the meaning of any idea to that of a plan or draft. Pragmatism has from its beginnings implicitly justified the current substitution of the logic of probability for that of truth, which has since become widely prevalent. For if a concept or an idea is significant only by virtue of its consequences, any statement expresses an expectation with a higher or lower degree of probability. In statements concerning the past, the expected events are the process of corroboration, the production of evidence from human witnesses or any kind of documents. The difference between the corroboration of a judgment by the facts that it predicts, and by the steps of inquiry that it may necessitate, is submerged in the concept of verification. The dimension of the past, absorbed by that of the future, is expelled from logic. ‘Knowledge,’ says Dewey,25 ‘is always a matter of the use that is made of experienced natural events, a use in which given things are treated as indications of what will be experienced under different conditions.’26 To this kind of philosophy prediction is the essence not only of calculation but of all thinking as such. It does not differentiate sufficiently between judgments that actually express a prognosis—e.g. ‘Tomorrow it will rain’—and those that can be verified only after they have been formulated, which is naturally true of any judgment. Present meaning and future verification of a proposition are not the same thing. The judgment that a man is sick, or that humanity is in agony, is no prognosis, even if it can be verified in a process subsequent to its formulation. It is not pragmatic, even though it may bring about recovery. Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and meditate. The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last. Like science, philosophy itself ‘becomes not a contemplative survey of existence nor an analysis of what is past and done with, but an outlook upon future possibilities with a reference to attaining the better and ‘A Recovery of Philosophy,’ in Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, New York, 1917, p. 47. 26 I should at least say under the same or under similar conditions. 25

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averting the worst.27 Probability or, better, calculability replaces truth, and the historical process that in society tends to make of truth an empty phrase receives a blessing, as it were, from pragmatism, which makes an empty phrase of it in philosophy. Dewey explains what, according to James, is the significant of an object: the meaning which should be contained in its conception or definition. ‘To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve, what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare,’ or more shortly, as it is quoted from [Wilhelm] Ostwald, ‘all realities influence our practice, and that influence is their meaning for us.’ Dewey does not see how anyone can doubt the import of this theory, ‘or . . . accuse it of subjectivism or idealism, since the object with its power to produce effects is assumed.’28 However, the subjectivism of the school lies in the role that ‘our’ practices, actions, and interests play in its theory of knowledge, not in its acceptance of a phenomenalistic doctrine.29 If true judgments on objects, and therewith the concept of the object itself, rests solely on ‘effects’ upon the subject’s action, it is hard to understand what meaning could still be attributed to the concept ‘object.’ According to pragmatism, truth is to be desired not for its own sake but in so far as it works best, as it leads us to something that is alien or at least different from truth itself. When James complained that the critics of pragmatism ‘simply assume that no pragmatist can admit a genuinely theoretic interest,’30 he was certainly right with regard to the psychological existence of such an interest, but if one follows his own advice—‘to take the spirit rather than the letter’31—it appears that pragmatism, like technocracy, has certainly contributed a great deal toward the fashionable disrepute of that ‘stationary contemplation’32 which was once the highest aspiration of man. Any idea of truth, even a dialectical whole of thought, as it occurs in a living mind, might be called ‘stationary contemplation,’ in so far as it is pursued for its own sake instead of as a means to ‘consistency, stability, and flowing inter Ibid. p. 53. Ibid. pp. 308–9. 29 Positivism and pragmatism identify philosophy with scientism. For this reason pragmatism is viewed, in the present context, as a genuine expression of the positivistic approach. The two philosophies differ only in that the earlier positivism professed phenomenalism, i.e. sensualistic idealism. 30 The Meaning of Truth, New York, 1910, p. 208. 31 Ibid. p. 180. 32 James, Some Problems of Philosophy, New York, 1924, p. 59. 27 28

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course.’ Both the attack on contemplation and the praise of the craftsman express the triumph of the means over the end. Long after Plato’s time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to ‘our’ interests. Philosophy, by preserving the idea of objective truth under the name of the absolute, or in any other spiritualized form, achieved the relativization of subjectivity. It insisted on the difference in principle between mundus sensibilis and mundus intelligibilis, between the image of reality as structured by man’s intellectual and physical tools of domination, by his interests and actions or any kind of technical procedure, and a concept of an order or hierarchy, of static or dynamic structure, that would do full justice to things and nature. In pragmatism, pluralistic as it may represent itself to be, everything becomes mere subject matter and thus ultimately the same, an element in the chain of means and effects. ‘Test every concept by the question “What sensible difference to anybody will its truth make?” and you are in the best possible position for understanding what it means and for discussing its importance.’33 Quite apart from the problems involved in the term ‘anybody,’ it follows from this rule that the behavior of people decides the meaning of a concept. The significance of God, cause, number, substance, or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas’ or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody.’ How should anyone react sensibly to such concepts if he takes it for granted that his reaction is their only meaning? What the pragmatist means by reaction is actually transferred to philosophy from the field of the natural sciences. His pride is ‘to think of everything just as everything is thought of in the laboratory, that is, as a question of experimentation.’34 Peirce, who coined the name of the school, declares that the procedure of the pragmatist is no other than that experimental method by which all the successful sciences (in which number nobody in his sense would include metaphysics) have reached the degrees of certainty that are severally proper to them today; this experimental method being itself nothing but a particular application of an older logical rule—‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’35 Ibid. p. 82. Peirce, op. cit. p. 272. 35 Ibid. p. 317. 33 34

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The explanation becomes more involved when he declares that ‘a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life’ and that ‘nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept imply.’ The procedure he recommends will afford ‘a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it.’36 He attempts to clear up the paradox in the supposedly obvious assurance that only possible results from experiments can have direct bearing upon human conduct, in the conditional sentence that makes this view dependent on the accurate definition of ‘all the conceivable experimental phenomena’ in any particular case. But since the question of what the conceivable phenomena may be must again be answered by experiment, these sweeping statements on methodology seem to lead us into serious logical difficulties. How is it possible to subject experimentation to the criterion of ‘being conceivable,’ if any concept—that is to say, whatever might be conceivable—depends essentially on experimentation? While philosophy in its objectivistic stage sought to be the agency that brought human conduct, including scientific undertakings, to a final understanding of its own reason and justice, pragmatism tries to retranslate any understanding into mere conduct. Its ambition is to be itself nothing else but practical activity, as distinct from theoretical insight, which, according to pragmatistic teachings, is either only a name for physical events or just meaningless. But a doctrine that seriously attempts to dissolve the intellectual categories—such as truth, meaning, or conceptions—into practical attitudes cannot itself expect to be conceived in the intellectual sense of the word; it can only try to function as a mechanism for starting certain series of events. According to Dewey, whose philosophy is the most radical and consistent form of pragmatism, his own theory ‘means that knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behavior towards facts, and that active experimentation is essential to verification.’37 This, at least, is consistent, but it abolishes philosophical thought while it still is philosophical thought. The ideal pragmatistic philosopher would be he who, as the Latin adage has it, remains silent. In accordance with the pragmatist’s worship of natural sciences, there is only one kind of experience that counts, namely, the experiment. The process that tends to replace the various theoretical ways to objective truth with the powerful machinery of organized research is sanctioned Ibid. p. 273. Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 330.

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by philosophy, or rather is being identified with philosophy. All things in nature become identical with the phenomena they present when submitted to the practices of our laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and interests of society as it is. This view may be compared with that of a criminologist maintaining that trustworthy knowledge of a human being can be obtained only by the welltested and streamlined examining methods applied to a suspect in the hands of metropolitan police. Francis Bacon, the great precursor of experimentalism, has described the method with youthful frankness: ‘Quemadmodum enim ingenium alicujus haud bene noris aut probaris, nisi eum irritaveris; neque Proteus se in varias rerum facies vertere solitus est, nisi manicis arcte comprehensus; similiter etiam Natura arte irritata et vexata se clarius prodit, quam cum sibi libera permittitur.’38 ‘Active experimentation’ actually produces concrete answers to concrete questions, as posed by the interests of individuals, groups, or the community. It is not always the physicist who adheres to this subjectivistic identification by which answers determined by the social division of labor become truth as such. The physicist’s avowed role in modern society is to deal with everything as subject matter. He does not have to decide about the meaning of this role. Neither is he obliged to interpret so-called intellectual concepts as purely physical events, nor to hypostatize his own method as the only meaningful intellectual behavior. He may even harbor the hope that his own findings will form part of a truth that is not decided upon in a laboratory. He may furthermore doubt that experimentation is the essential part of his endeavor. It is rather the professor of philosophy, trying to imitate the physicist in order to enroll his branch of activity among ‘all the successful sciences,’ who deals with thoughts as though they were things and eliminates any other idea of truth than the one abstracted from streamlined domination of nature. Pragmatism, in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt, or after the rationalized front office. In order to prove its right to be conceived, each thought must have an alibi, must present a record of its expediency. Even if its direct use is ‘theoretical,’ it is ultimately put to test by the practical application of the theory in which it functions. Thought must be gauged by something that ‘De augmentis scientiarum,’ lib. ii, cap. ii, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. by Basil Montague, London, 1827, vol. viii, p. 96. ‘For like as a man’s disposition is never well known till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straightened and held fast, so the passages and variations of nature cannot appear so fully in the liberty of nature as in the trials and vexations of art.’ Works of Francis Bacon, new edition, vol. i, London, 1826, p. 78.

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is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value. However, there is a noticeable difference between the attitude of the scientist and the artist on the one hand, and that of the philosopher on the other. The former still sometimes repudiate the embarrassing ‘fruits’ of their efforts that become their criteria in industrialist society, and break from the control of conformity. The latter has made it his business to justify the factual criteria as supreme. As a person, as a political or social reformer, as a man of taste, he may oppose the practical consequences of scientific, artistic, or religious undertakings in the world as it is; his philosophy, however, destroys any other principle to which he could appeal. This comes to the fore in many ethical or religious discussions in pragmatist writings. They are liberal, tolerant, optimistic, and quite unable to deal with the cultural débâcle of our days. Referring to a modern sect of his time that he calls the ‘mind-cure movement,’ James says: The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in preventing and curing a certain amount of disease. Religion in the shape of mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a certain class of persons. Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically.39 In face of the idea that truth might afford the opposite of satisfaction and turn out to be completely shocking to humanity at a given historical moment and thus be repudiated by anybody, the fathers of pragmatism made the satisfaction of the subject the criterion of truth. For such a doctrine there is no possibility of rejecting or even criticizing any species of belief that is enjoyed by its adherents. Pragmatism may justly be used as a vindication even by such sects as try to use both science and religion as ‘genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house’ in a more literal sense of the word than James may have imagined. Both Peirce and James wrote at a period when prosperity and harmony between social groups as well as nations seemed at hand, and no major

The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York, 1902, p. 120.

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catastrophes were expected. Their philosophy reflects with an almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of ‘being practical’ as a counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived. From the heights of the contemporary successes of science they could laugh at Plato, who, after presenting his theory of colors, goes on to say: ‘He, however, who should attempt to verify all this by experiment, would forget the difference of the human and divine nature. For God only has the knowledge and also the power which are able to combine many things into one and again resolve the one into many. But no man either is or ever will be able to accomplish either the one or the other operation.40 No more drastic refutation of a prognosis by history can be imagined than the one suffered by Plato. Yet the triumph of the experiment is only one aspect of the process. Pragmatism, which assigns to anything and anybody the role of an instrument—not in the name of God or objective truth, but in the name of whatever is practically achieved by it—asks scornfully what such expressions as ‘truth itself,’ or the good that Plato and his objectivistic successors left undefined, can really mean. It might be answered that they at least preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny—the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course. Dewey identifies fulfilment of the desires of people as they are with the highest aspirations of mankind: Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future which is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith which must be nurtured and made articulate; surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy.41 ‘Projection of the desirable in the present’ is no solution. Two interpretations of the concept are possible. First, it may be taken to refer to the desires of people as they really are, conditioned by the whole social system under which they live—a system that makes it more than doubtful whether their desires are actually theirs. If these desires are accepted in an uncritical way, not transcending their immediate, subjective range, market research and Gallup polls would be a more adequate means for ascertaining them than philosophy. Or, second, Dewey somehow agrees to accepting some kind of difference between subjective desire and objective desirability. Such an admission would mark just the beginning of critical philosophical ‘Timaeus,’ 68, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. by B. Jowett, New York, 1937, vol. ii, p. 47. ‘A Recovery of Philosophy,’ in op. cit. pp. 68–9.

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analysis—unless pragmatism is willing, as soon as it faces this crisis, to surrender and to fall back upon objective reason and mythology. The reduction of reason to a mere instrument finally affects even its character as an instrument. The anti-philosophical spirit that is inseparable from the subjective concept of reason, and that in Europe culminated in the totalitarian persecutions of intellectuals, whether or not they were its pioneers, is symptomatic of the abasement of reason. The traditionalist, conservative critics of civilization commit a fundamental error when they attack modern intellectualization without at the same time attacking the stultification that is only another aspect of the same process. The human intellect, which has biological and social origins, is not an absolute entity, isolated and independent. It has been declared to be so only as a result of the social division of labor, in order to justify the latter on the basis of man’s natural constitution. The leading functions of production—commanding, planning, organizing—were contrasted as pure intellect to the manual functions of production as lower, impurer form of work, the labor of slaves. It is not by accident that the so-called Platonic psychology, in which the intellect was for the first time contrasted with other human ‘faculties,’ particularly with the instinctual life, was conceived on the pattern of the division of powers in a rigidly hierarchic state. Dewey42 is fully conscious of this suspicious origin of the concept of pure intellect, but he accepts the consequences of reinterpreting intellectual as practical work, thus extolling physical labor and rehabilitating instincts. He disregards any speculative capacity of reason as distinct from existing science. In reality, the emancipation of the intellect from the instinctual life did not change the fact that its richness and strength still depend on its concrete content, and it must atrophy and shrink when its connections with this are cut. An intelligent man is not one who can merely reason correctly, but one whose mind is open to perceiving objective contents, who is able to receive the impact of their essential structures and to render it in human language; this holds also for the nature of thinking as such, and for its truth content. The neutralization of reason that deprives it of any relation to objective content and of its power of judging the latter, and that degrades it to an executive agency concerned with the how rather than with the what, transforms it to an ever-increasing extent into a mere dull apparatus for registering facts. Subjective reason loses all spontaneity, productivity, power to discover and assert new kinds of content—it loses its very subjectivity. Like a too frequently sharpened razor blade, this ‘instrument’ becomes too thin and in the end is even inadequate for mastering the purely formalistic tasks to which it is limited. This parallels the general social tendency to destruction of productive forces, precisely in a period of tremendous growth of these forces.

Human Nature or Conduct, New York, 1938, pp. 58–9.

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Aldous Huxley’s negative utopia expresses this aspect of the formalization of reason, that is to say, its transformation into stupidity. In it, the techniques of the brave new world, and the intellectual processes connected with them, are represented as tremendously refined. But the aims they serve—the stupid ‘feelies’ that allow one to feel a fur projected on a screen, the ‘hypnopaedia’ that inculcates the all-powerful slogans of the system in sleeping children, the artificial methods of reproduction that standardize and classify human beings even before they are born—all these reflect a process taking place in thinking itself that leads to a system of prohibition of thinking and that must end finally in subjective stupidity, prefigured in the objective idiocy of all life content. Thinking in itself tends to be replaced by stereotyped ideas. These are on the one hand treated as mere convenient instruments to be opportunistically abandoned or accepted, and on the other as objects of fanatic adoration.Huxley attacks a monopolistic state-capitalist world organization that is under the aegis of a self-dissolving subjective reason conceived as an absolute. But at the same time this novel seems to oppose to the ideal of this stultifying system a heroic metaphysical individualism that indiscriminately condemns fascism and enlightenment, psychoanalysis and moving pictures, de-mythologization and crude mythologies, and extols above all the cultured man, untainted by total civilization and sure of his instincts, or perhaps the skeptic. Thus Huxley unwittingly allies himself with the reactionary cultural conservatism that everywhere— and especially in Germany—has paved the way to the same monopolistic collectivism that he criticizes in the name of the soul as opposed to the intellect. In other words, while the naïve assertion of subjective reason has actually produced symptoms43 not unlike those described by Huxley, the naive rejection of that reason in the name of a historically obsolete and illusory concept of culture and individuality leads to contempt of the masses, cynicism, reliance on blind force; these in turn serve the rejected tendency. Philosophy today must face the question whether thought can remain master of itself in this dilemma and thus prepare its theoretical resolution, or whether it is to content itself with playing the part of empty methodology, deluded apologetics, or a guaranteed prescription like Huxley’s newest popular mysticism, which fits as well in the brave new world as any ready-made ideology.

An extreme example may be cited. Huxley invented ‘death conditioning’—i.e. children are brought into the presence of dying persons and are fed sweets and stimulated to play games while they watch the process of death. Thus they are made to associate pleasant ideas with death and to lose their terror of it. Parents’ Magazine for October 1944 contains an article entitled ‘Interview with a Skeleton.’ It describes how five-year-old children played with a skeleton ‘in order to make their first acquaintance with the inside working of the human body. ‘You need bones to hold your skin up,’ said Johnny, examining this skeleton. ‘He does not know he is dead,’ Martudi said.

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“Industrialization and Capitalism in Max Weber” Herbert Marcuse “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” first published in German in 1964, and revised in 1965, is a brief consideration of what, in “Means and Ends,” Horkheimer referred to as subjective reason. Weber saw capitalism as being intimately related to formal rationality (zweckrationalitat), as he called it. Formal rationality, Marcuse reminds us, is characterized by “mathematization,” in conjunction with an emphasis on experimentation, “proof” and technical expertise. It is expressed institutionally as bureaucracy, i.e. the enforcement of impersonal procedure, in the service of efficiency. Weber contrasted formal rationality with valueoriented rationality (wertrationalitat), and compared bureaucratic or legalrational modes of control to both traditional and charismatic authority. Weber was critical of formal rationality, likening its hold on modern society to being caught in an iron cage. But because he equated formal rationality with techne as such, and not with the form that technical ability takes in capitalism, he did not think that a shift to socialism would ameliorate its effects. Marcuse’s claim is two-fold. On the one hand, he argues that Weberian formal rationality is not merely formal. Rather, it “subordinates itself to the rationality of domination.” At the level of production relations, it is calculative expertise regarding the maximization of surplus value, not reason-as-genericmeans. At the level of the state, meanwhile, bureaucracies are themselves tools for maintaining substantive relations of power. In this respect, Marcuse says, “[t]he Weberian conception of reason ends in irrational charisma.” On the other hand, precisely because there is no such thing as instrumental reason that is not fused to socio-historical activity of one kind or another (“[t]echnology is always a historical-social project”), techne need not be at odds with freedom. It is abstract and “machine”-like at present precisely because capitalism is a mode of production distinguished by reification, in

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which there is no collective control over the conditions of life. Ultimately, however, Marcuse claims: “technical reason is the social reason ruling a given society and can be changed in its very structure. As technical reason, it can become the technique of liberation.”

“Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber” Industrialization and capitalism become problematic in Max Weber’s work in two respects: as the historical fate of the West, and as the contemporary fate of the Germany created by Bismarck. As the fate of the West, they are the decisive realizations of that Western rationality, that idea of reason, which Weber traces in its open and veiled, progressive and repressive, manifestations. As the fate of modern Germany, these manifestations determine for him the politics of the Reich, primarily as the historical task of the German bourgeoisie — in the transformation of the conservative-feudal state, then in democratization, finally in the struggle against revolution and socialism. It is essentially the idea of a fateful connection between industrialization, capitalism, and national self-preservation that motivates Max Weber’s passionate and — let us be frank — spiteful fight against the socialist efforts of 1918. According to him, socialism contradicts the idea of occidental reason, as well as that of the national state; hence it is a world-historical error, if not a world-historical crime. (We might ask, what Max Weber would have said had he lived to see that it is not the West, but the East, which, in the name of socialism, has developed modern occidental rationality in its extreme form.) Whatever capitalism may do to man, it must, according to Weber, first and before all evaluation, be understood as necessary reason. Philosophical, sociological-historical, and political motives are fundamentally connected in Weber’s analysis of industrial capitalism. His theory of the intrinsic value-freedom, or ethical neutrality, of science reveals itself as that which it is in practice: an attempt to make science “free” to accept obligatory valuations that are imposed on it from the outside. This function of Weber’s theory of knowledge has been clear ever since his inaugural address at Freiburg in 1895, which with ruthless frankness subordinates value-free economics to the claims of national power politics. Sometime later (at the meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1909) he himself made it as explicit as possible: The reason why I argue on every occasion so sharply and even, perhaps, pedantically against the fusion of Is and Ought is not because

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I underestimate Ought questions, but, on the contrary, because I cannot stand it when problems of world-moving importance, of the greatest intellectual and spiritual bearing, in a certain sense the highest problems that can move a human breast are transformed here into questions of technical-economic “productivity” and are made into the topic of discussion of a technical discipline, such as economics is.1 But the Ought that is thus taken out of science (a mere “technical discipline”) is thereby simultaneously protected from science and shielded from scientific criticism: the “value of that ideal itself can never be derived”2 from the material of scientific work itself. It is precisely Max Weber’s analysis of industrial capitalism, however, which shows that the concept of scientific neutrality, or, better, impotence, vis-à-vis the Ought, cannot be maintained: pure value-free philosophicalsociological concept formation becomes, through its own process, value criticism. Inversely, the pure value-free scientific concepts reveal the valuation that is contained in them: they become the critique of the given, in the light of what the given does to men (and things). The Ought shows itself in the Is: the indefatigable effort of conceptual thinking makes it appear. In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, that work of Max Weber which is most free from values and where the method of formal definitions, classifications, and typologies celebrates true orgies, formalism attains the incisiveness of content. This authentic concretion is the result of Weber’s mastery of an immense material, of scholarship that seems unimaginable today, of knowledge that can afford to abstract because it can distinguish the essential from the inessential and reality from appearance. With its abstract concepts, formal theory reaches the goal at which a positivistic, pseudoempirical sociology hostile to theory aims in vain: the real definition of reality. The concept of industrial capitalism thus becomes concrete in the formal theory of rationality and of domination which are the two fundamental themes of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Let us try first to present the connection between capitalism, rationality, and domination in the work of Max Weber. In its most general form this connection may be formulated as follows: the specifically Western idea of reason realizes itself in a system of material and intellectual culture (economy, technology, “conduct of life,” science, art) that develops to the full in industrial capitalism, and this system tends toward a specific type of domination which becomes the fate of the contemporary period: total bureaucracy. The comprehensive and basic concept is the idea of reason as Western rationality. We begin with this concept. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialipolitk (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924), p. 419. 2 Ibid., p. 402. 1

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For Weber, there is a rationality that has come into effect only in the West, that has formed (or has at least helped form) capitalism, and that has decided our foreseeable future. The effort to determine this rationality in its many (and often contradictory) manifestations occupies a large part of Weber’s work. The “spirit of capitalism,” as described in the first volume of his collected essays in the sociology of religion, is one of these manifestations; the preface to this work points out programmatically that the rationality formulated and acted on in capitalism fundamentally distinguishes Western industrialization from all other forms of economy and technology. Let us first list the elements that are characteristic of Max Weber’s concept of reason. (1) There is the progressive mathematization of experience and knowledge, a mathematization which, starting from the natural sciences and their extraordinary successes, extends to the other sciences and to the “conduct of life” itself (universal quantification). (2) There is the insistence on the necessity of rational experiments and rational proofs in the organization of science as well as in the conduct of life. (3) There is the result of this organization which is decisive for Weber, namely, the genesis and solidification of a universal, technically trained organization of officials that becomes the “absolutely inescapable condition of our entire existence.”3 With this last characteristic, the transition from theoretical to practical reason, to the historical form of reason is effected. The consciousness of its specific historicity was contained in the beginning in Weber’s conception of reason, with, or precisely due to, its abstractness. However, we shall see that it is not sustained in the entire course of his analysis and miscarries at the decisive point. In his sociology, formal rationality turns into capitalist rationality. Thus it appears as the methodical taming of the irrational “acquisitive drive,” the taming that finds its typical expression in “innerworldly asceticism.” In this “taming,” occidental reason becomes the economic reason of capitalism, that is, the striving for ever renewed gain within the continuous, rational, capitalist enterprise. Rationality thus becomes the condition of profitability, which in turn is oriented towards systematic, methodical calculation, “capital accounting.”4 The basis of this rationality is abstraction which, at once theoretical and practical, the work of both scientific and social organization, determines the capitalist period: through the reduction of quality to quantity. As universal functionalization (which finds its economic expression in exchange value), it becomes the precondition of calculable efficiency — of universal efficiency, insofar as functionalization makes possible the domination of all particular Max Weber, Foreword to the first volume of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Relionssoziolgie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920), pp. 1ff. 4 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 3

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cases and relations (through their reduction to quantities and exchange values). Abstract reason becomes concrete in the calculable and calculated domination of nature and man. The reason envisaged by Weber thus is revealed as technical reason, as the production and transformation of material (things and men) through the methodical-scientific apparatus. This apparatus has been built with the aim of calculable efficiency; its rationality organizes and controls things and men, factory and bureaucracy, work and leisure. But to what purpose does it control them? Up to this point, Weber’s concept of reason has been “formal,” that is, has been defined as quantifying abstraction from all particulars, an abstraction that rendered possible the universally calculable efficiency of the capitalist apparatus. But now the limits of formal reason emerge: neither the specific purpose of the scientific-technical construction nor its material (its subjects and its objects) can be deduced from the concept of reason; they explode from the start this formal, “value-free” concept. In capitalist rationality, as analyzed by Weber, these elements that are prior and “external” to reason and that thus materially delimit it appear in two historical facts: (1) provision for human needs — the aim of economic activity — is carried out in the framework of private enterprise and its calculable chances of gain, that is, within the framework of the profit of the individual entrepreneur or enterprise; (2) consequently, the existence of those whose needs are to be satisfied depends on the profit opportunities of the capitalist enterprise. This dependence is embodied, in its extreme form, in the “free” labor that is at the disposal of the entrepreneur. In terms of Weber’s conception, these facts are pregiven to formal reason from the outside, but as historical facts, they limit the general validity of the concept itself. According to Weber, the focal reality of capitalist rationality is the private enterprise; the entrepreneur is a free person, responsible by and to himself for his calculations and their risks. In this function, he is bourgeois, and the bourgeois conduct of life finds its representative expression in innerworldly asceticism. Is this conception still valid today? Is the bourgeoisie, in which Weber saw the bearer of industrial development, still its bearer in the late capitalist phase? Is late capitalist rationality still that which derives from innerworldly asceticism? I think the answer to these questions must be in the negative. In the development of capitalistic rationality itself, the forms ascribed to it by Weber have disintegrated and become obsolete, and their disintegration makes the rationality of capitalistic industrialization appear in a very different light: in the light of its irrationality. To mention only one aspect: “inner-worldly asceticism” is no longer a motivating force in late capitalism; it has become a fetter that serves the maintenance of the system. Keynes denounced it as such, and it is a danger to the “affluent society” wherever it could hinder the production and consumption of superfluous goods. To be sure, even late capitalism is built on “renunciation”: the struggle for existence and the exploitation of

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labor must be intensified more and more if increased accumulation is to be possible. “Planned obsolescence,” methodical irrationality, becomes a social necessity. But this is no longer the conduct of life of the bourgeoisie as the class that develops the productive forces. It is rather the stigma of productive destruction under total administration. And the capital accounting of mathematized profitability and efficiency celebrates its greatest triumphs in the calculation of kill and overkill, of the risk of our own annihilation compared with that of the annihilation of the enemy. In the unfolding of capitalist rationality, irrationality becomes reason: reason as frantic development of productivity, conquest of nature, enlargement of the mass of goods (and their accessibility for broad strata of the population); irrational because higher productivity, domination of nature, and social wealth become destructive forces. This destruction is not only figurative, as in the betrayal of so-called higher cultural values, but literal: the struggle for existence intensifies both within national states and internationally, and pent-up aggression is discharged in the legitimation of medieval cruelty (torture) and in the scientifically organized destruction of men. Did Max Weber foretell this development? The answer is No if the accent is placed on “tell.” But this development is implied in his conceptual scheme — implied at such a deep level that it appears as inexorable, final, and thereby, in turn (in the bad sense), rational. In the course of Weber’s analysis, the value-free concept of capitalist rationality becomes a critical concept — critical in the sense not only of “pure science,” but also of an evaluative, goal-positing critique of reification. But then the critique stops, accepts the allegedly inexorable, and turns into apologetics — worse, into the denunciation of the possible alternative, that is, of a qualitatively different historical rationality. With clairvoyance, Weber himself recognized the limit of his conceptual scheme. He defined himself as a “bourgeois” and identified his work with the historical mission of the bourgeoisie; in the name of this alleged mission, he accepted the alliance of representative strata of the German bourgeoisie with the organizers of reaction and repression. For political adversaries on the radical left, he recommended the lunatic asylum, the zoo, and the revolver shot. He raged against the intellectuals who had sacrificed their lives for the revolution.5 The personal serves us here only as illustration of the conceptual; it serves to show how the concept of reason itself, in its critical content, remains ultimately tied to its origin: “reason” remains bourgeois reason, and, indeed, only one part of the latter, viz. capitalist technical reason. Let us try now to reconstruct the inner development of the Weberian concept of capitalist reason. The Freiburg inaugural address envisions For documentation, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959), where the documentation is collected and analyzed in an exemplary manner.

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capitalist industrialization wholly as a form of power politics, that is, as imperialism. Only the development of large-scale industry can guarantee the independence of the nation in the ever more intense international competitive struggle. Imperialist power politics requires intensive and extensive industrialization, and vice versa. The economy must serve the raison d’état of the national state and must work with the latter’s means. Such means are colonization and military power, means for the realization of the extrascientific aims and values to which value-free economics must subordinate itself. As historical reason, the reason of state demands rule by that class which is capable of carrying out industrialization and thus effecting the growth of the nation, i.e. rule by the bourgeoisie. It is dangerous when an “economically declining class is in power”6 (as the Junkers in Germany). Under the pressure of extrascientific, political valuation, economic science thus becomes, with Weber, the political-sociological critique of the state erected by Bismarck. And this critique anticipates the future in an unheardof way: in Germany, the historically appointed class, the bourgeoisie, is “immature”; in its weakness it longs for a new Caesar who would do the deed for it.7 The coming to power of the bourgeois class meant, at that time, the democratization of the still prebourgeois state. But, owing to its political immaturity, the German bourgeoisie can neither realize nor hinder this democratization and calls for caesarism. Democracy, the political form corresponding to capitalist industrialization, threatens to change into plebiscitary dictatorship; bourgeois reason conjures up irrational charisma. This dialectic of bourgeois democracy if not of bourgeois reason continued to trouble Weber, and is incisively expressed in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. We shall return to it. Here it should be observed that Weber, more correctly than most contemporary socialists, also foresaw the later development of the other class that underlies capitalism, the proletariat, and therewith repeated almost unchanged what Bismarck had said as early as 1865. “The danger does not lie with the masses,”8 Weber declared in his 1895 inaugural address. It is not the ruled classes who will hinder imperialistic politics, let alone cause it to fail. It is rather “the ruling and rising classes” who represent this threat to the nation’s chances for survival in international competition. The conservative character of the masses, the caesaristic tendencies of the ruling classes: these changes of late capitalism Max Weber did foresee. He did not, as Marxist theory does, root them in the structure of capitalism itself. “Political immaturity” is a poor category as long as Max Weber, Gesammelte politischen Schriften (München: Drei Masken Verlag, 1921), pp. 20–1. 7 Ibid., p. 27. 8 Ibid., p. 29. 6

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it does not define the factors behind the fact — in this case the impossibility for capitalist production of preserving the free market through free competition. Capitalist production itself runs up against its limits in the democratic institutions of the market society. Domination is concentrated in and above the bureaucracy, as the necessary apex of regimentation. What appeared as political immaturity within the context of liberalistic capitalism becomes, in organized capitalism, political maturity. And the harmlessness of the ruled classes? Even while Weber was still living, they were, for a historical instant, ready to cause imperialistic politics to fail. After that, however, the political maturity of the bourgeoisie and the intellectual efficiency of capitalist productivity took things in hand and confirmed Weber’s prediction. Let us now look at his concept of capitalism where (apparently) it is removed from the concrete context of imperialistic power politics and developed in its value-free scientific purity: in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Here capitalism, as a form of “rational economic acquisition,” is defined in the first instance as a “particular form of monetary calculation”: Capital accounting is the valuation and calculation of profit opportunities and . . . proceeds by means of comparing the respective monetary values of total (fixed and liquid) assets at the beginning and end of a single profit-oriented undertaking or, in the case of a continuous profitmaking enterprise, of comparing the initial and final balance sheets for an accounting period.9 The effort — one is tempted to say the provocative effort — to define capitalism in a purely scientific manner and to abstract from everything human and historical shows forth even in the forbidding syntax (at least in German). What is at issue here is business and nothing else. In contrast to this attitude, Weber’s emphasis on the next page seems almost shocking: “Capital accounting in its formally most rational mode thus presupposes the struggle of man with man.”10 What capital accounting does to men finds sharper expression in its abstract definition than in the latter’s concretion: inhumanity is included in the rationality of the initial and final balance sheets. The “formally most rational” mode of capital accounting is the one into which man and his “purposes” enter only as variables in the calculation of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922), p. 48. Cf. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 191–2. 10 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 49. (original italics). Henderson-Parsons translate the passage as follows (Theory, p. 193): “Thus the highest degree of rational capital accounting presupposes the existence of competition on a large scale.” 9

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the chances of gain and profit. In this formal rationality, mathematization is carried to the point of the calculus with the real negation of life itself; at the extreme, risk of death from hunger, it becomes a motive for economic activity on the part of those who have nothing: . . . as [an] element of the motivation of economic activity under the conditions of a market economy [is] normally . . . for those without property . . . the fact that they run the risk, both for themselves and their personal dependents, such as children, wives, sometimes parents, whose maintenance the individual typically takes over, of going without any provision . . .11 Again and again, Weber defines formal rationality in contrast to a material (substantive) rationality, in which the economic maintenance of men is considered “from the point of view of certain valuational postulates (of whatever kind).”12 Formal rationality is thus in conflict not only with “traditional” value orientations and goals, but also with revolutionary ones. As an example, Max Weber mentions the antinomy between formal rationality on the one hand and, on the other, of attempts to abolish the separation of powers (“soviet republic, government by a convention or committee of public safety”13) of attempts, in other words, to change radically the existing form of domination. But is the formal rationality that finds expression in a capitalist economy really so formal? Here, once more, is its definition: The term “formal rationality of economic action” will be used to designate the extent of quantitative calculation or accounting which is technically possible and which is actually applied. A system of economic activity will be called “formally” rational according to the degree in which the provision for needs, which is essential to every rational economy, is cable of being expressed in numerical, calculable terms, and is so expressed.14 According to this definition, a totally planned economy, that is, a noncapitalist economy, would evidently be more rational, in the sense of formal rationality, than the capitalist economy. For the latter sets itself the limits

Weber, Theory, pp. 213–14 (translation modified); Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 60 (italics added). 12 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 44 (cf. Theory, p. 185). Translator’s note: Weber’s “materiale rationalität” is rendered by Henderson-Parsons as “substantive rationality.” Here both “material” and “substantive” are used. 13 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 167 (cf. Theory, pp. 406–7). 14 Weber, Theory, pp. 184–5; Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, pp. 44–5. 11

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of calculability in the particular interest of the private enterprise and in the “freedom” (however regimented) of the market. If Weber declares such a planned economy retrogressive or even realistically impossible, he does so in the first place for a technological reason: in modern industrial society, the separation of the workers from the means of production has become a technical necessity requiring the individual and private direction and control of the means of production, that is, the authority of the personally responsible entrepreneur in the enterprise. The highly material, historical fact of the private-capitalist enterprise thus becomes (in Weber’s sense) a formal structural element of capitalism and of rational economic activity itself. But the rational social function of individual control of production that is based on the separation of labor from the means of production goes beyond this. For Max Weber, it is the guarantor of technically and economically necessary organizational discipline, which then becomes the model of the entire discipline required by modern industrial society. Even socialism, according to Weber, has its origin in factory discipline: “From this life situation, from the discipline of the factory, was modern socialism born.”15 The “subjection to work discipline” characteristic of free enterprise is thus, on the one hand, the rationality of a personal hierarchy, but on the other hand, the rational domination of things over man, that is, “of the means over the end (the satisfaction of needs).” In these words, Weber quotes a socialist thesis.16 He does not contest it but believes that not even a socialist society will change the fundamental fact of the worker’s separation from the means of production, because this separation is simply the form of technical progress, of industrialization. Even socialism remains subject to its rationality, for otherwise it cannot remain faithful to its own promise of the general satisfaction of needs and the pacification of the struggle for existence. The control of man by things can be deprived of its irrationality only through the rational control of man by man. The question, therefore, is for socialism, too: “Who, then, is supposed to take over and direct this new economy?”17 Industrialization is thus seen as the fate of the modern world, and the fateful question for both capitalist and socialist industrialization is only this: What is the most rational form of dominating industrialization and hence society? (“Most rational” is still used in the sense of that formal rationality which is determined only by the calculable and regulated functioning of its own system.) But this formal rationality seems to have changed imperceptibly in the course of the logical development of Weber’s analysis. In becoming a question of domination, of control, this rationality Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialipolitk, p. 501 (“Der Sozialismus”). Ibid., p. 502. 17 Ibid., p. 511. 15 16

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subordinates itself, by virtue of its own inner dynamic, to another, namely, to the rationality of domination. Precisely insofar as this formal rationality does not go beyond its own structure and has nothing but its own system as the norm of its calculations and calculating actions, it is as a whole dependent, determined “from the outside” by something other than itself; in this fashion reason becomes, in Weber’s own definition, “material.” Industrialization as “fate,” domination as “fate” — Max Weber’s concept of “fate” shows in exemplary fashion the material content of his formal analysis. “Fate” is the law of an economy and society which are largely independent of individuals, and violation of this law would mean self-destruction. But society is not “nature.” Who decrees the fate? Industrialization is a phase in the development of men’s capacities and needs, a phase in their struggle with nature and with themselves. This development can proceed in very different forms and with very different aims; not only the forms of control but also those of technology and hence of needs and of their satisfactions are in no way “fatal,” but rather become such only when they are socially sanctioned, that is, as the result of material, economic, and psychological coercion. Weber’s concept of fate is construed “after the fact” of such coercion: he generalizes the blindness of a society which reproduces itself behind the back of the individuals, of a society in which the law of domination appears as objective technological law. However, in fact, this law is neither “fatal” nor “formal.” The context of Weber’s analysis is the historical context in which economic reason became the reason of domination — domination at almost any price. This fate has become a fate and inasmuch as it has become a fate it can also be abolished. Any scientific analysis that is not committed to this possibility is pledged, not to reason, but to the reason of established domination. For there is no structure that has not been posited or made and is not as such dependent. In the continuum of history, in which all economic action takes place, all economic reason is always the reason of domination, which historically and socially determines economic action. Capitalism, no matter how mathematized and “scientific,” remains the mathematized, technological domination of men; and socialism, no matter how scientific and technological, is the construction or demolition of domination. If in Weber’s work the formal analysis of capitalism thus becomes the analysis of forms of domination, this is not due to a discontinuity in concept or method; their purity itself shows itself impure. And this is so, not because Max Weber was a bad or inconsistent sociologist, but because he knew his subject matter: Truth becomes critique and accusation, and accusation becomes the function of true science. If he subjected the science of economics to politics as early as in the inaugural address, this tour de force shows itself, in the light of the whole of Weber’s work, as the inner logic of his method. Your science must remain “pure”; only thus can you remain faithful to the truth. But this truth forces you to recognize what

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determines the objects of your science “from the outside.” Over this you have no power. Your freedom from value judgments is as necessary as it is mere appearance. For neutrality is real only when it has the power of resisting interference. Otherwise it becomes the victim, as well as the aid, of every power that wants to use it. The formal rationality of capitalism comes up against its internal limit in two places: in the fact of private enterprise, or the private entrepreneur as the actual subject of the calculated nature of economic activity; and in the fact of the worker’s separation from the means of production, of free labor. These two facts belong, for Max Weber, to the specific rationality of capitalism;18 they are technological necessities. For him, they thus are the basis for domination as an integral element of capitalist (and even of economic) rationality in modern industrial society. If this is so, then domination itself must be demonstrated as the form of modern economic rationality; and this is what Weber tries to do in his analysis of bureaucracy. Bureaucratic control is inseparable from increasing industrialization; it extends the maximally intensified efficiency of industrial organization to society as a whole. It is the formally most rational form of control, thanks to its “precision, steadfastness, discipline, rigor, and dependability, in short calculability for both the head [of the organization] and for those having to do with it . . .”;19 and it is all this because it is “domination by virtue of knowledge,” ascertainable, calculable, calculating knowledge, specialized knowledge. Properly speaking, it is the apparatus that dominates, for the control of this apparatus, based on specialized knowledge, is such only if it is fully adjusted to its technical demands and potentialities. For this reason, domination of the apparatus is “possible for the layman only within limits: in the long run, the technically trained permanent official is usually superior to the layman as a [government] minister.”20 Again Weber stresses that any “rational socialism” “would simply have to take over and would intensify” bureaucratic administration since this administration is nothing but purely objective domination, demanded by the objective circumstances themselves, and equally valid for the most varied political, cultural, and moral aims and institutions. And the objective circumstances themselves are the given, ever more productively and efficiently developing, ever more precisely calculable apparatus. The specialized scientific administration of the apparatus as formally rational domination: this is the reification of reason, reification as reason, the apotheosis of reification. But the apotheosis turns into its negation, is bound to turn into its negation. For the apparatus, which dictates its Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, pp. 19–23 (cf. Theory, pp. 130–9). Ibid., p. 128 (cf. Theory, p. 337). 20 Weber, Theory, p.38 (translation modified); (cf. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, pp. 128–9). 18 19

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own objective administration, is itself instrument, means — and there is no such thing as a means “as such.” Even the most productive, most reified apparatus is a means to an end outside itself. As far as the economic apparatus of capitalism is concerned, it is not enough to say that this end is the satisfaction of needs. Such a concept is too general, too abstract, in the bad sense of the word. For, as Max Weber himself realized, the satisfaction of needs is far more the by-product than the end of capitalist economic activity. Human needs are necessary and “formally rational” as long as living human beings are still required as consumers (as producers they already are partly unnecessary), and already much is sold to warehouses — stockpiling for annihilation and a subhuman subterranean life. But if the bureaucratic administration of the capitalist apparatus, with all its rationality, remains a means, and thus dependent, then it has, as rationality, its own limit. The bureaucracy subjects itself to an extra- and suprabureaucratic power — to an “unbusinesslike” power. And if rationality is embodied in administration, and only in administration, then this legislative power must be irrational. The Weberian conception of reason ends in irrational charisma. Among all of Weber’s concepts, that of charisma is perhaps the most questionable. Even as a term it contains the bias that gives every kind of successful, allegedly personal domination an almost religious consecration. The concept itself is under discussion here only insofar as it can illuminate the dialectic of rationality and irrationality in modern society. Charismatic domination appears as a phase in a twofold process of development. On the one hand, charisma tends to turn into the solidified domination of interests and their bureaucratic organization; on the other hand, bureaucratic organization tends to submit to a charismatic leader. In the chapter “Transformation of Charisma” Max Weber describes how pure charismatic domination tends to transform itself into a “permanent possession”; in this process “it is given over to the conditions of everyday life and to the powers that dominate it, above all to economic interests.”21 What begins as the charisma of the single individual and his personal following ends in domination by a bureaucratic apparatus that has acquired rights and functions and in which the charismatically dominated individuals become regular, tax-paying, dutiful “subjects.” But this rational administration of masses and things cannot do without the irrational charismatic leader. For the administration would tend, precisely to the degree to which it is really rational, to the abolition of domination (and to the administration of things). Yet the administrative apparatus has always been built on the basis of domination and has been established to maintain and strengthen domination. To the democratization

Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 762.

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required by rational administration thus corresponds a parallel limitation and manipulation of democratization. Domination as the privilege of particular interests and self-determination as an expression of the general interest are brought into forced unity. This violent and simultaneously formally rational, i.e. technically efficient, solution of the contradiction has its classical manifestation in plebiscitary democracy,22 in which the masses periodically depose their leaders and determine their policies — under previously established conditions well controlled by the leaders. For Max Weber, universal suffrage thus is not only the result of domination but also its instrument in the period of its technical perfection. Plebiscitary democracy is the political expression of irrationality-become-reason. In what way does this dialectic of reason (that is, of formal reason) show forth in the development of capitalism? The latter’s profane power resists the idea of charisma, and Weber is rather timid when it comes to the application of this term to contemporary industrial society, even though his attitude and even his language during World War I and against the revolution often came very close to succumbing to charismatic illusions. But the actual trend is clearly exhibited by his analysis: the formal reason of the technically perfect administrative apparatus is subordinated to the irrational. Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy breaks through the ideological camouflage. Far ahead of his time, he showed the illusory character of modern mass democracy with its pretended equalization and adjustment of class conflicts. The bureaucratic administration of industrial capitalism is indeed a “leveling,” but what is decisive here is exclusively the leveling of the dominated vis-à-vis the ruling, bureaucratically organized group, which may actually, and often even formally, occupy a wholly autocratic position.23 He stresses again and again that precisely the technically perfect administrative apparatus, by virtue of its formal rationality, is a “means of power of the very first rank for him who has the bureaucratic apparatus at his disposal.” The dependence of the material fate of the mass on the continuous, correct functioning of the increasingly bureaucratically organized private-capitalist organizations increases continuously, and the thought of the possibility of their elimination thus becomes ever more utopian.24 Total dependence on the functioning of an omnipresent apparatus becomes the “basis of all order” so that the apparatus itself is no longer questioned. “Trained orientation toward obedient subjection to those orders” becomes the cement of a subjugation of which people are no longer conscious Ibid., pp. 156–7, 174, 763ff. Ibid., p. 667. 24 Ibid., p. 669. 22 23

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because the order to which they subordinate themselves is itself so terrifyingly rational; that is, because it administers to efficiently and puts at one’s calculable disposal the world of goods and performances of which the single individual no longer has an overview or a comprehension. Max Weber did not live long enough to see how mature capitalism, in the efficiency of its reason, makes even the planned annihilation of millions of human beings and the planned destruction of human labor the fountainhead of a bigger and better prosperity, how even sheer insanity becomes the basis, not only of the continuation of life, but of the more comfortable life. He did not live to see the “affluent society,” in the face of inhuman misery and methodical cruelty outside its borders, squander its unimaginable technical, material, and intellectual power and abuse its power for the purposes of permanent mobilization. Even before the unfolding of the power of this reason he called attention to the danger present in the submission of the rational bureaucratic administrative apparatus, by virtue of its own rationality, to an irrational supreme authority. In the first place, in the framework of Weber’s conceptual scheme, it is almost self-evident that the administration of industrial society requires outside and superior direction: “Every administration requires some kind of domination, since, for its direction, some commanding powers must always be placed in someone’s hands.”25 The capitalist entrepreneur is “in the material sense” as little of a trained official as the monarch at the head of the empire. No specialized qualities are required of him: “Bureaucratic domination thus inevitably has at its apex an element that is at least not purely bureaucratic.”26 “Inevitably,” because the value-free rationality of administration is dependent upon values and goals that come to it from the outside. In his inaugural address, Weber had defined the power politics of the nation-state as giving economics its values and goals. Capitalism was therewith defined as imperialism. In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft some characteristics of the imperialistic economy are called by their names and summed up in the concept of “politically oriented capitalism.” Weber then states: “It is clear from the start that those politically oriented events that offer these (political) possibilities for gain are economically irrational when viewed from the point of view of orientation toward market chances. . . .”27 As irrational, they can be replaced by others. Control of the capitalistic economy not only requires no specialized qualification, it is also to a great degree fungible. Capitalism, with all its rationality (or rather just because of its specific rationality), thus terminates in an irrational, “accidental” head — not only in the economy, but also in the control of the bureaucratic administration Ibid., p. 607. Ibid., p. 127. 27 Ibid., p. 96. 25 26

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itself, in governmental administration. (It is difficult not to think here of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right where the state of civil society, the rational state, culminates in the “accidental” person of the monarch who is determined only by the contingency of birth: in Hegel as in Weber, the analysis of bourgeois reason reveals the latter’s limits: bourgeois reason negates itself in its consummation.) Let us look back briefly at the stages in the development of Weber’s concepts (and of their objects). Western capitalism originated under the specific social, political, and economic conditions of the waning Middle Ages and of the Reformation. It developed its “spirit” in that formal rationality that realized itself in the psychological as well as the economic orientation and action of the originators (but not the objects!) of the process of capital. Industrialization has been carried out under this formal reason: technical progress and progressive satisfaction of needs, whatever needs they may be. We have seen that this formal rationality develops on the basis of two very material historical facts, which maintain themselves in its progress and which (according to Max Weber) are conditions of capitalism, namely (1) the private enterprise and (2) “free labor,” the existence of a class that “economically,” “under the compulsion of the lash of hunger,” is forced to sell its services.28 As productive forces, these material conditions enter into formal reason. Capitalism expands in the competitive struggle of unequal (but formally free) powers: the struggle for existence of persons, nation-states, and international alliances. For Max Weber, the contemporary phase of capitalism is dominated by national power politics: capitalism is imperialism. But its administration remains formally rational, i.e. bureaucratic domination. It administers the control of men by things; rational, “value-free” technology is the separation of man from the means of production and his subordination to technical efficiency and necessity — all this within the framework of private enterprise. The machine is the determining factor, but the “lifeless machine is congealed spirit (Geist). Only by being this has it the power to force men into its service . . . .”29 Yet because it is “congealed spirit,” it also is domination of man by man; thus this technical reason reproduces enslavement. Subordination to technology becomes subordination to domination as such; formal technical rationality turns into material political rationality (or is it the other way around, inasmuch as technical reason was from the beginning the control of “free” labor by private enterprise?). Under the compulsion of reason, the fate is fulfilled that Weber foresaw with remarkable clarity in one of his most telling passages: Joined to the dead machine, [bureaucratic organization] is at work to erect the shell of that future bondage to which one day men will perhaps Ibid., p. 240. Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften, p. 151.

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be forced to submit in impotence, as once the fellahs in the ancient Egyptian state — if a purely, technically good, that is, rational bureaucratic administration and maintenance is the last and only value which is to decide on the manner in which their affairs are directed.30 But it is precisely here, at this most decisive point, where Weber’s analysis becomes self-criticism, that one can see how much this analysis has fallen prey to the identification of technical reason with bourgeois capitalist reason. This identification prevents him from seeing that not “pure,” formal, technical reason but the reason of domination erects the “shell of bondage,” and that the consummation of technical reason can well become the instrument for the liberation of man. Put differently: Max Weber’s analysis of capitalism was not sufficiently value-free, inasmuch as it took into its “pure” definitions of formal rationality valuations peculiar to capitalism. On this basis, the contradiction developed between formal and material (or substantive) rationality, whose obverse is the “neutrality” of technical reason vis-à-vis all outside material valuations. This neutrality, in turn, made it possible for Weber to accept the (reified) interest of the nation and its political power as the values that determine technical reason. The very concept of technical reason is perhaps ideological. Not only the application of technology but technology itself is domination (of nature and men) — methodical, scientific, calculated, calculating control. Specific purposes and interests of domination are not foisted upon technology “subsequently” and from the outside; they enter the very construction of the technical apparatus. Technology is always a historical-social project: in it is projected what a society and its ruling interests intend to do with men and things. Such a “purpose” of domination is “substantive” and to this extent belongs to the very form of technical reason. Weber abstracted from this ineluctable social material. We have emphasized the right to this abstraction in the analysis of capitalist reason: abstraction becomes critical of this reason insofar as it shows the degree to which capitalist rationality itself abstracts from man, to whose needs it is “indifferent,” and in this indifference becomes ever more productive and efficient, calculating and methodical, thus erecting the “shell of bondage,” furnishing it (quite luxuriously), and universalizing it. Weber’s abstractness is so saturated with his material that it pronounces rational judgment on the rational exchange society. In the course of its development, however, this society tends to abolish its own material prerequisites: the private entrepreneur is no longer the subject of economic rationality, answering only to himself, and “free labor” is no longer the enslavement enforced by the threatening “lash of hunger.” The exchange society, where everything

30

Ibid., p. 151.

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proceeds so freely and rationally, comes under the control of economic and political monopolies. The market and its liberties, whose ideological character Max Weber demonstrated often enough, is now subjected to frightfully efficient regulation, in which the general interest is markedly shaped by the ruling particular interests. Reification is abolished, but in a very deceptive manner. The separation from the means of production, in which Weber rightly saw a technical necessity, turns into the subjection of the whole to its calculating managers. The formal rationality of capitalism celebrates its triumph in electronic computers, which calculate everything, no matter what the purpose, and which are put to use as mighty instruments of political manipulation, reliably calculating the chances of profit and loss, including the chance of the annihilation of the whole, with the consent of the likewise calculated and obedient population. Mass democracy becomes plebiscitary even within the economy and the sciences: the masses themselves elect their leaders into the shell of bondage. But if technical reason thus reveals itself as political reason, it does so only because from the beginning it was this technical reason and this political reason, that is, limited in the specific interest of domination. As political reason, technical reason is historical. If separation from the means of production is a technical necessity, the bondage that it organizes is not. On the basis of its own achievements, that is, of productive and calculable mechanization, this separation contains the potentiality of a qualitatively different rationality, in which separation from the means of production becomes the separation of man from the socially necessary labor that depurposiveness would be no longer “antinomical”; nor would administer automated production, formal and substantive purposiveness would be no longer “antinomical”; nor would formal reason prevail indifferently among and over men. For, as “congealed spirit,” the machine is not neutral; technical reason is the social reason ruling a given society and can be changed in its very structure. As technical reason, it can become the technique of liberation. For Max Weber this possibility was utopian. Today it looks as if he was right. But if contemporary industrial society defeats and triumphs over its own potentialities, then this triumph is no longer that of Max Weber’s bourgeois reason. It is difficult to see reason at all in the ever more solid “shell of bondage” which is being constructed. Or is there perhaps already in Max Weber’s concept of reason the irony that understands but disavows? Does he by any chance mean to say: And this you call “reason”? First published in German in Max Weber und die Soziologie heute (1964). This translation is based on a revised form of the essay first published in German in Kultur und Gesellschaft (1965).

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CHAPTER THREE

“On the Problem of Truth” Max Horkheimer

“On the Problem of Truth” was first published in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, Vol. IV, in 1935. Here Horkheimer distinguishes critical theory from Hegelianism, positivism and pragmatism, with respect to various epistemological issues. The central concern is with the epistemic status of claims about as-yet unrealized possibilities. Horkheimer begins by observing that contemporary “public life,” as he puts it, and “the philosophy of the bourgeois era” more generally, is marked by a simultaneous commitment to absolute certainty and to radical uncertaintly, skepticism and/or relativism. He points to the presence of this duality in the work of Descartes, Kant and, finally, Hegel. Hegel, he acknowledges, replaces overt skepticism with determinate negation, but “the notion of the all-embracing thought which is to apportion its partial rightness and final limitation to every point of view without consciously taking sides with any one against the others and deciding between them—this is the very soul of bourgeois relativism,” he says. Critical theory—what he ends up calling here “the open-ended materialist dialectic—does not bear the stamp of this familiar dichotomy. Its proponents affirm neither absolutism nor relativism. As Marcuse would have it, both the absolutism and the relativism of Hegel’s system are made possible by his idealism. All possible positions can be reconciled into a complete, final whole precisely because the sublation has occurred only at the level of thought. Critical theory shares with Hegelianism that it is a form of dialectics, but it is dialectics in a materialist register. It is an effort to grasp, in thought that stands to inform practice (and thereby to affect the object of inquiry), the changing nature of a complex, dynamic totality—so as to try to bring the whole in question under the collective, conscious control of its parts. Theory in this sense cannot be absolutist, at least not in the Hegelian sense of being a complete and

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final system, because reality itself is deemed to be “open-ended.” It is in the nature of the case, from this perspective, that we can’t know what will happen next. This is so even in capitalism, which is relatively predictably governed by the unremitting Law of Value. It would be all the more so in a society that was rationally self-determining. Critical theory must therefore itself be open-ended. But it isn’t relativist, if only because its proponents hold that thought is accountable to the material world, relative to which not all thoughts are true. And the operative conception of truth (and falsehood) is realist: if one claims that a person does not have tuberculosis when they do, says Horkheimer, the claim is false. The complication is that critical theorists are interested in transformation: above all, in the realization of “real possibility,” as Marcuse puts it in “The Concept of Essence.” Change per se is not unduly problematic, epistemologically. What we call tuberculosis might come to be understood in a new way, says Horkheimer, as medicine develops. If so, then the truthvalues of future diagnostic claims may differ from those in the present. This fact does not make it any less false to declare of a patient now that s/he does not have tuberculosis, if s/he does. More challenging are modal claims, i.e. claims about what could be, but isn’t yet. In the modal case the issue is not simply the fact that circumstances evolve, such that knowledge might be best conceived as something that can evolve too. Rather, the difficulty here is that the truth-maker (loosely speaking), or referent, does not presently obtain. A dedicated logical positivist will either need to turn such a claim into a statement about the present, so that it can be confirmed (or disconfirmed) empirically, or s/he will be forced to regard it as epistemically suspect, because unverifiable. (Note that the empiricist is also likely to balk at any claim about the present to the effect that it contains unexpressed potential, or real possibilities, since such features of the world, if they exist, would not be observable.) Horkheimer rejects the logical positivist demand that the empirical content of theory be restricted to descriptive statements. (See also “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” and “Traditional and Critical Theory.”) There are perfectly legitimate knowledge-claims, he insists—crucial ones, in fact—the proof of which is in the pudding, as it were (a desert that critical theory is intended to help deliver). Saying this, however, requires him to differentiate critical theory not just from Hegelianism and logical positivism, but also from pragmatism. He cites James and Dewey, in this regard. “According to this view,” he writes, “the truth of theories is decided by what one accomplishes with them.” To be true just is to be useful, from a pragmatist perspective. Horkheimer is as critical of such a definition of the concept of truth as he is of the verificationist principle of meaning, and on similar grounds. What supports immediate practice depends upon the nature of the undertaking. Sometimes desired outcomes and true beliefs

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coincide; sometimes they don’t. In capitalism, for example, beliefs about the structure of the wage-relation that would pass muster vis-à-vis a realist account of the concept of truth are not at all useful for the purpose of capital accumulation. “The truth is an impetus to correct practice,” Horkheimer writes,“[b]ut whoever identifies it directly with success … makes himself an apologist for the reality dominant an any given time.” To put it in less morally charged terms, pragmatists (insofar as they are tied to the present via their concept of truth) cannot do epistemic justice to the not-present any more than positivists can. Critical theorists, by contrast, are prepared to make defeasible claims about what could be—claims that have, as yet, no material reality to which they correspond, or in relation to which they might yield immediate practical dividends, but which nevertheless are not mere pronouncements of faith.

“On the Problem of Truth” The philosophic thought of recent decades, shot through with contradictions, has also been divided on the problem of truth. Two opposing and unreconciled views exist side by side in public life and, not infrequently, in the behavior of the same individual. According to one, cognition never has more than limited validity. This is rooted in objective fact as well as in the knower. Every thing and every relation of things changes with time, and thus every judgment as to real situations must lose its truth with time. “Every particular entity is given to us in time, occupies a definite place in time, and is perceived as lasting for a length of time and during this time developing changing activities and possibly altering its properties. Thus all our judgments on the essence, properties, activities, and relations of particular things are necessarily involved with the relationship to time, and every judgment of this sort can only be valid for a certain time.”1 Subjectively, too, truth is viewed as necessarily circumscribed. Perception is shaped not only by the object but by the individual and generic characteristics of human beings. It is particularly this subjective moment to which the modern science of mind has given its attention. Depth psychology seemed to destroy the illusion of absolutely valid truth by pointing out that the function of consciousness only made its appearance together with unconscious psychic processes, while sociology made a philosophically developed discipline out of the doctrine that every idea belongs to an intellectual pattern bound up

Ch. Sigwart, Logic, Freiburg im Breisgau 1889, vol. 1, p. 111.

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with a social group, a “standpoint”. Present-day relativism, in particular, has subjectivist characteristics, but it is by no means the sole representative of this period’s intellectual attitude toward truth. Rather, it is opposed by the impulse to blind faith, to absolute submission, which has always been necessarily linked with relativism as its opposite, and is once again characteristic of the cultural situation today. In philosophy, a new dogmatism has emerged in the wake of the metaphysical reworking of the concept, at first strictly interpreted, of intuition of essences. This development in the history of ideas reflects the historical circumstance that the social totality to which the liberal, democratic and progressive tendencies of the dominant culture belonged also contained from its beginning their opposite compulsion, chance and the rule of primal nature. By the system’s own dynamic, this eventually threatens to wipe out all its positive characteristics. The role of human autonomy in the preservation and renewal of social life is completely subordinated to the effort to hold together mechanically a dissolving order. The public mind is increasingly dominated by some rigid judgments and a few postulated concepts. The appearance of this contradiction in our time repeats in distorted form a discord which has always permeated the philosophy of the bourgeois era. Its prototype in the history of philosophy is the linkage of Descartes’ universal methodical doubt with his devout Catholicism. It extends to the details of his system. It reveals itself not only in the unreconciled juxtaposition of faith and contradictory knowledge, but in the theory of cognition itself. The doctrine of a solid res cogitans, a self-contained ego independent of the body, which serves as an absolute resolution of the attempt at doubt and is preserved immutable in the metaphysics of Descartes and his idealistic successors, reveals itself as an illusion, corresponding to the situation of the bourgeois individual and present before the inquiry rather than based on it. The independent existence of individual souls, the principle which for Descartes makes the world philosophically intelligible, is no easier to reconcile with the criteria and the whole spirit of the analytic geometry which he himself invented than is his proclamation of empty space as the sole physical substance with the theological dogma of transubstantiation. Complete doubt as to the reality of material truth, the constant emphasis on the uncertainty, conditional character and finiteness of all definite knowledge, immediately next to ostensible insights into eternal truths and the fetishization of individual categories and modes of being—this duality permeates the Cartesian philosophy. It finds its classic expression in Kant. The critical method was supposed to perform the task of differentiating the purely conditional and empirical from “pure” knowledge and reached the conclusion that pure knowledge was possible only in regard to the conditions of the conditional. The system of the necessary subjective conditions of human knowledge is the exclusive goal of transcendental philosophy. To Hume’s skepticism, Kant opposes

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nothing but the sensory and conceptual forms of knowledge and what can be deduced therefrom. But what comes into existence on the basis of these conditions, the theory of our actual world and not a merely possible one, knowledge of actual nature and existing human society, lacks for Kant the criteria of genuine truth and is only relative. Everything that we know of reality, of conditions in space and time, relates according to him only to appearances, and of these he claims to have shown “that they are not things (but only a form of representation), and that they are not qualities inherently belonging to the things in themselves.”2 In regard to knowledge of the world, he is no less a skeptical relativist than the “mystical” and “dreaming” idealists whom he combats. In the latest phase of transcendental philosophy, this subjective relativism is clearly formulated: “In the last analysis, all being is relative (as opposed to the false ideal of an absolute Being and its absolute truth), and is nevertheless relative in some customary sense to the transcendental subjectivity. But this subjectivity alone is ‘in and for itself.’ ”3 Along with the careful and differentiated theoretical philosophy, which did indeed keep thought rooted in the ahistorical sphere of transcendental subjectivity, there are in Kant the postulates of practical reason and—linked to them by conclusions which are in part extremely questionable—the transformation into absolute of the existing property relations under prevalent public and private law. In the Critique of Practical Reason, which fetishizes the concept of duty, he did not in any way overcome the need for an immovable intellectual foundation but merely met it in a way more fitting to the time than that of the rationalist ontology of the period. The theoretical philosophy itself assumes that there is absolute knowledge, independent of any sensory experience, and indeed that this alone deserves the name of truth. Even the Critique of Pure Reason depends on the assumption that pure concepts and judgments existing “a priori” in the consciousness, and that metaphysics not only always has been, but that it will of right exist for all eternity. Kant’s work embraces in itself the contradiction between the German and English schools of philosophy. The resolution of the contradictions it produces, the mediation between critique and dogmatic system, between a mechanistic concept of science and the doctrine of intelligible freedom, between belief in an eternal order and a theory isolated from practice, increasingly and vainly occupied his own thought till the last years of his life: this is the mark of his greatness. Analysis carried through to the end and skeptical distrust of all theory on the one hand and readiness to believe naively in detached fixed principles on the other, these are characteristic of the bourgeois mind. It appears in its most highly developed form in Kant’s philosophy. Kant, Prolegomena # 13, Note III, Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. IV, p. 293. Husserl, “Formale und transzendentale Logik’” in Jarbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol. X, Halle 1929, p. 241.

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This dual relationship to truth is again mirrored in the failure of the progressive methods of the scholar to influence his attitude toward the most important problems of the time, the combination of notable knowledge in the natural sciences with childlike faith in the Bible. The association of that particularly strict tendency in modern philosophy, positivism, with the crudest superstition, has already been noted in this magazine.4 Auguste Comte not merely laid the groundwork for a whimsical cult, but prided himself on his understanding of the various theories of the beyond. William James turned to mysticism and even mediumism.5 The brain appears to him not so much to promote as to obstruct the enlightening intuitions which exist “ready-made in the transcendental world” and come through as telepathic experiences as soon as the brain’s activity is “abnormally” reduced. “The word ‘influx’ used in Swedenborgian circles” describes the phenomenon very well.6 The pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller, whom James quotes, declares on this point: “Matter is not that which produces consciousness but that which limits it” and conceives of the body as “a mechanism for inhibiting consciousness.”7 This inclination to spiritualism can be followed through the later history of positivism. In Germany, it seems to have reached its ultimate in the philosophy of Hans Driesch, in which a scientism carried to extremes goes together with unconcealed occultism in all questions of this world and the beyond. In this, the occultistic dilemma finds a grotesque expression in his logic and theory of knowledge through intentional formalism and rigidity and through the monomaniacal reference of all the problems of the world to some few biological experiments. On the other side, the misconception of a self-sufficient science independent of history appears through the pseudo-scientific dress of his barbarous errors in religion and practice. Only in the decline of the contemporary epoch has it become the typical behavior of scholars for a person to develop high critical faculties in a specific branch of science while remaining on the level of backward groups in respect to questions of social life and echoing the most ignorant phrases. In the beginning of the bourgeois order, the turn to specific juristic and scientific studies without regard to social and religious demands immediately produced a moment of liberation from the theological tutelage of thought. But as a result of the alteration of the social structure, this sort of production without regard to the rational relation to the whole has become regressive and obstructive in all fields—in science just as in industry and agriculture. This abstractness and ostensible independence of the bourgeois science industry shows itself in the mass of isolated individual empirical studies, not related to any sort of theory and practice by clear terminology and subject matter. It is likewise visible in the efforts of scientists, without Cf. “Matrialismus and Metaphysik,” pp. 61ff. J. S. Bixler, Religion in the Philosophy of William Jones, Boston 1929, p. 27. 6 William James, Human Immortality, Boston and New York 1898, p. 27. 7 F. C. S. Schiller, Riddles on the Sphinx, London 1981, p. 295. 4 5

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any significant reason, to divest their concepts of all empirical material, and especially in the inordinate mathematicization of many intellectual disciplines. The conventional attitude of the scholar to the dominant questions of the period and the confinement of his critical attention to his professional specialty were formerly factors in the improvement of the general situation. Thinkers ceased to be concerned exclusively with the welfare of their immortal souls, or to make concern for it their guide in all theoretical matters. But subsequently this attitude has taken on another meaning: instead of being a sign of necessary courage and independence, the withdrawal of intellectual energies from general cultural and social questions; the placing of actual historical interests and struggles in a parenthesis, is more a sign of anxiety and incapacity for rational activity than of an inclination to the true tasks of science. The substance underlying intellectual phenomena changes with the social totality. It is not the intention here to go into detail in regard to the historical causes of this dual relationship to truth. The competition within the bourgeois economy, in the context of which the forces of this society unfolded, produced a critical spirit which not only was able to liberate itself from the bureaucracies of church and absolutism but, driven by the dynamic of the economic apparatus, can to a fantastic degree place nature at its service. But this power only seems to be its own. The methods for the production of social wealth are available, the conditions for the production of useful natural effects are largely known, and the human will can bring them about. But this spirit and will themselves exist in false and distorted form. The concept of having power over something includes deciding for oneself and making use of it for one’s own purposes. But domination over nature is not exercised according to a unified plan and purpose, but merely serves as an instrument for individuals, groups and nations which use it in their struggle against one another and, as they develop it, at the same time reciprocally circumscribe it and bend it to destructive ends. Thus, the bearers of this spirit, with their critical capacity and their developed thinking, do not really become masters but are driven by the changing constellations of the general struggle which, even though summoned up by men themselves, face them as incalculable forces of destiny. This seemingly necessary dependence, which increasingly bears fruit in disruptive tensions and crises, general misery and decline, becomes for the greatest part of mankind an incomprehensible fate. But to the extent that the alteration of basic relationships is excluded in practice, a need arises for an interpretation based purely on faith. The conviction that a constricting and painful constellation is essentially unalterable prods the mind to give it a profound interpretation so as to be able to come to terms with it without despairing. Death as the inevitable end was always the basis of the religious and metaphysical illusion. The metaphysical need which permeates the history of this period stems from the fact that the inner mechanism of this society,

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which produces insecurity and continuous pressure, does not emerge into clear consciousness and is put up with as something necessary and eternal, rather than as an object of effective change. The firm faith which was part of the mortar of the medieval social structure has disappeared. The great systems of European philosophy were always intended only for an educated upper crust and fail completely in the face of the psychic needs of the impoverished and socially continually sinking sections of the citizenry and peasantry, who are nevertheless completely tied to this form of society by upbringing, work and hope, and cannot believe it to be transitory. This is why the intellectual situation has for decades been dominated by the craving to bring an eternal meaning into a life which offers no way out, by philosophical practices such as the direct intellectual or intuitive apprehension of truth and finally by blind submission to a personality, be it an anthroposophic prophet, a poet or a politician. To the extent to which individual activity is circumscribed and the capacity for it eventually stunted, there exists the readiness to find security in the protective shelter of a faith or person taken as the vessel and incarnation of the truth. In particular periods of the rise of contemporary society, the expectation of steady progress within its own framework reduced the need for an interpretation that would transfigure reality, and the rational and critical faculties achieved greater influence in private and public thought. But as this form of social organization becomes increasingly crisis-prone and insecure, all those who regard its characteristics as eternal are sacrificed to the institutions which are intended as substitutes for the lost religion. This is, to be sure, only one aspect of the social situation out of which the shaky relationship to truth in modern times arises. A fundamental analysis of the fallacious bourgeois self-perception, which preserves the ideology of complete inner freedom in the face of the dependence and insecurity of its bearers, could show that the liberal validation of alien ideas (the mark of relativism) has a common root with the fear of making one’s own decisions, which leads to belief in a rigid absolute truth: the abstract, reified concept of the individual which inescapabably dominates thought in this economic system. But here the question is less one of the derivation of the phenomenon than of its practical significance. Is there really only the choice between acceptance of a final truth, as proclaimed in religions and idealistic schools of philosophy, and the view that every thesis and every theory is always merely “subjective,” i.e., true and valid for a person or a group or a time or mankind as a species, but lacking objective validity? In developing the dialectical method, bourgeois thought itself has made the most ambitious attempt to transcend this antinomy. Here the goal of philosophy no longer appears, as in Kant, to be merely the system of the subjective factors of cognition; perceived truth is no longer so empty that in practice one must take refuge in the solidity of faith. While the concrete content is perceived as conditional and dependent and every “final” truth

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is just as decisively “negated” as in Kant, it does not for Hegel simply fall through the sieve in the sifting out of pure knowledge. Recognition of the conditional character of every isolated view and rejection of its absolute claim to truth does not destroy this conditional knowledge; rather, it is incorporated into the system of truth at any given time as a conditional, one-sided and isolated view. Through nothing but this continuous delimitation and correction of partial truths, the process itself evolves its proper content as knowledge of limited insights in their limits and connection. To skepticism, Hegel opposes the concept of determinate negation. The progressive recognition of partial truths, the advance from one isolated definition to another, means for him not a mere lining up of attributes but a description which follows the actual subject matter in all particulars. This critique of every concept and every complex of concepts by progressive incorporation into the more complete picture of the whole does not eliminate the individual aspects, nor does it leave them undisturbed in subsequent thought, but every negated insight is preserved as a moment of truth in the progress of cognition, forms a determining factor in it, and is further defined and transformed with every new step. Precisely because of this, the methodological form of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is not to be applied as a “lifeless diagram.”8 If at any given time the antithesis expresses the critical and relativizing impetus in opposition to the assimilation and establishment of a pattern of thought, thesis and antithesis together immediately form a new insight, a synthesis, because the negation has not simply rejected the original insight but has deepened and defined it. Hegel does not end up with the bare assurance that all definite knowledge is transitory and unreal, that what we know is only appearance in contrast to an unknowable thing in itself or an intuitively perceived essence. If for Hegel the true is the whole, the whole is not something distinct from the parts in its determinate structure, but the entire pattern of thought which at a given time embraces in itself all limited conceptions in the consciousness of their limitation. Since the dialectical method does not rest with showing that a thing is conditioned, but takes the conditioned thing seriously, it escapes the relativistic formalism of the Kantian philosophy. Hegel therefore does not need to make a fetish out of an isolated concept like that of duty. He recognizes the vain effort of all idealistic philosophy before him to make the whole content of the world disappear in some conceptual generalization and declare all specific differences unreal as opposed to such attributes as the infinite, will, experience, absolute indifference, consciousness, etc. The second-rate thought to which the world always appears as a mysterious presentation in which only the initiate knows what goes on behind the scenes, which

8

Hegel, preface to Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 2, p. 47.

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sets philosophy to solving an ostensible riddle in order to know once and for all or even to despair that such a key is not to be found—this sort of dogmatism does not exist in Hegel. Rather, the dialectical method quickly led him to become aware of the stupidity of such philosophical work and to see in development and flux what presents itself as absolute and eternal. Insofar as this method, in Hegel, nevertheless still belongs to an idealistic system, he has not freed his thought from the old contradiction. His philosophy too is ultimately characterized by the indifference to particular perceptions, ideas and goals which belongs to relativism, as well as by the transformation of conceptual structures into substances and the inability to take theoretical and practical account of the dogmatism and historical genesis of his own thought. Its dogmatic side has been especially often attacked in the critique of cognition since the middle of the nineteenth century. In place of those doctrines which made an abstract concept into substance, that is, which sought to raise this limited aspect over history as identical with being, and thus degenerated into naive faith, Hegel puts the hypostatization of his own system. In his polemic against skepticism and relativism9, he himself says: “The goal is fixed for knowledge just as necessarily as the succession in the process; it is there, where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where it finds itself, and the concept fits the object, the object the concept. The progress to this end is therefore also continuous, and satisfaction is not to be found at any earlier stage.” Hegel believes that he guarantees this satisfaction through the whole of his thought. For him, philosophy has the same absolute content as religion, the complete unity of subject and object, a final and eternally valid knowledge. What man . . . ensnared on all sides in the finite, seeks, is the region of a higher substantial truth in which all the oppositions and contradictions of the finite can find their final resolution and freedom its complete satisfaction. This is the region of the truth in itself, and not of the relatively true. The highest truth, the truth as such, is the resolution of the highest opposition and contradiction. In it the opposition of freedom and necessity, of spirit and nature, of knowledge and object, law and impulse, opposition and contradiction in general, whatever form they may take, no longer have validity and force as opposition and contradiction. . . . Ordinary consciousness, on the other hand, does not get out of this contradiction and either despairs in it or discards it and helps itself in some other way. But philosophy steps into the middle of the mutually contradictory propositions, knows them according to their significance, i.e., as not absolute in their one-sidedness but self-resolving, and places them in the harmony and unity which is the truth. To grasp

9

Op. cit., p. 73.

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this concept of truth is the task of philosophy. . . . For philosophy also has no other subject than God and is thus rational theology, and by being in the service of truth is continuous service of God.10 According to Hegel himself, the doctrine of an absolute self-contained truth has the purpose of harmonizing in a higher spiritual region the “oppositions and contradictions” not resolved in the world. Especially in his later lectures and writings, he stresses that “the region of truth, freedom and satisfaction”11 is to be found not in the mechanism of reality but in the spiritual spheres of art, religion and philosophy. He opposes this peace and satisfaction in thought not only to skeptical despair but to the active attitude which tries to overcome the incompleteness of existing conditions “in some other way.” This dogmatic narrow-mindedness is not some sort of an accidental defect of his doctrine which one can strip off without changing anything essential. Rather, it is inextricably bound up with the idealistic character of his thought and enters into all the details of his application of the dialectic. Hegel cannot be reproached for the role in his thought played by external observation, from which, as Trendelenberg points out in criticism12, the basic concept of the dialectic, movement comes. He himself expounded the importance of experience for philosophy. Rather, in contemplating his own system, Hegel forgets one very definite side of the empirical situation. The belief that this system is the completion of truth hides from him the significance of the temporally conditioned interest which plays a role in the details of the dialectical presentation through the direction of thought, the choice of material content, and the use of names and words, and diverts attention from the fact that his conscious and unconscious partisanship in regard to the problems of life must necessarily have its effect as a constituent element of his philosophy. Thus, his conceptions of folk and freedom, which form the backbone of many parts of his work, are not perceived in terms of their temporal presuppositions and their transitory character, but on the contrary are, as conceptual realities and forces, made the basis of the historical developments from which they are abstracted. Because Hegel does not recognize and assert the specific historical tendencies which find expression in his own work, but presents himself as absolute mind in philosophizing and accordingly preserves on ostensible distance and impartiality, many parts of his work lack clarity and, in spite of the revolutionary sharpness and flexibility of the method, take on the arbitrary and pedantic character which was so closely bound up with the political conditions of his time. In the idealistic thought to which it owes its existence, Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik in vol. 12, pp. 146ff. Op. cit., p. 147. 12 Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, Leipzig, 1870, vol. I, pp. 42ff. 10 11

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the dialectic is beset by dogmatism. Since the abstractions at which the method arrives are supposed to be moments in a system in which thought “no longer needs to go beyond itself,” the relationships comprehended by it also are regarded as unalterable and eternal. If a great deal may happen in history yet to come, even if other peoples, e.g., the Slavs,13 should take over leadership from those nations which have in the past been decisive, nevertheless no new principle of social organization will become dominant and no decisive change will take place in the organization of mankind. No historical change which brought about a new form of human association could leave the concepts of society, freedom, right, etc., unaltered. The interconnection of all categories, even the most abstract, would be affected thereby. Hence, Hegel’s belief that his thought comprehended the essential characteristics of all being—the unity of which remained as it appeared in the system, a complete hierarchy and totality undisturbed by the becoming and passing of individuals—represented the conceptual eternalization of the earthly relationships on which it was based. The dialectic takes on a transfiguring function. The laws of life, in which according to Hegel domination and servitude as well as poverty and misery have their eternal place, are sanctioned by the fact that the conceptual interconnection in which they are included is regarded as something higher, divine and absolute. Just as religion and the deification of a race or state or the worship of nature offer the suffering individual an immortal and eternal essence, so Hegel believes he has revealed an eternal meaning in the contemplation of which the individual should feel sheltered from all personal misery. This is the dogmatic, metaphysical, naive aspect of his theory. Its relativism is directly bound up with this. The dogmatic assertion that all the particular views which have ever entered the lists against one another in real historical combat, all the creeds of particular groups, all attempts at reform are now transcended and canceled out, the notion of the all-embracing thought which is to apportion its partial rightness and final limitation to every point of view without consciously taking sides with any one against the others and deciding between them—this is the very soul of bourgeois relativism. The attempt to afford justification to every idea and every historical person and to assign the heroes of past revolutions their place in the pantheon of history next to the victorious generals of the counterrevolution, this ostensibly free-floating objectivity conditioned by the bourgeoisie’s stand on two fronts against absolutist restoration and against the proletariat, has acquired validity in the Hegelian system along with the idealistic pathos of absolute knowledge. It is self-evident that tolerance toward all views that are in the past and recognized as conditioned is no less relativist than negativist skepticism. The more the times

Cf. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte in ibid., vol II, p. 447.

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demand unsparing outspokenness and defense of particular truths and rights, the more unequivocally it reveals the inhumanity immanent in it. If in spite of the lack of a conscious relationship between his philosophy and any particular practical principle, Hegel was guided in detail not simply by the conservative Prussian spirit but also by interests pushing him forward, his dogmatism nevertheless prevented his recognizing and defending these tendencies, which found expression in his science, as his own purposes and progressive interests. He seems to speak of himself when he describes how “the consciousness lets the idea of something good in itself, which as yet has no reality, go by like an empty cloak.”14 In Hegel, as in Goethe, the progressive impulses enter secretly into the viewpoint which ostensibly comprehends and harmonizes everything real impartially. Later relativism, in contrast, directs his demonstration of limiting conditionality mainly against the progressive ideas themselves, which it thereby seeks to flatten, that is, to equate with everything already past. In his conceptual projections, the new as well as the old easily appear as simply rationalizing and ideology. Since the recognition of the truth of particular ideas disappears behind the display of conditions, the coordination with historical unities, this impartial relativism reveals itself as the friend of what exists at any given time. The dogmatism concealed within it is the affirmation of the existing power; what is coming into being needs conscious decision in its struggle, while the limitation to mere understanding and contemplation serves what is already in existence. That impartial partisanship and indiscriminate objectivity represent a subjective viewpoint is a dialectical proposition that indeed takes relativism beyond itself. In materialism, the dialectic is not regarded as a closed system. Understanding that the prevalent circumstances are conditioned and transitory is not here immediately equated with transcending them and canceling them out. Hegel declares: “Something is only known, indeed felt, as a limit, a defect, only when one is already beyond it. . . . It is . . . simply lack of consciousness not to see that precisely the description of something as finite or limited contains proof of the real presence of the infinite and unlimited, that knowledge of boundaries is only possible insofar as the unbounded is here in one’s consciousness.”15 This view has as its presupposition the basic postulate of idealism that concept and being are in truth the same, and therefore all fulfillment can take place in the pure medium of the spirit. Inner renewal and exaltation, reformation and spiritual elevation, were always the solution to which he pointed. Insofar as dealing with and changing the external world was regarded as at all fundamental, it appeared as a mere consequence of this. Materialism, on the other hand, insists that objective reality is not identical with man’s thought and can Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, vol. 2, p. 300. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, #60.

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never be merged into it. As much as thought in its own element seeks to copy the life of the object and adapt itself to it, the thought is nevertheless never simultaneously the object thought about, unless in self-observation and reflection—and not even there. To conceptualize a defect is therefore not to transcend it; concepts and theories form an impulse to its removal, a prerequisite to the proper procedure, which as it progresses is constantly redefined, adapted and improved. An isolated and conclusive theory of reality is completely unthinkable. If one takes seriously the formal definition of truth which runs through the whole history of logic as the correspondence of cognition with its object,16 there follows from it the contradiction to the dogmatic interpretation of thought. This correspondence is neither a simple datum, an immediate fact, as it appears in the doctrine of intuitive, immediate certainty and in mysticism, nor does it take place in the pure sphere of spiritual immanence, as it seems to in Hegel’s metaphysical legend. Rather, it is always established by real events, by human activity. In the investigation and determination of actual conditions, and even more in the verification of theories, the direction of attention, the refinement of methods, the categorical structure of subject matter, in short human activity within the framework of the given social period, play their role. (The discussion here will not deal with the question of how far all connection with such activity is avoided by Husserl’s “formal ontology” which refers “to any possible world in empty generality”17 or by formal apophantic, which likewise relates to all possible statements in empty generality, or by other parts of pure logic and mathematics, nor with how far they possess real cognitive value without regard to such a connection.) If certain philosophical interpretations of mathematics correctly stress its a priori character, that is, the independence of mathematical constructions from all empirical observation, the mathematical models of theoretical physics in which the cognitive value of mathematics finally shows itself are, in any case, structured with reference to the events that can be brought about and verified on the basis of the current level of development of the technical apparatus. As little as mathematics needs to trouble itself about this relationship in its deductions, its form at any given time is nevertheless as much conditioned by the increase in the technical capacity of mankind as the latter is by the development of mathematics. The verification and proof of ideas relating to man and society, however, consists not merely in laboratory experiments or the examination of documents, but in historical struggles in which conviction itself plays an essential role. The false view that the present social order is essentially harmonious serves as an impetus to the renewal of disharmony and decline and becomes a factor in its Cf. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik in vol. 5, p. 27. Husserl, Formale und Transcendentale Logik, supra, p. 140.

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own practical refutation. The correct theory of the prevalent conditions, the doctrine of the deepening of crises and the approach of catastrophes does, to be sure, find continuous confirmation in all particulars. But the picture of a better world that inheres in this theory and takes its departure from the assertion of the badness of the present, the idea of men and their capabilities immanent in it, finds its definition, correction and confirmation in the course of historical struggles. Hence, activity is not to be regarded as an appendix, as merely what comes after thought, but enters into theory at every point and is inseparable from it. Just for this reason pure thought does not here give the satisfaction of having sure and certain grasp of the question and being at one with it. It is certainly impossible to speak too highly of the conquests of the human spirit as a factor in liberation from the domination of nature and in improving the pattern of relationships. Social groups and possessors of power who fought against it, all propagandists of every sort of obscurantism, had their shady reasons and always led men into misery and servitude. But if in particular historical situations knowledge can, by its mere presence, obstruct evil and become power, the effort to make it in isolation the highest purpose and means of salvation rests on a philosophical misunderstanding. It cannot be said in general and a priori what meaning and value some particular knowledge has. That depends on social conditions as a whole at the particular time, on the concrete situation to which it belongs. Thoughts which, taken in isolation, are identical in content can at one time be unripe and fantastic and at another outdated and unimportant, yet in a particular historical moment form factors of a force that changes the world. There is no eternal riddle of the world, no world secret the penetration of which once and for all would be the mission of thought. This narrow view—which ignores the constant alteration in knowing human beings along with the objects of their knowledge as well as the insurmountable tension between concept and objective reality—corresponds today to the narrow horizon of groups and individuals who, from their felt inability to change the world through rational work, grasp at and compulsively hold to universal recipes which they memorize and monotonously repeat. When the dialectic is freed of its connection with the exaggerated concept of isolated thought, self-determining and completes in itself, the theory defined by it necessarily loses the metaphysical character of final validity, the sanctity of a revelation, and becomes an element, itself transitory, intertwined in the fate of men. But by ceasing to be a closed system, the dialectic does not lose the stamp of truth. In fact, the disclosures of conditional and one-sided aspects of other thought and its own forms an important impetus to the intellectual process. Hegel and his materialist followers were correct in always stressing that this critical and relativizing characteristic is a necessary part of cognition. But the certitude and verification of its own conviction

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does not require the assertion that concept and object are here henceforth one, and thought can rest. To the degree that the knowledge gained from perception and inference, methodical inquiry and historical events, daily work and political struggle, meets the test of the available means of cognition, it is the truth. The abstract proposition, that once a critique is justified from its own standpoint it will show itself open to correction, expresses itself for the materialists not in liberality toward opposing views or skeptical indecision, but in alertness to their own errors and flexibility of thought. They are no less “objective” than pure logic when it teaches that the relativistic “talk of a subjective truth which is this for one and the opposite for another must rate as nonsense.”18 Since that extrahistorical and hence exaggerated concept of truth which stems from the idea of a pure infinite mind and thus in the last analysis from the God concept, is impossible, it no longer makes any sense to orient the knowledge that we have to this impossibility and in this sense call it relative. The theory which we regard as correct may disappear because the practical and scientific interests which played a role in the formation of its concepts, and above all the facts and circumstances to which it referred, have disappeared. Then this truth is in fact irrecoverably gone, since there is no superhuman essence to preserve the present-day relationship between the content of ideas and their objects in its all-embracing spirit when the actual human beings have changed or even when mankind has died out. Only when measured against an extraterrestrial, unchanging existence does human truth appear to be of an inferior quality. At the same time as it nevertheless necessarily remains inconclusive and to that extent “relative,” it is also absolute, since later correction does not mean that a former truth was formerly untrue. In the progress of knowledge, to be sure, much incorrectly regarded as true will prove wrong. Nevertheless, the overturn of categories stems from the fact that the relationship of concept and reality is affected and altered as a whole and in all its parts by the historical changes in forces and tasks. To a large extent the direction and outcome of the historical struggle depends on the decisiveness with which men draw the consequences of what they know, their readiness to test their theories against reality and refine them, in short, by the uncompromising application of the insight recognized as true. The correction and further definition of the truth is not taken care of by history, so that all the cognizant subject has to do is passively observe, conscious that even his particular truth, which contains the others negated in it, is not the whole. Rather, the truth is advanced because the human beings who possess it stand by it unbendingly, apply it and carry it through, act according to it, and bring it to power against the resistance of reactionary, narrow, one-sided points of view. The process of cognition includes real

Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Halle an der Saale 1915, vol. 1, p. 115.

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historical will and action just as much as it does learning from experience and intellectual comprehension. The latter cannot progress without the former. Freed from the idealistic illusion, the dialectic transcends the contradiction between relativism and dogmatism. While it does not suppose the progress of criticism and definition at an end with its own point of view, and does not hypostatize the latter, it in no way surrenders the conviction that in the whole context to which its judgments and concepts refer, its cognitions are valid not only for particular individuals and groups but in general—that is, that the opposing theory is wrong. The dialectical logic also contains the law of contradiction; but in materialism it has completely stripped off its metaphysical character, because here a static system of propositions about reality, indeed any relation of concept and object not historically mediated, no longer appears meaningful as an idea. The dialectical logic in no way invalidates the rules of understanding. While it has as its subject the forms of movement of the advancing cognitive process, the breaking up and restructuring of fixed systems and categories also belongs in its scope along with the coordination of all intellectual forces as an impetus to human practice in general. In a time which in its lack of a way out tries to make everything into a fetish, even the abstract business of understanding, and would like thereby to replace the lost divine support, so that its philosophers rejoice in ostensibly non-temporal relations between isolated concepts and propositions as the timeless truth, the dialectical logic points out the questionable character of the interest in such “rigor” and the existence of a truth apart from it which is in no way denied by it. If it is true that a person has tuberculosis, this concept may indeed be transformed in the development of medicine or lose its meaning altogether. But whoever today with the same concept makes a contrary diagnosis, and not in terms of a higher insight which includes the determination of this man’s tuberculosis, but simply denies the finding from the same medical standpoint, is wrong. The truth is also valid for him who contradicts it, ignores it, or declares it unimportant. Truth is decided not by what the individual believes and thinks of himself, not by the subject in itself, but by the relation of the propositions to reality, and when someone imagines himself the messenger of God or the rescuer of a people, the matter is not decided by him or even the majority of his fellow men, but by the relation of his assertions and acts to the objective facts of the rescue. The conditions to which those opinions point must really occur and be present in the course of events. There are at present various opposed views of society. According to one, the present wretched physical and psychological state of the masses and the critical condition of society as a whole, in the face of the developed state of the productive apparatus and technology, necessarily follows from the continued existence of an obsolete principle of social organization. According to the others, the problem is not the principle but interference

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with it or carrying it too far or a matter of spiritual, religious or purely biological factors. They are not all true; only that theory is true which can grasp the historical process so deeply that it is possible to develop from it the closest approximation to the structure and tendency of social life in the various spheres of culture. It too is no exception to the rule that it is conditioned like every thought and every intellectual content, but the circumstance that it corresponds to a specific social class and is tied up with the horizon and interests of certain groups does not in any way change the fact that it is also valid for the others who deny and suppress its truth and must nevertheless eventually experience it for themselves. This is the place to define the concept of proof which dominates the logic of many otherwise opposed tendencies. Epicurus says: “Just as we do not desire the knowledge of the physician for the sake of its technical perfection itself, but consider it good for the sake of good health, and the skill of the helmsman possesses its value because it masters the methods of correct navigation but does not find recognition for its perfection, so wisdom, which must be perceived in skill in life, would not be sought after if it did not accomplish something.”19 The motif of result and proof as criteria of science and truth has never disappeared in the subsequent history of philosophy. Goethe’s line “What fruitful is, alone is true” and the sentence “I have noticed that I regard as true that idea which is fruitful for me, fits in with the rest of my thought, and at the same time benefits me,”20 appear to imply a pragmatic theory of cognition. Many phases of Nietzsche suggest a similar interpretation. “The criterion of truth lies in the increase in the feeling of power. . . . What is truth? Inertia; the hypothesis with which satisfaction occurs; the least use of spiritual strength, etc.”21 “True means ‘useful for the existence of human beings.’ But since we know the conditions for the existence of human beings only very imprecisely, the decision as to true and untrue can, strictly speaking, only be based on success.”22 With Goethe and Nietzsche, it is necessary to place such views, to which contradictions exist in their own writing, in the context of their entire thought in order to comprehend their meaning properly. But a special school of professional philosophy has grown up since the middle of the nineteenth century which places the pragmatic concept of truth in the center of its system. It has developed principally in America, where pragmatism has become the distinctive philosophical tendency through William James and subsequently John Dewey. According to this view, the truth of theories is decided by what one accomplishes with them. Their power to produce Epicurus, translated by W. Nestle in Die Nachsokratiker, Jena 1923, vol. 1, p. 202. Goethe, Letter to Zelter, Dec. 31, 1829. 21 Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht in Gesammelte Werke, Musarion Edition, vol. XIX, pp. 45ff., aphorisms 534 and 537. 22 Nietzsche in ibid., vol. XI, p. 28. 19 20

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desired effects for the spiritual and physical existence of human beings is also their criterion. The furtherance of life is the meaning and measure of every science. “Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of leading realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they pay.”23 If two theories are equally well fitted to produce a particular desired effect, it is at most still necessary to ask whether more intellectual energy is required with one than with the other. The proof of the idea in its working is identical with its truth, and indeed pragmatism, especially in its most recent development, places the principal emphasis not so much on the mere confirmation of a judgment by the occurrence of the predicted factual situation, as on the promotion of human activity, liberation from all sorts of internal restraints, the growth of personality and social life. If ideas, meanings, conceptions, notions, theories, systems are instrumental to an active reorganization of the given environment, to a removal of some specific trouble and perplexity, then the test of their validity and value lies in accomplishing this work. If they succeed in their office, they are reliable, sound, valid, good, true. If they fail to clear up confusion, to eliminate defects, if they increase confusion, uncertainty and evil when they are acted upon, then are they false. Confirmation, corroboration, verification lie in works, consequences. . . . That which guides us truly is true—demonstrated capacity for such guidance is precisely what is meant by truth.24 This view is closely related to positivism in France. If Bergson had not taken over the pragmatically restricted concept of science from Comte, it would be impossible to understand the need for a separate, supplementary, vitalistic metaphysics. The isolated intuition is the wishful dream of objective truth to which the acceptance of the pragmatic theory of cognition must give rise in a contemplative existence. The pragmatic concept of truth in its exclusive form, without any contradictory metaphysics to supplement it, corresponds to limitless trust in the existing world. If the goodness of every idea is given time and opportunity to come to light, if the success of the truth—even if after struggle and resistance—is in the long run certain, if the idea of a dangerous, explosive truth cannot come into the field of vision, then the present social structure is consecrated and—to the extent that it warns of harm—capable of unlimited development. In pragmatism there lies embedded the belief in the existence and advantages of free competition. Where in regard to the present it is shaken by a feeling of the dominant injustice, as in the far-reaching pragmatic philosophy of Ernst William James, “Pragmatism.” in Writings of William James, New York, Modern Library, p. 436. 24 John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Boston: Beacon, Paperback, p. 156. 23

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Mach, the problem of necessary change forms a personal commitment, a utopian supplement with a merely external connection to the other part, rather than a principle for the development of theory. It is therefore easy to separate that ideal from the empirio-critical way of thinking without doing it violence. There are various elements contained in the concept of proof which are not always differentiated from one another in pragmatist literature. An opinion can be completely validated because the objective relationships whose existence it asserts are confirmed on the basis of experience and observation with unobjectionable instruments and logical conclusions; and it can moreover be of practical use to its holder or other people. Even with the first of these relationships, a need arises for intellectual organization and orientation. In this connection, James speaks of a “function of guidance, which repays the effort.”25 He sees that this theoretical proof, the agreement between idea and reality, the portrayal, often means nothing more than “that nothing contradictory from the quarter of that reality comes to interfere with the way in which our ideas guide us elsewhere.”26 If the difference between this theoretical verification of truth and its practical meaning, the “furtherance of life,” is nevertheless often eliminated in a given moment of history, there comes into existence that idea of a strictly parallel progress of science and mankind which was philosophically established by positivism and has become a general illusion in liberalism. But the more a given social order moves from the promotion of the creative cultural forces to their restriction, the greater the conflict between the verifiable truth and the interests bound up with this form, bringing the advocates of truth into contradiction with the existing reality. Insofar as it affects the general public rather than their own existence, individuals have reason, despite the fact that proclaiming the truth can endanger them, to sharpen it and carry it forward, because the result of their struggle and the realization of better principles of society is decisively dependent on theoretical clarity. Pragmatism overlooks the fact that the same theory can be an annihilating force for other interests in the degree to which it heightens the activity of the progressive forces and makes it more effective. The epistemological doctrine that the truth promotes life, or rather that all thought that “pays” must also be true, contains a harmonizing illusion if this theory of cognition does not belong to a whole in which the tendencies working towards a better, life-promoting situation really find expression. Separated from a particular theory of society as a whole, every theory of cognition remains formalistic and abstract. Not only expressions like life and promotion, but also terms seemingly specific to cognitive theory such as verification, confirmation, proof, etc., remain William James, loc. cit. James, op. cit., p. 435.

25 26

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vague and indefinite despite the most scrupulous definition and transference to a language of mathematical formulae, if they do not stand in relation to real history and receive their definition by being part of a comprehensive theoretical unity. The dialectical proposition that every concept possesses real validity only as a part of the theoretical whole and arrives at its real significance only when, by its interconnection with other concepts, a theoretical unity has been reached and its role in this is known, is valid here too. What is the life promoted by the ideas to which the predicate of truth is to be attributed? In what does promotion consist in the present period? Is the idea to be considered valid when the individual who has comprehended it goes down while the society, the class, the public interest for which he fights strides forward? What does confirmation mean? Is the power of the slanderers and scoundrels to serve as confirmation of the assertions with whose help they attained it? Cannot the crudest superstition, the most miserable perversion of the truth about world, society, justice, religion, and history grip whole peoples and prove most excellent for its author and his clique? In contrast, does the defeat of the forces of freedom signify the disproof of their theory? The concept of proof also plays a role in the materialistic way of thinking. Above all, it is a weapon against every form of mysticism because of its significance in the criticism of the acceptance of a transcendent and superhuman truth which is reserved for revelation and the insight of the elect, instead of being basically accessible to experience and practice. Yet as much as theory and practice are linked to history, there is no pre-established harmony between them. What is seen as theoretically correct is not therefore simultaneously realized. Human activity is no unambiguous function of insight, but rather a process which at every moment is likewise determined by other factors and resistances. This clearly follows from the present state of the theory of history. A number of social tendencies in their reciprocal action are described there theoretically: the agglomeration of great amounts of capital as against the declining share of the average individual in relation to the wealth of society as a whole, the increase of unemployment interrupted by ever shorter periods of a relative prosperity, the growing discrepancy between the apportionment of social labor to the various types of goods and the general needs, the diversion of productivity from constructive to destructive purposes, the sharpening of contradictions within states and among them. All these processes were shown by Marx to be necessary at a time when they could only be studied in a few advanced countries and in embryo, and the prospect of a liberalistic organization of the world still seemed excellent. But from the beginning, this view of history, now in fact confirmed, understood these developments in a particular way, that is, as tendencies which could be prevented from leading to a relapse into barbarism by the effort of people guided by this theory. This theory, confirmed by the course of history, was thought of not

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only as theory but as an impetus to a liberating practice, bound up with the whole impatience of threatened humanity. The testing of the unswerving faith involved in this struggle is closely connected with the confirmation of the predicted tendencies which has already taken place, but the two aspects of the verification are not identical; rather, they are mediated by the actual struggle, the solution of concrete historical problems based on the theory reinforced by experience. Continuously in this process partial views may prove incorrect, timetables be disproved, corrections become necessary; historical factors which were overlooked reveal themselves; many a vigorously defended and cherished thesis proves to be an error. Yet the connection with the theory as a whole is in no way lost in this application. Adherence to its proven teachings and to the interests and goals shaping and permeating it is the prerequisite for effective correction of errors. Unswerving loyalty to what is recognized as true is as much an impetus to theoretical progress as openness to new tasks and situations and the corresponding refocusing of ideas. In such a process of verification the individuals and groups struggling for more rational conditions might succumb completely and human society develop retrogressively, a conceivable possibility which any view of history that has not degenerated into fatalism must formally take into account. This would refute the trust in the future which is not merely an external supplement to the theory, but belongs to it as a force shaping its concepts. But the frivolous comments of well-meaning critics who use every premature claim, every incorrect analysis of a momentary situation by the adherents of the cause of freedom as evidence against their theory as a whole, indeed against theory in general, are nevertheless unjustified. The defeats of a great cause, which run counter to the hope for its early victory, are mainly due to mistakes which do not damage the theoretical content of the conception as a whole, however far-reaching the consequences they have. The direction and content of activity, along with its success, are more closely related to their theory for the historically progressive groups than is the case with the representatives of naked power. The talk of the latter is related to their rise only as a mechanical aid, and their speech merely supplements open and secret force with craft and treachery, even when the sound of the words resembles truth. But the knowledge of the falling fighter, insofar as it reflects the structure of the present epoch and the basic possibility of a better one, is not dishonored because mankind succumbs to bombs and poison gases. The concept of verification as the criterion of truth must not be interpreted so simply. The truth is an impetus to correct practice. But whoever identifies it directly with success passes over history and makes himself an apologist for the reality dominant at any given time. Misunderstanding the irremovable difference between concept and reality, he reverts to idealism, spiritualism and mysticism.

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One can find in Marxist literature formulations close to pragmatic doctrine. Max Adler27 writes: “Theory turns directly into practice because, as Marxism has taught us to understand, nothing can be right which does not work in practice; the social theory is nevertheless only the recapitulation of the practice itself.” In regard to the identity of theory and practice, however, their difference is not to be forgotten. While it is the duty of everyone who acts responsibly to learn from setbacks in practice, these can nevertheless not destroy the proven basic structure of the theory, in terms of which they are to be understood only as setbacks. According to pragmatism, the verification of ideas and their truth merge. According to materialism, verification forms the evidence that ideas and objective reality correspond, itself a historical occurrence that can be obstructed and interrupted. This viewpoint has no place for a basically closed and unknowable truth or for the subsistence of ideas not requiring any reality, but this does not mean that the concept of a conviction which, because of a given constellation of the world is cut off from verification and success, is a priori untrue. This also holds true for historical conflicts. The possibility of a more rational form of human association has been sufficiently demonstrated to be obvious. Its full demonstration requires universal success; this depends on historical developments. The fact that meanwhile misery continues and terror spreads—the terrible force which suppresses that general demonstration—has no probative force for the contrary. The contradictions appear plainly in Max Scheler’s extensive refutation of pragmatism in postwar Germany.28 Scheler did not fail to recognize the relative truths of pragmatism: “So-called ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ . . . exists nowhere and cannot and also ‘should’ not exist, and has never existed anywhere in the world. When pragmatism attributes to the positive, exact sciences a primary purpose of control, it is certainly not wrong. Rather, it is vain foolishness to consider positive science too ‘good’ or too ‘grand’ to give men freedom and power, to guide and lead the world.”29 He also understood that the criteria for practical work in this doctrine were modeled exclusively on the inorganic natural sciences and then mechanically transferred unchanged to knowledge as a whole. Had he analyzed the concept of practice itself, it would have been evident that this is by no means as clear and simple as it seems in pragmatism, where it reduces and impoverishes truth. The meaning of the criterion is indeed not developed in experiments in natural science. Its essence consists in neatly isolating assertion, object and verification. The undefined and questionable aspect of the situation lies in the unarticulated relationship between the Max Adler, Marx als Denker, Berlin 1908, p. 75. Max Scheler, “Erkenntnis und Arbeit” in Die Wissenschaften und die Gesellschaft, Leipzig 1926. 29 Ibid., pp. 250ff. 27 28

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specific scientific activity and the life of the individuals involved and people in general, in the ostensible natural and self-evident character of the theoretical act. The unresolved and problematical aspect of its relationship to the concrete historical life with which it is obviously interwoven appears as soon as one more closely investigates the controlling categories and the choice of objects and methods. Practice as verification itself leads to a critique of positivist philosophy’s hypostatization of natural science and its basic concepts. The help of metaphysics is not required. However much the problems of natural science are soluble within its boundaries and with its specific means, independent of anything else, technical knowledge is in itself abstract and acquires its full truth only in the theory which comprehends natural science in this particular historical situation as an aspect of society’s development as a whole. If, in addition, practice is understood as the criterion not merely in the special case of physical science and the technique based on it, but in the theory of history, then it becomes clear without further ado that it embraces the whole situation of society at any given moment. It takes more than attention to isolated events or groups of events, or reference to general concepts such as that of progress, to apply the criterion of practice in deciding such questions as whether one or another judgment of the contemporary authoritarian states is correct; whether they can develop only in politically backward countries with strong remnants of a landed aristocracy or whether they should be regarded as an adequate state form for the present economic phase, hence necessarily to be expected in other areas; whether this or that theory of colonial expansion applies; whether, to come to more abstract problems, the progressive technical sealing off and mathematicization of logic and economics is more suited to their present situation than sticking to the development of concepts reflecting the historical situation. For this, one needs a definite theory of society as a whole, which is itself only to be thought of in terms of particular interests and tasks with one’s own point of view and activity. Scheler does not pursue this conceptual movement in which it becomes clear that practice as an abstract criterion of truth changes into the concrete theory of society and strips off the formalism in which it is clad in the undialectical thought of the pragmatic school. He does not push this category to the consequences which contradict the system of bourgeois thought in which it is firmly frozen. Instead, he opposes to the knowledge which can be verified and criticized through practice other forms of knowledge which according to him exist along with it and unconnected to it. He fails to recognize the elevation to a philosophical absolute of mechanical natural science as the ideological reflection of bourgeois society which was able to increase reason and thereby human “power and freedom” in a high degree in the technique of material production, and yet must block the ever more urgently necessary reorganization of human relations in production in

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accordance with its own principle. Thus it negates and destroys the same criteria of reason, power and freedom which in cognitive theory it recognizes in isolated areas. Nor does he relate the bourgeois reality and science which he combats to their own ideas and standards and thus show both society and ideas in their one-sidedness and abstraction and thus contribute to their supersession. Instead, like Bergson and other philosophers of this period, he goes on to proclaim his own special higher forms of cognition. In the face of the deepening contradictions between use in science and use for humanity, between use for privileged groups and for society as a whole, use for facilitating production and for easing life, the criterion of utility had become a dubious principle. Scheler does not further pursue the dialectic sketched out in his work, but rather places useful science at the very bottom in his ranking of knowledge. Turning back to earlier stages of human development, he advocates in opposition to “mastery or production knowledge” the two types of “cultural knowledge” and “redemption knowledge.” He declares himself in complete agreement with the “new sub-bourgeois class” in the pragmatist interpretation of “the pretentious rationalist metaphysics of the bourgeois entrepreneurs,”30 attacking most sharply classic German idealism and the historical materialism which issued from it. For him it is nonsense “that the human spirit and the ideal factors could ever control the real factors according to a positive plan. What J. G. Fichte, Hegel (‘Age of Reason’) and—following them, only postponed to a future point in time—Karl Marx, with his doctrine of the ‘leap into freedom,’ have dreamt will remain a mere dream for all time.”31 In contrast to this freedom, in which science would in fact have an important role to play, Scheler prophesied that the world should and could expect the rise of noble and spiritually elevated groups. If bourgeoisie and proletariat are “completely uncreative of all cultural knowledge and redemptive knowledge,”32 this will be remedied from now on by the fact “that growing and advancing capitalism will gradually again be able to produce a whole class of purely cognitive people, and likewise of such people who have broken with the authoritative class doctrines, with bourgeois and proletarian metaphysics—that is, with the absolute mechanistic view and philosophical pragmatism. In this elite and its hands alone rests the future development of human knowledge. . . . But the future will have a new independent rise of the genuine philosophical and metaphysical spirit.”33 In connection with the passage previously cited, Epicurus defines the goal of knowledge and wisdom as the happiness and good fortune of mankind. Scheler’s view and the present heralded by him are in irreconcilable opposition to this materialistic pragmatism. Ibid., Ibid., 32 Ibid., 33 Ibid., 30 31

pp. pp. pp. pp.

485ff. 44ff. 424ff. 426ff.

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In the analysis of the concept of proof and its role in open-ended, dialectical thought, it is shown that the decision on particular truths depends on still uncompleted historical processes. While progress in theory and practice is conditioned by the fact that, in contrast to relativistic neutrality, a definite theory corresponding to the highest available level of knowledge is adhered to and applied, this application reacts on the form of the theory and the meaning of its concepts. This is not merely a question of the correction of errors. Categories such as history, society, progress, science and so on experience a change of function in the course of time. They are not independent essences but aspects of the whole body of knowledge at a given time, which is developed by human beings in interaction with one another and with nature and is never identical with reality. This also applies to the dialectic itself. It is the sum total of the methods and laws which thought adheres to in order to copy reality as exactly as possible and to correspond as far as possible with the formal principles of real events. What are the characteristics of dialectical thought? It relativizes every many-sided but isolated definition in the consciousness of the alteration of subject and object as well as their relationship. (What results in idealism from a postulated absolute, takes place in materialism on the basis of developing experience.)34 Instead of ranging attributes alongside one another, it seeks to show, by analysis of each general characteristic in respect to the particular object, that this generalization taken by itself simultaneously contradicts the object, and that in order to be properly comprehended it must be related to the contrary property and finally to the whole system of knowledge. From this follows the principle that every insight is to be regarded as true only in connection with the whole body of theory, and hence is so to be understood conceptually that in its formulation the connection with the structural principles and practical tendencies governing the theory is preserved. Bound up with this is the rule that, while maintaining unswerving fidelity to the key ideas and goals and the historical tasks of the epoch, the style of presentation should be 34 In the Phänomenologie (op. cit., p. 36), Hegel himself described the dialect as the “science of experience, which creates consciousness.” Nicolai Hartmann considers this definition as the only authoritative on (e.g. in his essay “Hegel und das Problem der Realdialektik,” published in French translation in the collection Etudes sur Hegel, Paris, 1931, cf. especially pp. 17ff.). In the materialistic interpretation it acquires more fundamental meaning than in Hegelian logic itself, since Hegel’s closed metaphysics rules out, in the future course of history, decisive experience which could change currently valid conceptual structures. To be sure, Hartmann’s contemplative point of view causes him to misunderstand the interaction between concept and object, so that he one-sidedly interprets the dynamic nature of thought as a “subjective law of through” arising from the effort of the subject to follow reality and adapt itself to it. The problem of the changes occurring in praxis in the relationship between the two principles in the course of the historical process is not posed; instead, both are preserved in their isolation.

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characterized more by “as well as” than “either-or.” A basic principle is the inseparability of the regressive and progressive impulses, the preserving and decomposing, the good and bad sides of particular situations in nature and human history. Instead of accepting the legitimate analyses and abstractions of professional science but turning to metaphysics and religion for an understanding of concrete reality, it tries to place the analytically achieved concepts in relation to one another and reconstruct reality through them. These and all the other characteristics of dialectical reason correspond to the form of a complicated reality, constantly changing in all its details. Such very general intellectual laws of motion, which are abstracted from previous history and form the content of dialectical logic in general, seem relatively constant and also extremely empty. But the special dialectical forms of description of a particular subject matter correspond to its characteristics and lose their validity as forms of the theory when their bases change. The critique of political economy comprehends the present form of society. In a purely intellectual construction, the concept of value is derived from the basic general concept of the commodity. From it, Marx develops the categories of money and capital in a closed system; all the historical tendencies of this form of economy—the concentration of capital, the falling rate of profit, unemployment and crises—are placed in relation to this concept and deduced in strict succession. At least in terms of the theoretical intention, a close intellectual relationship should exist between the first and most general concept, whose abstractness is further transcended with every theoretical step, and the unique historical event, in which every thesis necessarily follows from the first postulate, the concept of free exchange of commodities. According to the theoretical intention, whose success will not be examined here, knowledge of all social processes in the economic, political and all other cultural fields will be mediated by that initial cognition. This attempt to carry the theory through to the end in the closed form of an inherently necessary succession of ideas has an objective significance. The theoretical necessity mirrors the real compulsiveness with which the production and reproduction of human life goes on in this epoch, the autonomy which the economic forces have acquired in respect to mankind, the dependence of all social groups on the selfregulation of the economic apparatus. That men cannot shape their labor according to their common will but, under a principle which sets them against one another individually and in groups, produce with their labor not security and freedom but general insecurity and dependence; that they fall into misery, war and destruction instead of using the immeasurably increased social wealth for their happiness, and are the slaves instead of the masters of their fate—this finds expression in the form of logical necessity, proper to the true theory of contemporary society. It would therefore be wrong to think that events in a future society could be deduced according to

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the same principles and with the same necessity as the lines of development of the present one. The meaning of the categories will change along with the structure of the society from which they are drawn and in whose description they play a role. The concept of historical tendency loses the compulsive character that it had in the present historical period, while preserving a relation to the category of natural necessity, which may indeed be narrowed but can never be transcended completely. The concept of the individual will lose the character of an isolated monad and simultaneously the unconditionally central place it has held in the system of thought and feeling in recent centuries at the moment when individual and general goals really coincide and are supported in the whole society, when man no longer merely imagines that he embodies absolute selfdetermination but is in reality a member of a freely self-determining society. With the ending of the situation in which the contradiction between particular and general purposes necessarily follows from the economic structure and the idea that the individualistic principle has been fully transcended rests partly on conscious deception and partly on impotent dreaming, the concept of the I loses its function of controlling the entire relation to the world and acquires another meaning. As long as the life of society flows not from cooperative work but from the destructive competition of individuals whose relationship is essentially conducted through the exchange of commodities, the I, possession, the mine and not-mine play a fundamental role in experience, in speech and thought, in all cultural expressions, characterizing and dominating all particulars in a decisive way. In this period, the world disintegrates into I and not-I as in Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, and one’s own death means absolute annihilation insofar as this relationship is not alleviated by metaphysical or religious faith. Like the categories of tendency and the individual, all other social concepts will be affected by the alteration of reality. The more formal categories such as the lawful nature of society, causality, necessity, science, etc., as well as the more material ones such as value, price, profit, class, family and nation, acquire a different look in the theoretical structures which correspond to a new situation. In traditional logic, this alteration of concepts is interpreted in such a way that the original divisions in the system of classification of a field of knowledge are made more specific by subdivisions. The general concept of tendency then includes the historical tendencies of the present society as well as the possible tendencies of a different sort in a future society. In spite of all historical changes, Aristotle’s definition of the polis—composed of individuals and groups and differing not only quantitatively but qualitatively from its elements—can be absorbed into a supreme formal category of society, valid for all forms of society, and thus preserved in its general validity. For Aristotle himself, slavery belonged to this highest category, while in later conceptual systems it is only one of the subcategories of society, contrasted to other definite types. The conceptual realism which

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dominates Platonic and in part medieval philosophy, and whose remnants have by no means yet been surmounted in modern logic (for instance, in modern phenomenology), has the character of discursive logic. It interprets all changes as mere additions of new subtypes under the universal types, made absolute and subsumed under the metaphysical view that all change is to be understood as the incarnation or emanation of permanent ideas and essences in ever-new particulars and exemplars. Thus, the essential would always remain in the old, there would be an eternal realm of unalterable ideas, and all change would affect only the lower levels of being. Indeed, it would not be genuinely real and would only exist for the dull senses of men. Since the Hegelian system hypostatizes the categories dealt with within its framework, it still preserves something of this realism and falls into the dualism of essence and appearance which it opposed so vigorously. The given fate of historically determined individuals and the changing circumstances of present and future history become null and void in comparison with the ideas which are supposed to underlie the past. The discursive logic of “Understanding” is only limited inside Hegel’s system; in the sense of a metaphysical legend, it retains its reifying power over his philosophy as a whole. The logic of the Understanding abstracts from the fact that in the face of the changed content of concepts, lumping them indiscriminately with those which formerly went under the same headings can become distortion, and a new definition, a new ordering and hierarchy of concepts can become necessary. Perhaps the category of tendency later becomes so restructured as to revolutionize its relation to the concept of systematic purpose on the one hand and that of the power of nature on the other. The concept of the state alters its relation to the categories of will, domination, force, society, etc. Such definite perspectives do not flow from observation of today’s valid system of classification of social phenomena, but from the theory of historical development itself, of which the former is only an ordered, abstract inventory. The connection between the concrete movement of thought, as it develops in constant interrelation with the life of society, and the systems organized by the Understanding, is not examined in detail by traditional logic, which relegates it to a separate discipline as the subject of the history of science or culture. It itself deals with the relations of unchanging concepts: how one passes from one to another judiciously and conclusively and how one develops from each what it contains. Traditional logic is “a science of the necessary laws of thought, without which no use of understanding and reason takes place and which are therefore the conditions under which alone understanding can and should be congruous with itself—the necessary laws and prerequisites of its correct use.”35 Their function is “to make clear concepts

Kant, Logik, edited by Jäsche, Akademie edition, vol. IX, p. 13.

35

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intelligible.”36 This proceeds analytically, drawing out of the concept what is in it. The concept itself “remains the same; only the form is changed. . . . Just as nothing is added to a map itself when it is illuminated, so the lighting up of a concept by the analysis of its characteristics does not expand the concept itself in the least.”37 Traditional logic has nothing to do with the alteration of the “map” and the construction of new systems of classification. But if concepts are used without being strictly tied in to the existing system of reference, in which all previous discoveries of the branch concerned have been arranged, if they are used without that correct reading of the “map” which is required by the laws of logic, every intellectual outline remains blurred, or rather meaningless. The accurate description of the object results from the methodical collaboration of all cognitive forces in the theoretical construction. Aside from the table of contents for this content, which it does not itself produce, “the tabular understanding” also gives conceptual material.38 From time to time “the empirical sciences,” investigation and analysis, “have contradicted the material” of the dialectical description “in finding general uniformities, classifications, and laws.”39 The real significance of this work, the cognitive value of understanding, rests on the fact that reality knows not only constant change but also relatively static structures. Because development proceeds not gradually but in leaps, there are between these junctures, leaps and revolutions periods in which the tensions and contradictions trying to break through appear as elements of a relatively closed and fixed totality, until the particular form of being turns into another. This determinate and organized state is therefore a necessary condition of truth but not its real form, movement and progress. Thus, traditional logic is inadequate for, and comprehends only individual aspects of, the historically conditioned alteration of the fundamental categories and every thought process about the subject matter. Since a concept plays a determinate role in the dialectical construction of an event, it becomes a non-autonomous aspect of a conceptual whole which has other qualities than the sum of all the concepts included in it. This whole, the construction of the particular object, can indeed only come into existence in a way appropriate to the existing knowledge if the concepts are interpreted in the sense that belongs to them in the systems of the individual sciences, in the systematic inventory of scientifically based definitions, insofar as it is a question of concepts for which special branches of science exist. In Capital, Marx introduces the basic concepts of classical English political economy—value, price, labor-time etc.—in accordance with their precise Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 64. 38 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, op. cit., p. 50. 39 Hegel, Enzyklopädie, #12. 36 37

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definitions. All the most progressive definitions drawn from scientific practice at that time are employed. Nevertheless, these categories acquire new functions in the course of the presentation. They contribute to a theoretical whole, the character of which contradicts the static views in connection with which they came into being, in particular their uncritical use in isolation. Materialist economics as a whole is placed in opposition to the classical system, yet individual concepts are taken over. The dialectical forms of the movement of thought show themselves to be the same as those of reality. A hydrogen atom observed in isolation has its specific characteristics, acquires new ones in molecular combination with other elements, and displays the old ones again as soon as it is freed from the combination. Concepts behave in the same way; considered individually, they preserve their definitions, while in combination they become aspects of new units of meaning.40 The movement of reality is mirrored in the “fluidity” of concepts. The open-ended materialistic dialectic does not regard the “rational” as completed at any point in history and does not expect to bring about the resolution of contradictions and tensions, the end of the historic dynamic, by the full development of mere ideas and their simple consequences. It lacks the aspect of the idealistic dialectic which Hegel described as “speculative” and at the same time as “mystical,” namely, the idea of knowing the ostensibly unconditioned and thereby being oneself unconditioned.41 It does not hypostatize any such universal system of categories. To attain the “positively rational,” it does not suffice to resolve and transcend contradictions in thought. It requires the historical struggle whose guiding ideas and theoretical prerequisites are indeed given in the consciousness of the combatants. But the outcome cannot be predicted on a purely theoretical basis. It will be determined, not by any firmly outlined unity such as the “course of history,” the principles of which could be established indivisibly for all time, but by human beings interacting with one another and with nature, who enter into new relationships and structures and thereby change themselves. The resolution of contradictions in subjective thought and the overcoming of objective antagonisms can be closely intertwined, but they are in no way identical. In a particular historical period, a free society in the sense of the free development of the individual and in the sense of free enterprise on the basis of inequality will be conceptually and actually full of contradictions. The resolution in terms of ideas occurs through the concept of a differentiated higher form of freedom. It has a decisive voice in the real overcoming, but in no way coincides with it and predicts the future only abstractly and inexactly. Since the logic of the open-ended dialectic allows for the possibility that change will affect the entire present content of the Cf. “Zum Rationalismus streit in der gegenwärtigen Philosophie,” p. 141 supra. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, # 82, appendix.

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categories, without therefore considering the theory formed from it as any less true, it corresponds exactly to the Hegelian conception of the difference between dialectic and understanding without overlaying it with a new dogmatism. “The intelligible exists in concepts in their fixed definition and differentiation from others; the dialectical shows them in their change and disintegration.”42 To be sure, the first is immanent in the second; without the definition and organization of concepts, without understanding, there is no thought and also no dialectic. But the understanding becomes metaphysical as soon as it absolutizes its function of preserving and expanding existing knowledge, of confirming, organizing and drawing conclusions from it, or the results of that function as the existence and progress of truth. The revolutionizing, disintegration and restructuring of knowledge, its changing relation to reality, its changes of function resulting from its intertwinement with history, fall outside the thought processes which traditional logic, whose theme is understanding, comprehends. Taken by itself, it leads to the erroneous concept of a detached thought with fixed, eternal and autonomous results. Nietzsche said that a great truth “wants to be criticized, not worshipped.”43 This is valid for truth in general. He might have added that criticism includes not only the negative and skeptical impulse but also the inner independence not to let the truth fall but to remain firm in its application even if it may sometime pass away. In the individual, the process of cognition includes not only intelligence but also character; for a group, not merely adaptation to changing reality but the strength to declare and put into practice its own views and ideas. The initially discussed division in the bourgeois spirit with regard to truth, in contrast to dialectical thought, finds especially clear expression in the attitude toward religion. In the face of the primitive materialism which dominates economic life, it has become more and more internalized. The practice of general competition which characterizes contemporary reality was pitiless from the beginning, and with the exception of a few periods, has become increasingly inhuman. Its means and consequences, which at particular historical moments have led to domination by small economic groups, the abandonment of power to the most culturally backward elements of society, and the extermination of minorities, notoriously contradict the basic teachings of Christianity. In a period in which, despite great resistance, reading and writing had to become common skills for economic reasons, and the contents of the Bible could not remain a permanent secret from the masses, it had long been inevitable that the opposing principle of Christianity would be openly sacrificed to reality, and the vulgar positivism of bare facts along with the worship of success, immanent in this life-style, propagated as the exclusive and highest truth. Hegel, Philosophische Propädeutik, #12. Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, Musarion edition, vol. XI, p. 15.

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But the gross contradiction that existed was really understood within the bourgeoisie only by religious outsiders such as Kierkegaard and Tolstoi. The monistic propaganda of Strauss and Haeckel, who proclaimed it on the basis of scientific research, saw only the difference which it implied between natural science by itself and revelation and misunderstood both the spirit of the Gospels and historical reality. These materialists on the basis of natural science had to remain sectarians, for religion was indispensable for the social groups to which they belonged. The predominant intellectual attitude in recent centuries was not that of exposing the split. Instead, religion was so robbed of any clear and definite content, formalized, adapted, spiritualized, relegated to the innermost subjectivity, that it was compatible with every activity and every public practice that existed in this atheistic reality. Since individuals began to think more independently, that is, since the rise of the new economic order, philosophy in all fields has ever more clearly fulfilled the function of erasing the contradiction between the dominant way of life and Christian or Christian-oriented theoretical and practical doctrines and ideas. The reason for this coincides with the root of bourgeois dogmatism in general. The isolated individual, who is simultaneously regarded as free and responsible, is in the present epoch necessarily dominated by anxiety and uncertainty. In addition to this inner need, which is directly grounded in the atomistic principles of the existing order, the external concern for social peace has led to great efforts to gloss over the irreconcilability of modern science and the way people conduct their lives with the religious views on the origin and structure of the world as well as the ideas of love for one’s neighbor, justice and the goodness of God. Troeltsch, a typical philosopher of religion in prewar Germany, openly states what he fears: To anyone even moderately acquainted with human beings, it will be inconceivable that divine authority could ever disappear without damage to the moral law, that the generally coarse-thinking average man could do without this supplement to the motivation of morality. The abstraction of a self-validating law will be forever unrealizable for him; in connection with law, he will always have to think of the lawgiver and watcher. He may think of this a bit coarsely, but not so irrationally. . . . Where atheistic morality has undone divine authority among the masses, experience shows that there is little sense of that law left. A fierce hatred of all authority and an unbounded unchaining of selfishness as the most obvious thing in the world has been, with few exceptions, the easily comprehensible logical consequence.44 Troeltsch, “Zur Religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Tübingen 1922, vol. II, p. 535.

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A social situation in which there would be no “watcher,” either in the form of a transcendent being or “a self-validating law,” to hold the “unbounded” selfishness of the masses in check, is something he cannot conceive of. Dogmatic adherence to the inherited conceptual world seems to him a selfevident proposition, a thema probandum. Nevertheless, he also sees that the Protestant-confessional axiom must be self-revised and more freely interpreted; that its accomplishments must find a broader, more general basis and make themselves far more independent of immediate clerical reality; that its style must leave room for detailed historical research and the definitive results of natural science, and be constantly prepared for new revisions on the basis of this work. Indeed, the possibility exists that eventually Christianity itself will cease to be axiomatic.45 The axioms to which earlier liberal theology could reach back have meanwhile been overturned. “Kant and Schleiermacher, Goethe and Hegel, still lived under the influence of an axiomatic validation which no longer exists.”46 He therefore recommends resorting to Kant’s critical philosophy “which undertakes to discover the ultimate presuppositions in the organization of consciousness instead of metaphysics.”47 He seeks refuge in a “critique of religious consciousness”48 and hopes to find a firm footing through a general theory of religion and its historical development. But this theory itself would have to be rooted in a transcendental theory of consciousness and to answer, from this ultimate basis of all scientific thinking, this ultimate and correct presupposition, two questions: the question of the justification of religion in general, and that of the difference in value between its historical forms. Theology is thereby referred to the philosophy of religion. On this basis only will it be able so to construe the essence and validity of Christianity as to satisfy the modern spirit of taking nothing for granted. The ultimate presuppositions lie in the philosophy of transcendentalism. . . .49 According to this, the “justification of religion in general” and even the advantages of Christianity are still the question, and the whole uncertainty, the relativistic readiness for concessions not to the selfishness of the masses but to ostensibly non-axiomatic science, becomes clear. Only one thing is Ibid., pp. 190ff. Ibid. 47 Ibid., pp. 191ff. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 45 46

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preserved at any cost: “In all change there must be a permanent truth. This is a requirement of that ideal faith, to renounce which would be to renounce the meaning of the world.”50 If this so necessary faith only remains attached to an eternal meaning, one can come to terms with idealistic philosophy, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Brahmin and Buddhist ideas of salvation.51 This ambiguous relationship to religion characterizes the whole period, and only finds a particularly clear ideological expression in phenomena like Troeltsch. It is an aspect of the objective dishonesty which, despite the good conscience of the participants, dominated the spiritual atmosphere. If one looks closely at previous history, the fact that in many areas of public discussion the crude and obvious lie is now treated with honor represents no incomprehensible change. The situation of the bourgeoisie has resulted in the setting aside of intellectual development in moral and religious questions and the keeping in twilight of central areas, as if by tacit agreement. The religious philosophy of the middle ages outlines the spiritual horizon which corresponded to society at the time. Its most important results therefore form historical evidence of obvious greatness. Since the irreligion immanent in modern natural science and technology, these specifically bourgeois achievements, has found no corresponding place in the general consciousness, and the conflicts that this involves have not been arbitrated, official spirituality is characterized by hypocrisy and indulgence toward particular forms of error and injustice, and this has eventually spread over the cultural life of entire peoples. The only great spirit who, in the face of the gross thickening of this fog which has taken place since the middle of the last century, has achieved the freedom from illusion and the comprehensive view which are possible from the standpoint of the big bourgeoisie, is Nietzsche. It must indeed have escaped him that the intellectual honesty with which he was concerned did not fit in with this social standpoint. The reason for the foulness against which he fought lies neither in individual nor national character, but in the structure of society as a whole, which includes both. Since as a true bourgeois philosopher he made psychology, even if the most profound that exists today, the fundamental science of history, he misunderstood the origin of spiritual decay and the way out, and the fate which befell his own work was therefore inevitable. (“Who among my friends would have seen more in it than an impermissible presumption, completely indifferent to happiness?”)52 The philosophically mediated dishonesty in questions of religion cannot be eliminated by psychological or other explanations. Whereas Nietzsche makes the religious question and Christian morality negatively central and thereby makes an ideologue of himself, this aspect of the existing situation also can Ibid., p. 311. Cf. ibid., p. 802. 52 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Gesammelte Werke, Musarion edition, vol. XXI, p. 275. 50 51

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only be eliminated by transcending it through higher forms of society. In dialectical thought, religious phenomena too are related to knowledge as a whole and judged at any given time in connection with the analysis of the whole historical situation. As important as it is to see the incompatibility of the religious content with advanced knowledge, the present shows that making religious questions central to the whole cultural problem can be foolish. One can find more penetrating analysis of bourgeois society in the literature of the Catholic counterrevolution in France, in Bonald and de Maistre and the writings of the Catholic royalist Balzac, than in the critics of religion in Germany at the same period. The devout Victor Hugo and Tolstoi have more nobly depicted and more vigorously fought the horrors of existing conditions than the enlightened Gutzkow and Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In the practical questions of daily life, efforts guided by dialectical thought can lead to temporary collaboration with religiously motivated groups and tendencies and radical opposition to anti-religious ones. The complex of historical tasks which is decisive for an illusion-free and progressive attitude today does not divide people primarily on the basis of their religious preference. Groups and individuals may be characterized more quickly today on the basis of their particular interest (theoretically explicable, to be sure) or lack of interest in just conditions which promote the free development of human beings, in the abolition of conditions of oppression which are dangerous to and unworthy of mankind, than by their relation to religion. It follows from the differing cultural levels of social groups, the miserable state of education on social problems, and other factors, that religion can mean altogether different things for different classes and different ways of life. It requires not merely experience and theoretical education but a particular fate in society to avoid either inflating thought into the creation of idols or devaluing it as the sum total of mere illusions, making it an absolute lawgiver and unambiguous guide for action, or separating it from the practical goals and tasks with which it interacts. It is a utopian illusion to expect that the strength to live with the sober truth will become general until the causes of untruth are removed.

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CHAPTER FOUR

“A Note on Dialectic” Herbert Marcuse “A Note on Dialectic” was published in 1960 as the Preface to the Beacon Press paperback edition of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (first published in 1941). The book was dedicated to Max Horkheimer and the Institute of Social Research. In the original Preface, Marcuse wrote “[i]n our time, the rise of Fascism calls for a reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. We hope that the analysis offered here will demonstate that Hegel’s basic concepts are hostile to the tendencies that have led into Fascist theory and practice.”1 At eight pages, “A Note on Dialectic” really is just a note. But it is a lovely distillation of the nature of critical theory. Here, Marcuse emphasizes the negative aspect of thinking about potentiality. Reason and Revolution, he says, was written not to revive Hegel, but to revive “a mental faculty which is in danger of being obliterated: the power of negative thinking. As Hegel defines it: ‘Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.’” The problem confronting anyone who wants to think critically is this, as Marcuse explains it: present circumstances always include conceptual frameworks and attendant philosophical vocabularies for grasping those same circumstances. The mode of thought internal to any given present functions to legitimate that present by establishing it, along with its characteristic cognitive forms, as unremarkable fact. The challenge, therefore, is how to use thought to call the present, including the present mode of thought itself, into question. The impetus for doing so in the current present, Marcuse says, is the manifest suffering caused by the non-rational production relations of capitalism. For materialists, the “negation of that which is immediately before us” will apply not just to patterns of cognition, but also to the patterns of social relation in which they are embedded. Thus the task of “calling Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, “Preface to the Original Edition” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. xv.

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into question” is not just an abstract one, amounting to a transformation of self-understanding at the level of thought, but a concrete one, involving the effort to create a free and rationally self-determined society. The existence of such a society would not put an end to critical thought. On the contrary, critical thought would be likely to play a direct role in maintaining such a present.

“A Note on Dialectic” This book was written in the hope that it would make a small contribution to the revival, not of Hegel, but of a mental faculty which is in danger of being obliterated: the power of negative thinking. As Hegel defines it: “Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.” What does he mean by “negation,” the central category of dialectic? Even Hegel’s most abstract and metaphysical concepts are saturated with experience—experience of a world in which the unreasonable becomes reasonable and, as such, determines the facts; in which unfreedom is the condition of freedom, and war the guarantor of peace. This world contradiction itself. Common sense and science purge themselves from this contradiction; but philosophical thought begins with the recognition that the facts do not correspond to the concepts imposed by common sense and scientific reason—in short, with the refusal to accept them. To the extent that these concepts disregard the fatal contradictions which make up reality, they abstract from the very process of reality. The negation which dialectic applies to them is not only a critique of a conformistic logic, which denies the reality of contradictions; it is also a critique of the given state of affairs on its own grounds—of the established system of life, which denies its own promises and potentialities. Today, this dialectical mode of thought is alien to the whole established universe of discourse and action. It seems to belong to the past and to be rebutted by the achievements of technological civilization. The established reality seems promising and productive enough to repel or absorb all alternatives. Thus acceptance—and even affirmation—of this reality appears to be the only reasonable methodological principle. Moreover, it precludes neither criticism nor change; on the contrary, insistence on the dynamic character of the status quo, on its constant “revolutions,” is one of the strongest props for this attitude. Yet this dynamic seems to operate endlessly within the same framework of life: streamlining rather than abolishing the domination of man, both by man and by the products of his labor. Progress becomes quantitative and tends to delay indefinitely the turn

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from quantity to quality—that is, the emergence of new modes of existence with new forms of reason and freedom. The power of negative thinking is the driving power of dialectical thought, used as a tool for analyzing the world of facts in terms of its internal inadequacy. I choose this vague and unscientific formulation in order to sharpen the contrast between dialectical and undialectical thinking. “Inadequacy” implies a value judgment. Dialectical thought invalidates the a priori opposition of value and fact by understanding all facts as stages of a single process—a process in which subject and object are so joined that truth can be determined only within the subject-object totality. All facts embody the knower as well as the doer; they continuously translate the past into the present. The objects thus “contain” subjectivity in their very structure. Now what (or who) is this subjectivity that, in a literal sense, constitutes the objective world? Hegel answers with a series of terms denoting the subject in its various manifestations: Thought, Reason, Spirit, Idea. Since we no longer have that fluent access to these concepts which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still had, I shall try to sketch Hegel’s conception in more familiar terms: Nothing is “real” which does not sustain itself in existence, in a lifeand-death struggle with the situations and conditions of its existence. The struggle may be blind or even unconscious, as in inorganic matter; it may be conscious and concerted, such as the struggle of mankind with its own conditions and with those of nature. Reality is the constantly renewed result of the process of existence—the process, conscious or unconscious in which “that which is” becomes “other than itself”; and identity is only the continuous negation of inadequate existence, the subject maintaining itself in being other than itself. Each reality, therefore, is a realization—a development of “subjectivity.” The latter “comes to itself” in history, where the development has a rational content; Hegel defines it as “progress in the consciousness of freedom.” Again a value judgment—and this time a value judgment imposed upon the world as a whole. But freedom is for Hegel an ontological category: it means being not a mere object, but the subject of one’s existence; not succumbing to external conditions, but transforming factuality into realization. This transformation is, according to Hegel, the energy of nature and history, the inner structure of all being! One may be tempted to scoff at this idea, but one should be aware of its implications. Dialectical thought starts with the experience that the world is unfree; that is to say, man and nature exist in conditions of alienation, exist as “other than they are.” Any mode of thought which excludes this contradiction from its logic is a faulty logic. Thought “corresponds” to reality only as it transforms reality by comprehending its contradictory structure. Here the principle of dialectic drives thought beyond the limits of philosophy. For to comprehend reality means to comprehend what things really are, and

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this in turn means rejecting their mere factuality. Rejection is the process of thought as well as of action. While the scientific method leads from the immediate experience of things to their mathematical-logical structure, philosophical thought leads from the immediate experience of existence to its historical structure: the principle of freedom. Freedom is the innermost dynamic of existence, and the very process of existence in an unfree world is “the continuous negation of that which threatens to deny (aufheben) freedom.” Thus freedom is essentially negative: existence is both alienation and the process by which the subject comes to itself in comprehending and mastering alienation. For the history of mankind, this means attainment of a “state of the world” in which the individual persists in inseparable harmony with the whole, and in which the conditions and relations of his world “possess no essential objectivity independent of the individual”. As to the prospect of attaining such a state, Hegel was pessimistic: the element of reconciliation with the established state of affairs, so strong in his work, seems to a great extent due to this pessimism—or, if one prefers, this realism. Freedom is relegated to the realm of pure thought, to the Absolute Idea. Idealism by default: Hegel shares this fate with the main philosophical tradition. Dialectical thought thus becomes negative in itself. Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense, to undermine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts, to demonstrate that unfreedom is so much at the core of things that the development of their internal contradictions leads necessarily to qualitative change: the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs. Hegel sees the task of knowledge as that of recognizing the world as Reason by understanding all objects of thought as elements and aspects of a totality which becomes a conscious world in the history of mankind. Dialectical analysis ultimately tends to become historical analysis, in which nature itself appears as part and stage in its own history and in the history of man. The progress of cognition from common sense to knowledge arrives at a world which is negative in its very structure because that which is real opposes and denies the potentialities inherent in itself—potentialities which themselves strive for realization. Reason is the negation of the negative. Interpretation of that-which-is in terms of that-which-is-not, confrontation of the given facts with that which they exclude—this has been the concern of philosophy wherever philosophy was more than a matter of ideological justification or mental exercise. The liberating function of negation in philosophical thought depends upon the recognition that the negation is a positive act: that-which-is repels that-which is-not and, in doing so, repels its own real possibilities. Consequently, to express and define that-which-is on its own terms is to distort and falsify reality. Reality is other and more than that codified in the logic and language of facts. Here is the inner link between dialectical thought and the effort of avant-garde

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literature: the effort to break the power of facts over the word, and to speak a language which is not the language of those who establish, enforce and benefit from the facts. As the power of the given facts tends to become totalitarian, to absorb all opposition and to define the entire universe of discourse, the effort to speak the language of contradiction appears increasingly irrational, obscure, artificial. The question is not that of a direct or indirect influence of Hegel on the genuine avant-garde, though this is evident in Mallarmé and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, in surrealism, in Brecht. Dialectic and poetic language meet, rather, on common ground. The common element is the search for an “authentic language”—the language of negation as the Great Refusal to accept the rules of a game in which the dice are loaded. The absent must be made present because the greater part of the truth is in that which is absent. This is Mallarmé’s classical statement: Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relégue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets. I say: a flower! and, out of the oblivion where my voice banishes all contours, musically rises, different from every known blossom, the one absent from all bouquets—Idea itself and delicate. In the authentic language, the word n’est pas l’expression d’une chose, mais l’absence de cette chose. . . . Le mot fait disparaître les choses et nous impose le sentiment d’un manque universel et même de son propre manque.1 is not the expression of a thing, but rather the absence of this thing. . . . The word makes the things disappear and imposes upon us the feeling of a universal want and even of its own want. Poetry is thus the power “de nier les choses” (to deny the things)—the power which Hegel claims, paradoxically, for all authentic thought. Valéry asserts: La pensée est, en somme, le travail qui fait vivre en nous ce qui n’existe pas.2 In short, thought is the labor which brings to life in us that which does not exist. 1 2

Maurice Blanchot, “Le Paradoxe d’Aytre,” Les Temps Modernes, June 1946, p. 1580ff. Oeuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, vol. I, p. 1333.

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He asks the rhetorical question: “que sommes-nous donc sans le secours de ce qui n’existe pas?”3 (What are we without the help of that which does not exist?) This is not “existentialism.” It is something more vital and more desperate: the effort to contradict a reality in which all logic and all speech are false to the extent that they are part of a mutilated whole. The vocabulary and grammar of the language of contradiction are still those of the game (there are no others), but the concepts codified in the language of the games are redefined by relating them to their “determinate negation”. This term, which denotes the governing principle of dialectical thought, can be explained only in a textual interpretation of Hegel’s Logic. Here it must suffice to emphasize that, by virtue of this principle, the dialectical contradiction is distinguished from all pseudo- and crackpot opposition, beatnik and hipsterism. The negation is determinate if it refers the established state of affairs to the basic factors and forces which make for its destructiveness, as well as for the possible alternatives beyond the status quo. In the human reality, they are historical factors and forces, and the determinate negation is ultimately a political negation. As such, it may well find authentic expression in nonpolitical language, and the more so as the entire dimension of politics becomes an integral part of the status quo. Dialectical logic is critical logic: it reveals modes and contents of thought which transcend the codified pattern of use and validation. Dialectical thought does not invent these contents; they have accrued to the notions in the long tradition of thought and action. Dialectical analysis merely assembles and reactivates them; it recovers tabooed meanings and thus appears almost as a return, or rather a conscious liberation, of the repressed! Since the established universe of discourse is that of an unfree world, dialectical thought is necessarily destructive, and whatever liberation it may bring is a liberation in thought, in theory. However, the divorce of thought from action, of theory from practice, is itself part of the unfree world. No thought and no theory can undo it; but theory may help to prepare the ground for their possible reunion, and the ability of thought to develop a logic and language of contradiction is a prerequisite for this task. In what, then, lies the power of negative thinking? Dialectical thought has not hindered Hegel from developing his philosophy into a neat and comprehensive system which, in the end, accentuates the positive emphatically. I believe it is the idea of Reason itself which is the undialectical element in Hegel’s philosophy. This idea of Reason comprehends everything and ultimately absolves everything, because it has its place and

Ibid., p. 966.

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function in the whole, and the whole is beyond good and evil, truth and falsehood. It may even be justifiable, logically as well as historically, to define Reason in terms which include slavery, the Inquisition, child labor, concentration camps, gas chambers and nuclear preparedness. These may well have been integral parts of that rationality which has governed the recorded history of mankind. If so, the idea of Reason itself is at stake; it reveals itself as a part rather than as the whole. This does not mean that Reason abdicates its claim to confront reality with the truth about reality. On the contrary, when Marxian theory takes shape as a critique of Hegel’s philosophy, it does so in the name of Reason. It is consonant with the innermost effort of Hegel’s thought if his own philosophy is “cancelled,” not by substituting for Reason some extrarational standards, but by driving Reason itself to recognize the extent to which it is still unreasonable, blind, the victim of unmastered forces. Reason, as the developing and applied knowledge of man—as “free thought”—was instrumental in creating the world we live in. It was also instrumental in sustaining injustice, toil, and suffering. But Reason, and Reason alone, contains its own corrective. In the Logic, which forms the first part of his System of Philosophy, Hegel anticipates almost literally Wagner’s Parsifal message: “the hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand that heals it.”4 The context is the biblical story of the Fall of Man. Knowledge may have caused the wound in the existence of man, the crime and the guilt; but the second innocence, the “second harmony,” can be gained only from knowledge. Redemption can never be the work of a “guileless fool.” Against the various obscurantists who insist on the right of the irrational versus Reason, on the truth of the natural versus intellect, Hegel inseparably links progress in freedom to progress in thought, action to theory. Since he accepted the specific historical form of Reason reached at his time as the reality of Reason, the advance beyond this form of Reason must be an advance of Reason itself; and since the adjustment of Reason to oppressive social institutions perpetuated unfreedom, progress in freedom depends on thought becoming political, in the shape of a theory which demonstrates negation as a political alternative implicit in the historical situation. Marx’s materialistic “subversion” of Hegel, therefore, was not a shift from one philosophical position to another nor from philosophy to social theory, but rather a recognition that the established forms of life were reaching the stage of their historical negation. This historical stage has changed the situation of philosophy and of all cognitive thought. From this stage on, all thinking that does not testify to an awareness of the radical falsity of the established forms

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The Logic of Hegel, trans. W. Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1895, p. 55.

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of life is faulty thinking. Abstraction from this all-pervasive condition is not merely immoral; it is false. For reality has become technological reality, and the subject is now joined with the object so closely that the notion of object necessarily includes the subject. Abstraction from their interrelation no longer leads to a more genuine reality but to deception, because even in this sphere the subject itself is apparently a constitutive part of the object as scientifically determined. The observing, measuring, calculating subject of scientific method, and the subject of the daily business of life—both are expressions of the same subjectivity: man. One did not have to wait for Hiroshima in order to have one’s eyes opened to this identity. And as always before, the subject that has conquered matter suffers under the dead weight of his conquest. Those who enforce and direct this conquest have used it to create a world in which the increasing comforts of life and the ubiquitous power of the productive apparatus keep man enslaved to the prevailing state of affairs. Those social groups which dialectical theory identified as the forces of negation are either defeated or reconciled with the established system. Before the power of the given facts, the power of negative thinking stands condemned. This power of facts is an oppressive power; it is the power of man over man, appearing as objective and rational condition. Against this appearance, thought continues to protest in the name of truth. And in the name of fact: for it is the supreme and universal fact that the status quo perpetuates itself through the constant threat of atomic destruction, through the unprecedented waste of resources, through mental impoverishment, and—last but not least—through brute force. These are the unresolved contradictions. They define every single fact and every single event; they permeate the entire universe of discourse and action. Thus they define also the logic of things: that is, the mode of thought capable of piercing the ideology and of comprehending reality whole. No method can claim a monopoly of cognition, but no method seems authentic which does not recognize that these two propositions are meaningful descriptions of our situation: “The whole is the truth,” and the whole is false.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Negative Dialectics, selections Theodor Adorno

Negative Dialectics was published in 1966. Lectures that Adorno gave in the years leading up to its publication are now available in English, released as a number of separate volumes. While readers may find the volume entitled Lectures on Negative Dialectics to be of interest, the material that reappears in Negative Dialectics figures most centrally in three other volumes, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Problems of Moral Philosophy and, to a certain extent, History and Freedom.1 (There are additional volumes in the series, all of which are relevant to one degree or another.) Negative Dialectics is notoriously difficult to understand if one does not already know what Adorno means to say. The lectures, by contrast, contain repeated statements such as: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I fear that I confused you last time. Let me try to clarify what I said.” I cannot recommend the three that I’ve pointed to highly enough, as a place to begin a study of Adorno’s work. The following snippets from Negative Dialectics offer just a hint of Adorno’s thinking about thought. The opening line of the Introduction— “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed”—echoes Marcuse’s question, posed decades before in “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” regarding the role of reason in an irrational society: “What, however, if the development outlined by the Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/66, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008); Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schroder, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); (Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-65, ed. Thomas Schroder, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006).

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theory does not occur?” Adorno replies that, at a minimum, “[t]he summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried.” But while Adorno too retains a role for reason, his assessment of what Marcuse in 1960 called “the power of negative thinking” is considerably more pained than is Marcuse’s. Adorno is concerned that thought is inherently problematic. Not just in the sense described by Marcuse in “A Note on Dialectic” (viz., that given forms of thought are always already implicated in existing relations of power, such that in a context of reification one must literally, or at least almost literally, find a way to think outside the box), but more deeply still. Kant had argued that phenomenal objects are constituted as objects (i.e. as material entities that can be experienced) via what he, Kant, called the unity of apperception, an a priori synthesis carried out by the faculty of pure reason. On the one hand, Adorno is resistant to this account. For one thing, what Kant took to be the doings of a transcendental subject, Adorno assumes to be society itself (see “Subject and Object”). Beyond this, Adorno at least wants to say that objects have their own being, separate from the cognitive acts of subjects. On the other hand, Adorno is not prepared to simply reject the crux of Kant’s position. Every act of thought, he insists, imposes the structure of subjectivity upon the object-as-cognized, even if thought and the object of thought are not thereby brought into a relation of equivalence, or identity. It follows for Adorno that critical thought amounts, above all, to appreciating, via thought, that thought necessarily does an injustice, if not a violence, to the objects of thought. “[W]e can think against our thought,” he writes, and if it were possible to define dialectics, this would be a definition worth suggesting. This said, negative dialectics as Adorno conceives of it is not simply an ex post facto fallibilism. Rather, it is the recognition of the fact (if it is one) that it is impossible to capture, in thought, the unmediated nature of an object of thought. For Adorno, this is because what the inescapable imposition of subjectivity upon objects of thought does to them is obscure their particularity. If the negative task of critical thought is to register, without falling into nihilism, that ultimately no thought can be true (in the sense of being adequate to its object), the positive epistemic task is to attempt to get beyond what Adorno takes to be the inherent universality of thought, so as to catch a glimpse of the particular.

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Negative Dialectics, selections Introduction The possibility of philosophy Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. Philosophy offers no place from which theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is suspected of, now as before. Perhaps it was an inadequate interpretation which promised that it would be put into practice. Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require. Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself. Once upon a time, compared with sense perception and every kind of external experience, it was felt to be the very opposite of naïveté; now it has objectively grown as naïve in its turn as the seedy scholars feasting on subjective speculation seemed to Goethe, one hundred and fifty years ago. The introverted thought architect dwells behind the moon that is taken over by extroverted technicians. The conceptual shells that were to house the whole, according to philosophical custom, have in view of the immense expansion of society and of the strides made by positive natural science come to seem like relics of a simple barter economy amidst the late stage of industrial capitalism. The discrepancy (since decayed into a commonplace) between power and any sort of spirit has grown so vast as to foil whatever attempts to understand the preponderance might be inspired by the spirit’s own concept. The will to this understanding bespeaks a power claim denied by that which is to be understood. The most patent expression of philosophy’s historical fate is the way the special sciences compelled it to turn back into a special science. If Kant had, as he put it, “freed himself from the school concept of philosophy for its world concept,”1 it has now, perforce, regressed to its school concept. Whenever philosophers mistake that for the world concept, their Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd edn, Works III (Drittes Hauptstück der Transzendentalen Methodenlehre)—Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan Co., New York 1929.

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pretensions grow ridiculous. Hegel, despite his doctrine of the absolute spirit in which he included philosophy, knew philosophy as a mere element of reality, an activity in the division of labor, and thus restricted it. This has since led to the narrowness of philosophy, to a disproportionateness to reality that became the more marked the more thoroughly philosophers forgot about the restriction—the more they disdained, as alien, any thought of their position in a whole which they monopolized as their object, instead of recognizing how much they depended on it all the way to the internal composition of their philosophy, to its immanent truth. To be worth another thought, philosophy must rid itself of such naïveté. But its critical self-reflection must not halt before the highest peaks of its history. Its task would be to inquire whether and how there can still be a philosophy at all, now that Hegel’s has fallen, just as Kant inquired into the possibility of metaphysics after the critique of rationalism. If Hegel’s dialectics constituted the unsuccessful attempt to use philosophical concepts for coping with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts, the relationship to dialectics is due for an accounting insofar as his attempt failed.

Dialectics not a standpoint No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising. But neither need dialectics be muted by such rebuke, or by the concomitant charge of its superfluity, of being a method slapped on outwardly, at random. The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of thought entwine. The semblance cannot be decreed away, as by avowal of a beingin-itself outside the totality of cogitative definitions. It is a thesis secretly implied by Kant—and mobilized against him by Hegel—that the transconceptual “in itself” is void, being wholly indefinite. Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs

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in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. As the heterogeneous collides with its limit it exceeds itself. Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking. We are blaming the method for the fault of the matter when we object to dialectics on the ground (repeated from Hegel’s Aristotelian critics on2) that whatever happens to come into the dialectical mill will be reduced to the merely logical form of contradiction, and that (an argument still advanced by Croce3) the full diversity of the noncontradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, will be ignored. What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its demand for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical with it. This is what dialectics holds up to our consciousness as a contradiction. Because of the immanent nature of consciousness, contradictoriness itself has an inescapably and fatefully legal character. Identity and contradiction of thought are welded together. Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification. Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well. ****

Fragility of truth The dismantling of systems, and of the system at large, is not an act of formal epistemology. What the system used to procure for the details can be sought in the details only, without advance assurance to the thought: whether it is there, or what it is. Not until then would the steadily misused word of “truth as concreteness” come into its own. It compels our thinking to abide with minutiae. We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things. But if we surrender to the specific object we are suspected of lacking an unequivocal position. What differs from the existent will strike the existent as witchcraft, while thought figures such as proximity, home, security hold the faulty world under their spell. Men are afraid that in losing this magic they would lose everything, because the only happiness they know, even in thought, is to be able to hold on to something—the perpetuation of unfreedom. They want a bit of Cf. F. A.Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. I, Leipzig 1870, pp. 43ff., 167ff. Cf. Benedetto Croce, Lebendiges und Totes in Hegels Philosophie, trans. K. Büchler, Heidelberg 1909, pp. 66ff., 68ff., 72ff., 82ff.

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ontology, at least, amidst their criticism of ontology—as if the smallest free insight did not express the goal better than a declaration of intention that is not followed up. Philosophy serves to bear out an experience which Schoenberg noted in traditional musicology: one really learns from it only how a movement begins and ends, nothing about the movement itself and its course. Analogously, instead of reducing philosophy to categories, one would in a sense have to compose it first. Its course must be a ceaseless self-renewal, by its own strength as well as in friction with whatever standard it may have. The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or a position—the texture, not the deductive or inductive course of one-track minds. Essentially, therefore, philosophy is not expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous; the fact that most of it can be expounded speaks against it. But if a mode of conduct shields no primacy, harbors no certainty, and yet—because of its definite presentation, if on no other grounds—concedes so little to relativism, the twin of absolutism, that it approaches a doctrine, such a mode will give offense. It goes beyond, and to the point of breaking with, the dialectics of Hegel, who wanted his dialectics to be all things, including prima philosophia, and in fact made it that in his principle of identity, his absolute subject. By dissociating thought from primacy and solidity, however, we do not absolutize it as in free suspense. The very dissociation fastens it to that which it is not. It removes the illusion of the autarky of thought. The falsehood of an unleashed rationality running away from itself, the recoil of enlightenment into mythology, is rationally definable. To think means to think something. By itself, the logically abstract form of “something,” something that is meant or judged, does not claim to posit a being; and yet, surviving in it—indelible for a thinking that would delete it—is that which is not identical with thinking, which is not thinking at all. The ratio becomes irrational where it forgets this, where it runs counter to the meaning of thought by hypostasizing its products, the abstractions. The commandment of its autarky condemns thinking to emptiness, and finally to stupidity and primitivity. The charge of bottomlessness should be lodged against the self-preserving mental principle as the sphere of absolute origins; but where ontology, Heidegger in the lead, hits upon bottomlessness—there is the place of truth. Truth is suspended and frail, due to its temporal substance; Benjamin sharply criticized Gottfried Keller’s arch-bourgeois dictum that the truth can’t run away from us. Philosophy must do without the consolation that truth cannot be lost. A truth that cannot plunge into the abyss which the metaphysical fundamentalists prate about—it is not the abyss of agile sophistry, but that of madness—will at the bidding of its certainty principle turn analytical, a potential tautology. Only thoughts that go the limit are facing up to the omnipotent impotence of certain accord; only a cerebral acrobatics keeps relating to the matter, for which, according to the fable

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convenu, it has nothing but disdain for the sake of its self-satisfaction. No unreflected banality can remain true as an imprint of the wrong life. Any attempt to bring thought—particularly for its utility’s sake—to a halt with the hackneyed description of it as smugly exaggerated and noncommittal is reactionary nowadays. The argument might be reduced to a vulgar form: “If you want me to, I’ll make innumerable analyses like that, rendering each one worthless.” Peter Altenberg gave the appropriate reply to a man who cast the same sort of aspersion on his abbreviated literary forms: “But I don’t want you to.” The open thought has no protection against the risk of decline into randomness; nothing assures it of a saturation with the matter that will suffice to surmount that risk. But the consistency of its performance, the density of its texture, helps the thought to hit the mark. There has been an about-face in the function of the concept of certainty in philosophy. What was once to surpass dogmas and the tutelage of self-certainty has become the social insurance of a cognition that is to be proof against any untoward happening. And indeed, to the unobjectionable nothing happens. ****

Noncontradictoriness not to be hypostatized Such reflections come to seem paradoxical. Subjectivity, thinking itself, is called explicable not by itself but by facts, especially by social facts; but the objectivity of cognition in turn is said not to exist without thinking, without subjectivity. Such paradoxicality springs from the Cartesian norm of explication: reasons for what follows—for what follows logically, at least—have to be found in what goes before. This norm is no longer compulsory. Measured by it, the dialectical state of facts would be the plain logical contradiction. But the state of facts is not explicable by a hierarchic schema of order summoned from outside. If it were, the attempt to explain would presuppose the explication that remains to be found; it would presuppose noncontradictoriness, the principle of subjective thinking, as inherent in the object which is to be thought. In a sense, dialectical logic is more positivistic than the positivism that outlaws it. As thinking, dialectical logic respects that which is to be thought—the object—even where the object does not heed the rules of thinking. The analysis of the object is tangential to the rules of thinking. Thought need not be content with its own legality; without abandoning it, we can think against our thought, and if it were possible to define dialectics, this would be a definition worth suggesting. The thinker’s equipment need not remain ingrown in his thinking; it goes far enough to let him recognize the very totality of its logical claim as a delusion. The seemingly unbearable

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thesis that subjectivity presupposes facts while objectivity presupposes the subject—this thesis is unbearable only to one so deluded, to one who hypostatizes the relation of cause and effect, the subjective principle to which the experience of the object fails to bow. Dialectics as a philosophical mode of proceeding is the attempt to untie the knot of paradoxicality by the oldest means of enlightenment: the ruse. Not by chance has the paradox been the decaying form of dialectics from Kierkegaard on. Dialectical reason follows the impulse to transcend the natural context and its delusion (a delusion continued in the subjective compulsion of the rules of logic) without forcing its own rule upon this context—in other words, without sacrifice and without vengeance. Dialectical reason’s own essence has come to be and will pass, like antagonistic society. Antagonism, of course, is no more limited to society than is suffering. No more than dialectics can be extended to nature, as a universal principle of explication, can two kinds of truth be erected side by side, a dialectical one within society and one indifferent to society. The division of social and extra-social Being, a division that takes its bearings from the arrangement of the sciences, deceives us about the fact that heteronomous history perpetuates the blind growth of nature.4 The only way out of the dialectical context of immanence is by that context itself. Dialectics is critical reflection upon that context. It reflects its own motion; if it did not, Kant’s legal claim against Hegel would never expire. Such dialectics is negative. Its idea names the difference from Hegel. In Hegel there was coincidence of identity and positivity; the inclusion of all nonidentical and objective things in a subjectivity expanded and exalted into an absolute spirit was to effect the reconcilement. On the other hand, the force of the entirety that works in every single definition is not simply its negation; that force itself is the negative, the untrue. The philosophy of the absolute and total subject is a particular one.*5 The inherent reversibility of the identity thesis counteracts the principles of its spirit. If entity 2. Cf. Weltgeist und Naturgeschichte, passim. *In the history of modern philosophy, the word “identity” has had several meanings. It designated the unity of personal consciousness: that an “I” remains the same in all its experiences. This meant the Kantian “I think, which should be able to go with all my conceptions.” Then, again, identity was what is legally the same in all rational beings—thought as logical universality—and besides, it was the equality with itself of every object of thought, the simple A = A. Finally, epistemologically, it meant that subject and object coincide, whatever their media. Not even Kant keeps the first two layers of meaning strictly apart, and this is not due to a careless use of language. It is due to the fact that, in idealism, identity designates the point of indifference of the psychological and logical moments. Logical universality, as the universality of thought, is tied to individual identity, without which it would not come into being—for nothing past would be maintained in something present, and thus nothing would be maintained as the same at all. The recourse to this in turn presupposes logical universality; it is a recourse of thinking. The Kantian “I think,” the moment of individual unity, always requires the supra-individual generality as well. The individual I is one I solely by virtue of 4

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can be totally derived from that spirit, the spirit is doomed to resemble the mere entity it means to contradict; otherwise, spirit and entity would not go together. It is precisely the insatiable identity principle that perpetuates antagonism by suppressing contradiction. What tolerates nothing that is not like itself thwarts the reconcilement for which it mistakes itself. The violence of equality-mongering reproduces the contradiction it eliminates. ****

On the dialectics of identity As the thinker immerses himself in what faces him to begin with, in the concept, and as he perceives its immanently antinomical character, he clings to the idea of something beyond contradiction. The antithesis of thought to whatever is heterogeneous to thought is reproduced in thought itself, as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal criticism of the universal and of the particular; identifying acts of judgment whether the concept does justice to what it covers, and whether the particular fulfills its concept—these constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity of particular and concept. And not of thinking only. If mankind is to get rid of the coercion to which the form of identification really subjects it, it must attain identity with its concept at the same time. In this, all relevant categories play a part. The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of identification. Barter is the social model of the principle, and without the principle there would be no barter; it is through barter that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total. But if we denied the principle abstractly—if we proclaimed, to the greater glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rule—we would be creating excuses for recidivism into ancient injustice. From olden times, the main characteristic of the exchange of equivalents has been that unequal things would be exchanged in its name, that the surplus value of labor would be appropriated. If the generality of the principle of numerical unity; the unity of consciousness itself is a form of reflection of the logical identity. That an individual consciousness is one applies only on the logical premise of the excluded middle: that it shall not be able to be something else. In that sense its singularity, to be possible at all, must be supra-individual. Neither of the two moments has priority over the other. If there were no identical consciousness, no identity of particularization, there would be no universal—no more than there would be one the other way round. This is what lends epistemological legitimacy to the dialectical conception of particularity and universality.

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comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the barter principle—as ideology, of course, but also as a promise—would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques. When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal and yet unequal—our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too, for all our skepticism of the rancor involved in the bourgeois egalitarian ideal that tolerates no qualitative difference. If no man had part of his labor withheld from him any more, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking. This comes close enough to Hegel. The dividing line from him is scarcely drawn by individual distinctions. It is drawn by our intent: whether in our consciousness, theoretically and in the resulting practice, we maintain that identity is the ultimate, that it is absolute, that we want to reinforce it—or whether we feel that identity is the universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature.” Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself—of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thus tied to the supreme categories of identitarian philosophy as its point of departure. Thus, too, it remains false according to identitarian logic: it remains the thing against which it is conceived. It must correct itself in its critical course—a course affecting concepts which in negative dialectics are formally treated as if they came “first” for it, too. It is one thing for our thought to close itself under compulsion of the form which nothing can escape from, to comply in principle, so as immanently to deny the conclusive structure claimed by traditional philosophy; and it is quite another thing for thought to urge that conclusive form on its own, with the intent of making itself “the first.” In idealism, the highly formal identity principle had, due to its formalization, an affirmative substance. This is innocently brought to light by terminology, when simple predicative sentences are called “affirmative.” The copula says: It is so, not otherwise. The act of synthesis, for which the copula stands, indicates that it shall not be otherwise—else the act would not be performed. The will to identity works in each synthesis. As an a priori task of thought, a task immanent in thought, identity seems positive and desirable: the substrate of the synthesis is thus held to be reconciled with the I, and therefore to be good. Which promptly permits the moral desideratum that the subject, understanding how much the cause is its own, should bow to what is heterogeneous to it.

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Identity is the primal form of ideology. We relish it as adequacy to the thing it suppresses; adequacy has always been subjection to dominant purposes and, in that sense, its own contradiction. After the unspeakable effort it must have cost our species to produce the primacy of identity even against itself, man rejoices and basks in his conquest by turning it into the definition of the conquered thing: what has happened to it must be presented, by the thing, as its “in-itself.” Ideology’s power of resistance to enlightenment is owed to its complicity with identifying thought, or indeed with thought at large. The ideological side of thinking shows in its permanent failure to make good on the claim that the non-I is finally the I: the more the I thinks, the more perfectly will it find itself debased into an object. Identity becomes the authority for a doctrine of adjustment, in which the object—which the subject is supposed to go by—repays the subject for what the subject has done to it. The subject is to see reason against its reason. The critique of ideology is thus not something peripheral and intra-scientific, not something limited to the objective mind and to the products of the subjective mind. Philosophically, it is central: it is a critique of the constitutive consciousness itself. ****

Starting out from the concept Because entity is not immediate, because it is only through the concept, we should begin with the concept, not with the mere datum. The concept’s own concept has become a problem. No less than its irrationalist counterpart, intuition, that concept as such has archaic features which cut across the rational ones—relics of static thinking and of a static cognitive ideal amidst a consciousness that has become dynamic. The concept’s immanent claim is its order-creating invariance as against the change in what it covers. The form of the concept—“false” in this respect also—would deny that change. Dialectics is a protest lodged by our thinking against the archaicisms of its conceptuality. The concept in itself, previous to any content, hypostatizes its own form against the content. With that, however, it is already hypostatizing the identity principle: that what our thinking practice merely postulates is a fact in itself, solid and enduring. Identifying thought objectifies by the logical identity of the concept. On its subjective side, dialectics amounts to thinking so that the thought form will no longer turn its objects into immutable ones, into objects that remain the same. Experience shows that they do not remain the same. The unstable character of traditional philosophy’s solid identity can be learned from its guarantor, the individual human consciousness. To Kant, this is

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the generally predesigned unit underlying every identity. In fact, if an older person looking back has started early on a more or less conscious existence, he will distinctly remember his own distant past. It creates a unity, no matter how unreal the elusive picture of his childhood may seem. Yet the “I” which he remembers in this unreality, the I which he was at one time and potentially becomes again—this I turns simultaneously into another, into a stranger to be detachedly observed. Such ambivalence of identity and nonidentity extends even to logical problems of identity. For those, technical terminology stands ready with the customary formula of “identity in nonidentity”—a formula with which we would first have to contrast the nonidentity in identity. But such a purely formal reversal would leave room for the subreption that dialectics is prima philosophia after all, as “prima dialectica.”*6 The test of the turn to nonidentity is its performance; if it remained declarative, it would be revoking itself. In the traditional philosophies, even in the “constructive” ones of Schelling’s slogan, the construction was in truth an imitation, a refusal to tolerate anything not pre-digested by the philosophies. By interpreting even heterogeneity as their own self and finally as the spirit, they already reconverted it into sameness, into the identity in which they would repeat themselves as in a vast analytical judgment, leaving no room for the qualitatively new. They got into a rut, into the habit of thinking that without such a structure of identity there could be no philosophy, that it would crumble into purely juxtaposed statements. The mere attempt to turn philosophical thought towards the nonidentical, away from identity, was called absurd. By such attempts the nonidentical was said to be a prior reduced to its concept, and thus identified. Plausible considerations of this kind are too radical and, like most radical questions, are therefore not radical enough. Lashed by some of the driving ethos of labor, the form of tireless recourse takes us farther and farther from what we should see through, until in the end we leave it alone. The category of the root, the origin, is a category of dominion. It confirms

*“If it does no more than re-process the yield of the several sciences and think it through to a whole, dialectics is a higher empiricism and really no more than the kind of reflection that would use experience to construe an overall harmony. But dialectics, then, must not break with the genetical view; it must not boast of immanent progress—which, after all, excludes the accidental acquisition of observation and discovery. Dialectics, then, works only in the same fashion and by the same means as other sciences and differs only in the goal of uniting the parts in the idea of the whole. We thus face another thought-provoking dilemma. Either the dialectical development is independent and solely self-determined; if so, it must indeed know everything by itself. Or it presupposes the finite sciences and empirical knowledge—but then its immanent progress and continuous context is interrupted by that which has been received from outside, and besides, it is acting uncritically toward experience. Dialectics may choose. We see no third possibility.” (F. A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. I, Leipzig, 1870, p. 91f.)

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that a man ranks first because he was there first; it confirms the autochthon against the newcomer, the settler against the migrant. The origin—seductive because it will not be appeased by the derivative, by ideology—is itself an ideological principle. Karl Kraus’s line “The origin is the goal” sounds conservative, but it also expresses something that was scarcely meant when the line was uttered: namely, that the concept “origin” ought to be stripped of its static mischief. Understood this way, the line does not mean that the goal had better make its way back to the origin, to the phantasm of “good” nature; it means that nothing is original except the goal, that it is only from the goal that the origin will constitute itself. There is no origin save in ephemeral life. ****

Constellation The unifying moment survives without a negation of negation, but also without delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden. The model for this is the conduct of language. Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it appears essentially as a language, where it becomes a form of representation, it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centered about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means. By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking. The Hegelian usage of the term “concrete”—according to which the thing itself is its context, not its pure selfhood—takes note of this; and yet, for all the criticism of discursive logic, that logic is not ignored. But Hegelian dialectics was a dialectics without language, while the most literal sense of the word “dialectics” postulates language; to this extent, Hegel remained an adept of current science. He did not need language in an emphatic sense, since everything, even the speechless and opaque, was to him to be spirit, and the spirit would be the context. That supposition is past salvaging. Instead, what is indissoluble in any previous thought context transcends its seclusion in its own, as nonidentical. It communicates

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with that from which it was separated by the concept. It is opaque only for identity’s claim to be total; it resists the pressure of that claim. But as such it seeks to be audible. Whatever part of nonidentity defines definition in its concept goes beyond its individual existence; it is only in polarity with the concept, in staring at the concept, that it will contract into that existence. The inside of nonidentity is its relation to that which it is not, and which its managed, frozen self-identity withholds from it. It only comes to in relinquishing itself, not in hardening—this we can still learn from Hegel, without conceding anything to the repressive moments of his relinquishment doctrine. The object opens itself to a monadological insistence, to a sense of the constellation in which it stands; the possibility of internal immersion requires that externality. But such an immanent generality of something individual is objective as sedimented history. This history is in the individual thing and outside it; it is something encompassing in which the individual has its place. Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it. The chorismos of without and within is historically qualified in turn. The history locked in the object can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects—by the actualization and concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge. Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safedeposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.

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PART TWO

Ontology

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CHAPTER SIX

“The Concept of Essence” Herbert Marcuse

“The Concept of Essence” is an ontological counterpart to pieces such as “Philosophy and Critical Theory” and Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory,” which are primarily epistemological-methodological in focus. Here Marcuse attends to the object of critical theory, rather than to the nature of critical theory itself as a mode of inquiry. As is the norm for these authors, the first-order analysis is accompanied by meta-philosophical reflections— in this case pertaining to the shifting definition (and role) of the concept of essence in the history of Western philosophy, relative to simultaneously changing social conditions—from which the first-order claims cannot be entirely separated, and through which the first-order analysis is in part developed. The discussion can be organized into two parts, analytically: a critical review of various accounts of the concept of essence that Marcuse takes to be idealist, and a positive statement of a materialist conception. Marcuse plots out two conceptual lineages. Both begin with Plato and Aristotle, followed by Aquinas. One trajectory then goes on, in a break with the past, to Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Scheler and finally to logical positivism. The other progresses from Kant to Hegel, whom Marcuse sees as recovering the dynamism of the classical approach, and from there to critical theory. “Materialism,” as Marcuse here dubs critical theory, is therefore situated as an alternative not just to Hegelianism, but to both phenomenology and its positivist “other” (the proponents of which, Marcuse contends, cannot deliver an effective critique of Husserl or of those working in his wake). All versions of the concept of essence, says Marcuse, involve assumptions about the relationship between essence and not-essence (the latter of which he variously labels “appearance,” “experience” and “that which is immediately given”). An important difference between the two

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trajectories is how those who fall into one or the other lineage understand the relationship. As Marcuse tells the story, both Plato and Aristotle treat notessence as potentiality. For Plato, the given falls short of perfection, relative to the universals that fix the identities of things. This disparity brings with it a sense of perfectibility, Marcuse thinks, of directedness or development toward the ideal. For Aristotle, meanwhile, (who would seem to be the more obvious example of an author who conceives of essence as potentiality), essence is a not-necessarily-actualized property or set of properties had by a thing, in virtue of which it is a member of a kind. Here the link between essence and potentiality is explicit: things as they happen to be at any one moment are not as they might be, were their distinctive, identity-conferring qualities fully realized. Essence is therefore “What a thing could be, but isn’t yet.” From this perspective, “appearance” is more of a temporal designation than an epistemic or even ontological one. It refers to what a thing is now, not to an unreliable perception of an object. The falsehood or superficiality of “appearances” so construed is just the belief that how things are at present is how they must be always. Already in the Medieval period, Marcuse claims, the concept of essence as dynamic counter-factual potential had been “pacified,” replaced by the equation of essence with “the inner structure of existence,” or “structural law.” Modern philosophy then splits into two traditions. Beginning with Descartes, there is a line of thinkers who render essences internal to consciousness, to a sphere of transcendental subjectivity that is thought to co-exist with an essence-less material realm. Moderns of this ilk hold that the essence of “man” is to be rational and free, but (reflecting their lack of direct rational control over the means of production, Marcuse says) this fact about human beings (if it is one) is not thought to intersect ontologically with our socio-historical circumstances. Loss of the modal purchase of the concept of essence is carried forward through Kantianism into nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenology, whose proponents hold that there is a sharp split between the domain of essences (which they regard as purely conceptual) and that of empirical experience. Things are no better with phenomenology’s logical positivist critics, Marcuse thinks: they, by contrast, completely collapse the domains, eradicating any difference between the purportedly essential and the immediately given. “The world of [logical positivist] facts is, so to speak, one-dimensional,” Marcuse writes, anticipating the title of One Dimensional Man (published 28 years after this article). The second line begins with Hegel, who recovers from Aristotle the notion of essence as potentiality, as that-which-isn’t-yet, and leads through to Marx to critical theory. Hegel reintroduces the Aristotelian belief that dynamis, potentiality, is a real force in the material world; “real possibility exists,” Marcuse declares. But Hegel’s historicized Aristotelian essentialism

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is conceptualized in an idealist register, and his announcement that the possible is now fully actual was premature. Whatever has or has not been achieved abstractly, freedom and rationality have not yet been established at the level of material practice. Proponents of what Marcuse calls here “materialist theory” share with Hegel the view that an essence is the way that something has the potential to be, given its “self-subsistent possibilities.” Unlike Hegel, they believe that our as-yet-realized potentialities can only be actualized via a concrete social transformation, one that has not yet been carried out. There are, says Marcuse, three “concretions” of the concept of human essence, three increasingly specific articulations of the socio-historical conditions in the context of which rational self-determination is a real possibility. The most general is the idea of a social formation, a “totality of the social process as it is organized in a particular historical epoch.” For greater precision yet, we can zero in on the “level” of “social reality” that is presently “fundamental,” i.e., those relations that presently determine the shape of the whole. Finally, we can point to the real dynamics of capital accumulation, and the political and juridical institutions that it involves. These dynamics can be described superficially, Marcuse says (and in a sense falsely), in terms of categories such as “wages and entrepreneur,” or in a manner that captures their class character, e.g. in terms of “surplus value.” Marcuse goes on to say that the total social structure has both a form, presently given by the valorization of capital, and content, consisting of “the maintenance and reproduction of society.” (This distinction echoes Marx’s discussion of the natural form of laboring, labor as such, at the start of Chapter 7 of Capital, Vol. 1.) Marxist theory goes beyond the given in that it is an analysis of the form that human labor assumes in capitalism (corresponding as an object of inquiry to the third degree of concretion above, it seems to me), rather than a mere description of how capitalism presents to those who have not grasped its logic. But implicit in the analysis (and in the mode of production itself) is the idea (and real possibility) of an entirely different form of laboring, and of social being—one that would not involve the production of surplus value at all. To put it differently, once one has understood the nature and place of value in the context of the real dynamics of capital accumulation, one also knows that value itself is just the alienated expression of humanity’s collective powers of productivity. It is this as-yet unrealized capacity for creative self-determination that is our essence, Marcuse thinks: that potential the actualization of which could be, but isn’t yet. Effecting the realization of this essence is the proper task of critical theory. It is a practical task, but one that can be aided by a social theory that preserves the tension between that which is and that which can come to be, and that grounds the latter in the former.

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“The Concept of Essence” In philosophy, there are fundamental concepts whose metaphysical character sets them far apart from the sociohistorical roots of thought. That their content remains the same in the most diverse philosophical theories would appear the soundest justification for the idea of a “philosophia perennis.” Yet even these loftiest conceptions of philosophy are subject to historical development. It is not so much their content as it is their position and function within philosophical systems which changes. Once this is seen, it becomes clear that these very concepts provide a clearer indication of the historical transformation of philosophy than those whose contents are far closer to facticity. Their metaphysical character betrays more than it conceals. For so much of men’s real struggles and desires went into the metaphysical quest for an ultimate unity, truth, and universality of Being1 that they could not have failed to find expression in the derived forms of the philosophical tradition. The concept of essence belongs to these categories. Its manifold forms have as their common content the abstraction and isolation of the one true Being from the constantly changing multiplicity of appearances. Under the name of “essence” this Being is made into the object of “authentic,” certain, and secure knowledge. The way in which modern philosophy has understood and established knowledge of essence contrasts with that of ancient and medieval philosophy. The historical situation of the bourgeoisie, the bearer of modern philosophy, comes out in modern interpretations of the relation of essence and appearance. According to the view characteristic of the dawning bourgeois era, the critical autonomy of rational subjectivity is to establish and justify the ultimate essential truths on which all theoretical and practical truth depends. The essence of man and of things is contained in the freedom of the thinking individual, the ego cogito. At the close of this era, knowledge of essence has primarily the function of binding the critical freedom of the individual to pregiven, unconditionally valid necessities. It is no longer the spontaneity of the concept but the receptivity of intuition that serves as the organon of the doctrine of essence. Cognition culminates in recognition, where it remains fixated. Husserl’s phenomenology can be considered a delayed attempt to reinvigorate bourgeois theory with the basic forces and concepts of German Idealism (in which the doctrine of essence had found its classical form). Although eliminating their critical (Kantian) orientation, Husserl’s philosophy thus still belongs to the liberalist period. The material eidetics (Scheler) that came in Husserl’s train, however, represents the transition to 1 Translator’s note: “(Das) Sein” (esse) I have rendered as “Being.” “(Das) Seinde” (ens) I have rendered as “beings” or the “world of beings” or, when there is no escaping it “being.”

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a new stage: the preparation of thought for the ideology of authoritarian forms of domination. The intuition of essence is misused to establish orders of value in which the relations of hierarchy and subordination required by the established order are derived from the “essence” of man, of nationality, and of race. From Descartes to modern eidetics, the concept of essence has followed a course leading from autonomy to heteronomy, from the proclamation of the free, rational individual to his surrender to the powers of the authoritarian state. The current form of the doctrine of essence no longer preserves the comprehension that led to the separation of essence and appearance; neither does the abstract cancellation of this separation demanded by positivism. A theory that wants to eradicate from science the concept of essence succumbs to helpless relativism, thus promoting the very powers whose reactionary thought it wants to combat. Positivism cannot provide an effective critique of the idealist doctrine of essence. Doing so devolves upon the materialist dialectic. Before this task is attempted, we shall analyze some typical forms of the idealist doctrine of essence. *** In Plato’s theory of Ideas, where the concept of essence was first clearly formulated, it was an outcome of the quest for the unity and universality of Being in view of the multiplicity and changeability of beings. That things, even though each of them is “individual,” are nevertheless similar and dissimilar, like and unlike; that in the endless multiplicity of their attributes they are comprehended as one and the same; that quite diverse phenomena accord in being considered good, beautiful, just, unjust, and so forth; in short, that the world of beings is divided into species and genera, subsumed under the highest categories, and known by means of universal concepts is the philosophical substratum of the problem of essence. This problem was not one of epistemology alone. For when the unity in multiplicity, the universal, is conceived as what truly exists, critical and ethical elements enter into the concept of essence. The isolation of the one universal Being is connected to that of authentic Being from inauthentic, of what should and can be from what is. The Being of things is not exhausted in what they immediately are; they do not appear as they could be. The form of their immediate existence is imperfect when measured against their potentialities, which comprehension reveals as the image of their essence. Their eidos, or Idea, becomes the criterion by means of which the distance between existence and what it could be, its essence, is measured in each case. Accordingly, the attributes of this concept of essence do not have a primarily logical or epistemological basis. Seeking the unity, universality, and permanence of Being and “remembering” the essence are motivated by the critical consciousness of “bad” facticity, of unrealized potentialities.

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The essence as potentiality becomes a force within existence. Beginning with the late version of the theory of Ideas in the Sophist and the Philebus, the Idea as dynamis enters into the process in which “true Being” originates as the result of becoming. This is the first form in which the critical and dynamic character of the concept of essence is fully realized. The Idea means fundamentally the agathon, or what exists as it can be according to its own measure; existence is in motion toward this agathon.2 The dynamic of this relation also governs Aristotelian ontology. The concepts of essence ousia and ti en einai attempt to grasp the manner in which beings constitute and preserve themselves as identical in the various phases of their movement. From Plato on the ancient theory of essence was impelled by the unrest of the unresolved tension between essence and existence. The Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages pacified the critical consciousness of this antithesis in an onto-theological principle, which it eternalized as a structural law of the created world. For Thomas Aquinas the essence, as essentia of existence, is that according to, through, and in which existence is what it is. The essentia is, in other words, the inner structure of existence, in which it operates as the principle of form for each kind of being. The essence has always already been realized in whatever is the case; yet — and this is the crucial point — this reality is never that of the essence itself. In all finite being, essence and existence are ontologically separated. The latter supervenes to the former “from outside,” and, in relation to existence, the essence as such has the ontological character of pure potentiality, potentia transcendentalis. It is eternal, unchanging, and necessary: the “Idea” as the original model of existence in the divine intellect. The essence conceived in this way can become real only through a principle that is “exterior” to it. In its material concreteness, the form of its real existence remains an irrevocable contingency.3 Human beings are thus exonerated from concern with the “ontic” difference between essence and existence in the realm of finite being.4 The relevant passages for the dynamic form of Plato’s theory of Ideas are Sophistes 247 e. ff. and Philebos 23 b–27 b. 3 “Accidens dicitur large omne, quod non est pars essentiae, et sic est esse in rebus creatis” (Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales 12, 5).—“Oportet ergo, quod illud cuius esse est aliud ab essentia sua, baheat esse causatum ab alio” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia, 3, 4). 4 The change wrought by the mitigation of the critical tensions in the theory of essence is evident in the altered meaning of the classical ontological concepts incorporated into Aquinas’ philosophy. Essence as such is no longer “authentic” Being but pure possibility. Compared with reality, possibility is inferior, a privation. Aristotle, too, had characterized the relationship of dynamis and energia in this way, but for him the relationship of possibility to reality was one of movement; the on dynamei was conceived as an existing “power” or “potentiality” which in itself strives for actuality (Aristotle Metaphysics 1045 b 33ff.). Essence as potentia transcendentalis, in contrast, is no longer the “real possibility” of “power,” and its relation to reality is no longer the dynamic of movement. 2

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No matter how much it mitigated the critical tensions implied in the concept of essence, Thomistic philosophy persevered in conceiving the difference between essence and existence as indicative of a characteristic of beings themselves, as they are given to man in spatio-temporal reality. In this way, the reduction of the problem of essence to one of logic and epistemology was impeded. This reduction occurred only in the development of modern thought that began with Descartes and ended with Husserl. The concept of essence enters the sphere of the self-certain ego cogito, or transcendental subjectivity. Liberated from the bonds and obligations of the medieval order and empowered to shape his own world, the autonomous individual saw his reason presented with the task that had been metaphysically hypostatized in the doctrine of essence: realizing the authentic potentialities of beings on the basis of the discovery that nature can be controlled. Essence became the object of theoretical and practical reason. The transcendental, subjective form of the concept of essence is typical of bourgeois theory and was first fully worked out by Descartes. In his attempt to provide philosophy with a new foundation, Descartes sought an instance of absolutely certain, necessary, and universally valid knowledge. He found it in the individual’s consciousness, in the ego cogitans. To a considerable extent, the concept of theory guiding Descartes was patterned on mathematically formulated natural science, but this does not adequately account for the significance of his approach. At the same time, science was making its pioneering discoveries, and the ideal of “objectively” ascertained knowledge, fulfilled in a nature subjected to calculation and domination, seemed attainable as never before. Why then did Descartes have recourse to the “subjective” certainty of the ego cogito? Why is his anchoring of theory in the consciousness of subjectivity to be found right alongside his mechanistic philosophy, his analytical geometry, and his treatise on machines? The difficulty of circumscribing the significance of Descartes’ approach derives from its thoroughly contradictory nature: simultaneous liberation and impotence, representing the simultaneous affirmation and flight or protest with which the individual, released from medieval hierarchy, reacted to the law of bourgeois society. Universal doubt, the demand that the proof of all judgments be appealed to the sovereign reason of the individual, and the incorporation of mathematics and mechanics into philosophy expressed the new, self-possessed individuality that appeared with demands for the free shaping of the conditions of life and for the subjection of nature and its newly discovered wealth. Intense activism is manifest in the programmatic connection, emphasized by Descartes, between theory and practice: theory, absolutely certain of its knowledge, is to serve as a sure organon of practice. “It suffices to judge well in order to do well, and to judge as well as one can in order to do one’s best, that is to say, to acquire . . . all the other goods that one can acquire.”5

Descartes, Discours de la Méthode, in Oeuvres Choises (Paris: Garnier, 1930), I, pp. 24ff.

5

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Descartes believed in a philosophie pratique instead of the ancient philosophie spéculative, a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us . . . we should be able to utilize them in like manner for all the uses to which they are suited and thus render ourselves masters and possessors of nature.6 But in the contemporary form of social organization, the domination of nature through rational methods of production as envisioned by Descartes was neither joined to nor directed by the sovereign reason of the associated individuals. The fate of bourgeois society announces itself in its philosophy. When the liberated individual as the subject of practice actually sets himself to shaping the conditions of his life, he sees himself subjected to the laws of the commodity market, which operate as blind economic laws behind his back. At most, his first step, the beginning of his career, can appear free, as though dictated by his own reason. All subsequent ones are prescribed him by the conditions of a commodity-producing society, and he must observe them if he does not want to go under. The transparent relations of dependence characteristic of the medieval order were replaced by a system in which relations of dependence could no longer be grasped as such by the individual. The conditions of labor become autonomous; subjected to their mechanism, the individual’s fate in such a society appears to him as a mere contingency. Spatio-temporal reality becomes a merely “external” world that is not rationally connected with man’s authentic potential, his “substance” or “essence.” This external reality is not organized by the activity of human freedom, although modern science shows such organization to be possible and modern philosophy requires it as a task. In practice, the fulfillment of this task comes up against an obstacle whose removal would lead beyond this society’s limits. As long as philosophy does not adopt the idea of a real transformation, the critique of reason stops at the status quo and becomes a critique of pure thought. The uncertainty and unfreedom of the external world is countered by the certainty and freedom of thought as the individual’s only remaining power base. He must recognize that he must conquer himself rather than fortune, his wants rather than the “order of the world,” and “that there is nothing aside from our thoughts which is completely within our power, so that, after we have done our best with regard to things outside us, all wherein we fail to succeed is absolutely impossible on our part.”7 If the individual is to be salvaged and human freedom to be preserved, then the “essence” of man must be located in thought. Here is where his authentic potentialities 6 7

Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 22.

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and the ontological certainty of his existence must be found: “I conclude with assurance that my essence consists exclusively in my being a thing that thinks, or a substance whose entire essence or nature is only to think.”8 It is often asserted today that Descartes, by beginning with the ego cogito, committed the original sin of modern philosophy, that he placed a completely abstract concept of the individual at the basis of theory. But his abstract concept of the individual is animated by concern with human freedom: measuring the truth of all conditions of life against the standard of rational thought. Hegel said of Descartes: “It is the interest of freedom that is fundamental here. What is known to be true is to have the function of preserving our freedom through our thinking.”9 That this freedom is freedom “only” of thought, that only the “abstract” individual is free, that concern with human freedom becomes concern with the absolute certainty of thought, demonstrate the historical veracity of Cartesian philosophy. As the counterpart to his factual unfreedom, the individual, aiming at the greatest truth and certainty possible within bourgeois practice, is left only with the freedom of thought. The “reason” of this epoch is necessarily “abstract”; in order to remain true to itself and avoid falling into irrationality, reason must disregard not only the given form of spatio-temporal existence, but even the concrete content of thought at any time, and retain only thought as such, the pure form of all cogitationes. Reason cannot unfold itself in the rational domination and shaping of objects by free individuals. Rather, objectivity becomes a postulate of pure knowledge and is thus released from the “interest of freedom”: The impulse to freedom is in fact basic, but predominating, at least in consciousness, is the goal of arriving at something solid and objective — the element of objectivity, not the moment of subjectivity (i.e. that it is posited, known, and verified by me).10 After Descartes defined the essence of man as “thinking” and thought as fundamentum inconcussum (unshakable foundation), the problem of essence moved into the sphere of cognitive subjectivity. The question of essence — of the truth, unity, and authenticity of Being — became the question of the truth, unity, and authenticity of knowledge. Post-Cartesian idealism retains this fundamental philosophical idea of the bourgeois period, the idea that the “organization” of existing things in accordance with their comprehended potentialities is a function of the free, critical reason of the individual. In the reified world in which work relations are no Descartes, Médiations Métaphysiques, in Oeuvres Choises, I, p. 150. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Werke, original edition, XVI, p. 338. 10 Ibid., p. 336. 8 9

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longer “essentially” related to men’s potentialities and appear rather as an effect of over-powering conditions of production, the idea that an organization of existing things in terms of their “essential” relationships could be the result of a future change disappears; organization becomes a matter of pure cognition. In transcendental philosophy the notion of a critical, rational organization of existing things underwent the decisive reduction to a formal a priori that has always already preceded any factual experience. To be sure, the relation of the a priori syntheses to experience is in the mode of absolute simultaneity; but in that the syntheses, which are eternally valid, precede every possible future experience and cannot be surpassed by any future experience, the essence of man as cognitive subject and of the objects of cognition is cut off from the future and oriented toward the past. This is the dominant motif of the transcendental method, the method specific to bourgeois philosophy. With Kant the characteristics of essence — such as unity, universality, permanence — reappear in the context of pure theoretical reason, where they are incorporated partly in the pure concepts of the understanding or in their transcendental apperception, partly in the transcendental Ideas of reason. Thus they appear on the one hand as the categorical forms of conceptual synthesis, which are prior to all future experience, and on the other as Ideas or pure concepts of reason which “extend beyond the limit of all experience,” in which “no object can ever appear that would be adequate to the transcendental Idea.”11 In the first case, the critical and dynamic opposition of essence to experience is eliminated by being completely absorbed into the timeless history of cognition. In the second it is more immediately and explicitly clear that the problem of essence has been taken up into “reason” — and not only because Kant consciously associated himself with the Platonic doctrine of essence by calling the concepts of reason “Ideas.” Reason is the locus of the final unity, totality, and universality of knowledge: “the faculty that unifies the rules of the understanding under principles.”12 As a pure concept of reason, the Idea is directed toward the “totality of the conditions for a given conditioned thing”; it is the “concept of the unconditioned.”13 Now, Kant says that these Ideas “perhaps make possible a transition from natural concepts to practical ones.”14 The age-old philosophical question of realizing the essence in existence becomes here the problem of the transition from the concepts of theoretical to those of practical reason. Kant emphasized that reason’s interest in these Ideas was “a practical interest”: in the Ideas the

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Werke, Cassirer, ed. (Berlin, 1913), III, p. 264. Ibid., p. 250. 13 Ibid., p. 262. 14 Ibid., p. 265. 11 12

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“foundation stones of morality and religion”15 were at stake. And precisely here that thought whose structure Kant is unfolding becomes tangled in paralogisms and antinomies, in a “natural and unavoidable illusion,” which “is still deceptive even when one is no longer at its mercy.”16 It is characteristic of the historical situation of idealist thought that the “Ideas” as concepts of reason become part of the dialectic of transcendental illusion and that when the dialectic first reappears in idealism it is one of illusion: of necessary illusion. The essence of man is still seen as lying in reason, “which alone is called upon to do away with all errors”; Kant still insists that this reason “knows no other judge than universal human reason, in which each man has a voice; and since it is from reason that every improvement of which our condition is capable must spring,” freedom is its original right “and may not be restricted.”17 But it is not accidental that two different concepts of reason are intertwined in Kant’s work: reason as the unifying totality of man’s cognitive faculty (as which it is the subject of the “critiques” of pure and practical reason), and reason in a narrower sense, as a single faculty that rises “above” the understanding, as the faculty of those “Ideas” that can never be adequately represented in experience and have a merely regulative function. It is reason in this second, more narrow sense through which, for Kant, the transition to practical concepts occurs. It occurs under the aegis of the concept of freedom: the “Idea” is transformed into a “postulate” and the “postulate” into a “fact” of practical reason. In this way reason’s freedom undergoes still another limitation. Through the stipulation that man’s free reason be united with the empirical world of necessity, freedom is hypostatized as a timeless occurrence: it can exercise its causality on the empirical world only insofar as the world has no effect whatsoever on it. Free reason is limited in function to furnishing the determining ground of actions, to “beginning” them. Once begun, actions enter the unbreakable causal nexus of natural necessity, and they proceed in accordance with its laws forever after. Thus this doctrine mirrors the fate of a world in which rational human freedom always can take only the initial step freely, only to encounter afterward an uncontrolled necessity which remains contingent with respect to reason. The causality of reason, operating in one direction only, cuts off the possibility of the empirical world affecting the intelligible essence of man. It thus imprisons this essence in a past without future: The intelligible essence of every thing, and especially of man, stands, according to this [idealism] outside of every causal connection, as it stands outside of or above all time. Thus it can never be determined by Ibid., p. 334. Ibid., p. 303. 17 Ibid., pp. 503 and 509. 15 16

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anything that has gone before it, in that it rather is prior, not so much temporally as logically, to everything else that is or becomes within it.18 *** In the development of transcendental philosophy after Kant, this stabilization of the concept of essence was broken down and a dynamic theory of essence achieved. Hegel’s dialectic, in which this dynamic theory of essence was developed, received no further elaboration in idealist philosophy: its development forms part of a different trend of thought and will be discussed later. When Husserl undertook to found anew the theory of essence, he based it on the theory of transcendental subjectivity as it was worked out from Descartes to Kant. Phenomenology did not, to be sure, start out as transcendental philosophy. The pathos of purely descriptive, scientific objectivity which characterizes the Logische Untersuchungen (“Logical Investigations”) is indicative of an inner connection with positivism, even where Husserl attacks it. Husserl himself pointed to Hume as the first to “make serious use of Descartes’ pure inward focus.”19 But where the theory of essence becomes central in Husserl’s philosophy, its elaboration forces phenomenology to base itself ever more radically on transcendental apriorism. For this reason the stage represented by the Logische Untersuchungen does not need to be considered here. Husserl defines essence in opposition to the individual, spatio-temporally existing real thing, the “fact,” object of all empirical sciences: the significance of this contingency, which is called facticity, is limited by its correlation to a necessity that does not stand for the mere factual existence of a valid rule for the co-ordination of spatio-temporal facts; rather, it has the character of essential necessity and is thus related to essential universality. Part of the “meaning of everything contingent . . . is to have an essence and thus an eidos that is to be grasped in its purity. This eidos is a component of essential truths of various levels of generality.”20 At first glance, these attributes do not differ at all from those of the traditional

Schelling, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, in Werke (Stuttgart, 1856–7), Section I, VII, p. 389. 19 Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie, X (Halle, 1913), p. 227. 20 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomemologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologischen Forschung, I (Halle, 1913), p. 9. 18

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conception of essence as quidditas and essentia, as it was formulated by the Scholastics and incorporated into philosophy. But the context in which phenomenology deals with the concept of essence is completely different: the sphere of transcendental consciousness, “purged” of all acts intending spatio-temporal existence. For Husserl, the concept of essence is relevant only within the dimension of pure subjectivity that remains as a residuum after the phenomenological “annihilation of the world” and that “precedes the being of the world as constituting in itself the meaning of that being” — a “completely self-contained reality,” “something existing absolutely.”21 The essential truths that make their appearance in this dimension “do not contain the slightest assertion about facts, and thus from them alone not even the most meager factual truth can be derived.”22 After his Ideen (“Ideas”), Husserl programmatically defined his philosophical work in relation to Descartes. The relationship of Husserl to Descartes is not only one within the history of philosophy: it is the relationship of advanced bourgeois thought to its beginnings. Transcendental phenomenology itself represents, in its own content, an endpoint. Its attempt at a new foundation of philosophy as rigorous science presents itself as the end, no longer to be surpassed, of the line of thought that tried to anchor the absolute certainty, necessity, and universal validity of knowledge in the ego cogito. Once again the fundamental characteristics of bourgeois theory are at stake, and in the struggle for them resignation and the transition to a new stage are already in evidence. Only in this context does the significance of phenomenology’s restitution of the concept of essence become clear. In his Formale und transzendentale Logik (“Formal and Transcendental Logic”) Husserl gives an account of his relation to Descartes and to transcendental philosophy. He sees Descartes as the originator of transcendental philosophy and accepts this origin as valid for himself as well, for “all objective knowledge must be founded on the single apodictic givenness . . . of the ego cogito.”23 But be calls it a great error that Descartes saw in this ego a “primary, indubitably existing particle of the world” and deduced the rest of the world from it. This “realism” on Descartes’ part, according to Husserl, is a naïve prejudice with which phenomenology cannot concur.24 On the other hand, the Kantian critique of reason “erred” in directing itself toward the constitution of the given spatio-temporal world rather than toward “all possible worlds.”25 Thus, for Husserl, Kant’s critical thought remained caught in “mundane” realism. Phenomenology insisted on distinguishing itself from the start from this critical thought: Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, pp. 237 and 241. Husserl, Ideen, p. 13. 23 Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, p. 201. 24 Ibid., p. 202. 25 Ibid., p. 225. 21 22

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“Phenomenology cannot distance itself from critical thought, because it was never at one with it.”26 Now, it is precisely this point — where the ego cogito is construed as an “indubitably existing particle of the world” and at the same time serves as the only springboard into the world — that links Cartesian philosophy with the progressive tendencies of the bourgeoisie. Only when the ego as something really existing in the world becomes the first certainty in the realm of beings can its reason provide the critical standard of real knowledge and serve as the organon for the ordering of life. And only as long as reason is constitutively directed toward empirically given “material” can its spontaneity be more than mere imagination. Once this connection between rational thought and spatio-temporal reality is severed, the “interest of freedom” disappears completely from philosophy. But this severance belongs from the start to the program of the phenomenological reductions. Spatio-temporal facts in their spatio-temporal relevance are excluded from the field of genuine phenomenological study. What remains after the first reduction are the facts of consciousness, a world whose factual quality and richness are “the same” as the “natural” world’s — with one very decisive difference: the phenomenological index modifies the meaning of reality in such a way as to make all facts, as facts of intentional consciousness, of equal validity;27 they are “exemplary” in principle. Thus the whole spatio-temporal world, to which man and the human ego ascribe themselves as subordinate individual realities, acquires the meaning of merely intentional being, that is, being that has the merely secondary and relative meaning of being for a consciousness. It is a being posited by consciousness in its experiences, a being which in principle can be intuited and determined only as that which is identical in the motivated manifolds of appearances but which aside from that is nothing.28 The full import of this reduction of facts to “exemplars” is revealed in the phenomenological definition of the relation of essence and fact in the prehension29 of essence (Wesenserfassung). In a second reduction, the essential content and essential organization of the facts of consciousness are distinguished from their factual being. Thus all contents of Fink, Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik (Berlin-Charlottenburg, 1934), p. 20. 27 Translator’s note: “Gleichgültig” literally means “equivalent” and, as equivalent, “indifferent.” 28 Husserl, Ideen, p. 93. 29 Translator’s note: “Erfassung” literally means, “grasping.” 26

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consciousness function equally as “exemplary”: the elucidation of essence (Wesenserklärung) can take place on the basis of a perception or any other kind of representation — moreover and significantly, “free fantasies acquire a preferential position with respect to perceptions.”30 Essence results as the invariant within the infinitely manifold variations which representational acts undertake with regard to their object. Variation resulting in essence is generated in the freedom of pure fantasy and in the pure consciousness of arbitrariness — of “pure at-all-ness” . . . thereby simultaneously entering a horizon of openly and endlessly manifold free possibilities for ever new variants. This variation is thus fully free, unbound from all a priori facts. It comprises all variants of the openly endless horizon, including the “example” itself, freed of all facticity, as something “arbitrary.” . . . In this variation, they are in a continuous, pervasive synthesis of “coinciding opposites.” But in this very coincidence appears the invariant, that which is necessarily constant in the free and continuously reformed variation, that which is indivisibly the same in that which is other and recurrently other — in short, universal essence — to which all “thinkable” modifications of the example remain tied.31 This text, which leads deep into the inner mechanism of the phenomenological prehension of essence, also provides the best insight into the changed function of the theory of essence. All the decisive concepts which played a role in the theory of essence since its beginnings reappear here, and all in a characteristically changed form. Freedom has become a mark of pure fantasy, as the free arbitrariness of ideational possibilities of variation. The constant, identical, and necessary is no longer sought as the Being of beings but as what is invariant in the infinite manifold of representational modifications of “exemplars.” Possibility is no longer a force straining toward reality; rather, in its open endlessness it belongs to mere imagination.32 As the ego cogito and the essence which appear to it become the object of phenomenology, there is no longer a critical tension between them and factual existence. Phenomenology is therewith in principle a descriptive philosophy: it always aims only at describing what is as it is and as it presents itself, not, for instance, at showing what could and should be. The theoretical radicalness which seemed audible in the call, “To the things themselves!” reveals its quietistic, indeed positivistic, character as phenomenology progresses. The “things” become so for phenomenology only after they have been stripped of their actual materially objective character and Ibid., p. 30. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, p. 219. 32 Husserl, Médiations Cartésiennes (Paris, 1931), p. 49 30 31

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have entered the “levelling” sphere of transcendental subjectivity for which everything is equi-valent (in-different) as a fact of consciousness. In this dimension, speaking of essence no longer means setting reality against its potentiality and what exists against what could be; essence has a purely descriptive and epistemological character. A philosophy that considers “all pre-given beings with their exact evidence” equally “prejudgments”33 no longer has any basis for distinguishing critically among these beings. Universal freedom from presuppositions here becomes equivalent to universal acknowledgment. Phenomenology’s concept of essence is so far removed from any critical significance that it regards both the essential and the inessential, the object of phantasy as well as that of perception, as “facts.” The epistemological antipositivism of this doctrine ill conceals its positivistic orientation. The abatement of the dynamic movement contained in the concept of essence can also be seen in the few remnants of a position on Husserl’s part with regard to knowledge of (spatio-temporal) facticity. The formal epistemological version of the concept of essence lets facticity subsist as a self-contained realm “alongside” the realm of essence. To know it does not involve changing or abolishing any aspect of it, but “only understanding.” “Through my phenomenological reflection, the transcendent world . . . is neither abolished, devalued, nor changed, but only understood. . . .”34 The phenomenological epoché, which was intended to be so much more radical than Descartes’ methodical doubt, contains a quietistic indifference, which regresses behind Descartes, with regard to the established order. With Husserl, concern with the present has become concern with eternity: the eternity of pure science, whose timeless and absolute truth is supposed to provide the present with security. He considers the “spiritual distress” of our time the “most radical distress of life” and declares: We must not sacrifice eternity for the sake of alleviating our distress in the present. We must not bequeath to our descendants an accumulation of distress such that it becomes an ultimately indestructible evil.35 Positivistic indifference, however, is only one way in which the altered function of transcendental philosophy is expressed in phenomenology. Phenomenology appeared on the scene with the radical claim of beginning anew. That phenomenology explicitly speaks once more of “essence” in opposition to “fact” and makes essence the object of an independent “intuition” is a significant novelty that cannot be explained exclusively as a development of the transcendental method. The pathos of the evidence Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, p. 244. Ibid., p. 243. 35 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos, I (1910–11), p. 337. 33 34

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of universal, necessary, and objective truths, the demand of arriving at “the things themselves,” and the renaissance of metaphysics in the wake of phenomenology belong to a new historical trend. While retaining the transcendental approach philosophy professes to be truly concrete and to take concrete objects as its point of departure. A sign of material “objectivity” and diversity can be seen in the renewed consideration of essence as the object of an independent, originally “giving” intuition. It is significant that phenomenology claims that the verification, “meaning,” and truth of cognitive judgments no longer reside on the “side of the subject,” of the ego cogito, but on the “side of the object.” It is the object itself which appears there and whose essence prescribes, as it were, the cognitive acts directed toward it. The phenomenological doctrine of essence binds the transcendental freedom of the ego cogito to objectively pregiven essences and essential objects. This is the point where, within phenomenology, the new situation of thought imposes itself: the introduction of material eidetics, in which the entire perspective is changed. The philosophy of the bourgeois era was founded by Descartes as a subjective and idealist one, and this resulted from an inner necessity. Every attempt to ground philosophy in objectivity, in the sphere of material reality, without attacking the real presuppositions of its conceptual character, i.e. without integrating into the theory a practice aimed at transformation, necessarily surrenders its rationally critical character and becomes heteronomous. This fate befell the material doctrine of essence; it led, just as with positivism, to the subjection of theory to the “given” powers and hierarchies. With regard to knowledge, the basic meaning of the intuition of essence is that it “lets itself be given” its object, that it passively accepts it and binds itself to it as “something absolutely given.”36 That which gives itself in evidence “congruent unity” (Deckungseinheit) is “at the same time absolute Being, and the object that is now the object of such Being, such pure essence, is to an ideal degree adequately given.”37 The intuition of essence is (despite the “freedom” of ideational variations) receptive. At the apex of philosophy, the receptivity of the intuition of essence replaces the spontaneity of the comprehending understanding that is inseparable from the idea of critical reason. The sacrifice of the idea of critical reason paved the way to resignation for the doctrine of essence, to its gradual transition to a new ideology. Bourgeois philosophy lost the Archimedian point where it had anchored the freedom of the knowing individual, and without it, it has no basis from which the weapon of critique can be employed against the claims of specific facts and hierarchies to be “essential.” The material doctrine of essence began with the elaboration of a new ethics, which was outlined in Ibid., p. 315. Scheler, Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, in Schriften aus dem Nachlass (Berlin, 1933), I, p. 288.

36 37

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opposition to Kant’s ethics. The law-like character of ethical valuation no longer resides in the obedience of the autonomous individual to a freely selfgiven, absolutely obligatory, “norm,” but follows, to the contrary, “from the effectiveness of personally structured prototypes and antitypes.”38 I assert, in other words’ that value systems, and especially the systems of norms and laws that depend on them and which man obeys or disobeys, are in the last analysis always to be reduced to personal prototypes, to value patterns in the form of a person. We do not choose them, for they possess us and attract us before we can choose.39 Material value-ethics (Wertethik) becomes the ethics of personal prototypes, where the norms of action are no longer given by individual or universal reason, but are instead received; here, too, the autonomy of freedom is replaced by receptive heteronomy. This is part of the annunciation of the ideology of the monopoly-capitalist period, in which domination by the most powerful economic groups is effected by means of the delegation of power to prototypical leader personalities and in which the interests of these groups are concealed by means of the image of an essentially personal order of values (leadership and following, status order, racial elite, and so forth). The intuition of essence helps to set up “essential” hierarchies in which the material and vital values of human life occupy the lowest rank, while the types of the saint, the genius, and the hero take first place. Renunciation, sacrifice, and humility are considered “essential” as the central values of the individual, while “blood and soil” are supposed to constitute the “essence” of the nation (Volkstum). We shall not delineate here the further development of these theories. It was our intention only to indicate their conceptual links to the material doctrine of essence.40 The function of the intuition of essence in material eidetics leads to the abdication of the critical freedom of reason, to the cancellation of its autonomy. From Descartes on, the idea of the autonomy of reason was linked to the progressive tendencies of the bourgeoisie. Its restriction to abstract cognitive reason characterized the retreat of these tendencies. In the epoch of monopoly capitalism, reason is replaced by the acquiescent Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie, Husserl, ed., II (Halle, 1916), p. 465. 39 Scheler, “Vorbilder und Führer,” in Zur Ethik und Erkenntnislehre, op. cit., pp. 163–4. 40 A characteristic utterance from a representative source makes the connection obvious: “recent philosophy says that intuitive ‘seeing of essences’ (Wesensschau) is the immediate intuition of what is lawlike. This quality finds its strongest expression in the personality of Adolf Hitler . . . . The Führer possesses not only the infinitely valuable capacity of seeing what is essential in things, but also, to a great extent, the instinct for bold and accurately timed action.”—Otto Dietrich, Die philosophischen Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus (Breslau, 1935), pp. 36–7. 38

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acknowledgment of “essential” givens, in whose verification reason initially plays only a derivative role, and subsequently none at all. It is material eidetics against which the positivist attack on the concept of essence was directed. The positivist opposition to the “metaphysics” of the doctrine of essence conceived itself primarily as an epistemological critique: our experience of reality (reality by no means being identified with the immediately given) does not at all justify the assumption of two ontologically different “worlds,” an assumption presupposed by the opposition of thing and appearance, essence and fact. There is no fact that compels or even justifies us in making such a contrast between two irreducible realities. . . . We arrive at a satisfactory picture of the world only when we accord everything real, the contents of consciousness as well as all Being outside of consciousness, the same sort and the same degree of reality, without any distinction. All things are in the same sense self-subsistent, yet all are in the same sense interdependent.41 With this contention, positivism takes a decisive step beyond epistemological empiricism. For with its concept of fact, the facticity of an object of knowledge establishes not only its “reality” but simultaneously its cognitive equi-valence to every other reality. With respect to knowledge, all facts are as such equi-valent. The world of facts is, so to speak, one-dimensional. The real is “absolutely (schlechthin) real” and as such precludes any metaphysical or critical transcendence toward essence. There is only one reality, which is always essence and cannot be decomposed into essence and appearance. There are, to be sure, many sorts of real objects, perhaps even infinitely many, but there is only one sort of reality, and all of them partake of it equally.42 Here the thesis of the essentiality of the facts is associated with absolute acknowledgment of reality, “which is always essence.” Cognition, freed from the tension between facts and essence, becomes recognition. The very theory that intended to eliminate from science the concept of essence makes the same sacrifice of critical reason performed by phenomenological eidetics in liberating essence from all opposition to spatio-temporal facts and arriving at an equi-valence of all facts for transcendental consciousness. When all facts are indiscriminately held to be essential, and when each fact is indiscriminately held to be an essence, philosophy’s attitude toward reality is fundamentally identical. To be sure, positivism 41 42

M. Schlick, “Erscheinung und Wesen,” Kant-Studien, XXIII, No. 2–3 (Berlin, 1918), p. 206. M. Schlick, Allemeine Erkenntnislehre (Berlin, 1918), p. 205.

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comprehended the critical and moral motivation of the theory of essence: “One kind of Being is considered higher, more genuine, more noble, and more important than the other, i.e. an evaluative conception has been introduced.”43 But for it this is only a confusion of the “evaluative viewpoint with the logical viewpoint,” the proton pseudos or false premise of a scientific theory. Positivism adheres to the bourgeois ideal of presuppositionless, pure theory, in which the absence of “ethical neutrality” or the commitment of taking a position signifies delinquency in rigor. Compared with the ideology which material eidetics became, in which the language of the essential priority of specific values concealed their establishment by regressive social interests, positivism retains a certain critical tendency. But the world of “absolutely real” facts is dominated by powers concerned with the preservation of this form of reality, in the interest of small and powerful economic groups, against the already real possibility of another form of reality; and the tension between essence and appearance determines the historical image of reality in the shape of universal social contradiction. Under these conditions a theory for which reality is “always essence” can only be one of resignation. As with phenomenological eidetics, the positivist annulment of the opposition of essence and fact is not a new beginning, but an end. *** The theme of the philosophical theories of the last decades has been the reconsideration of bourgeois thought’s traditional preoccupation with absolutely certain, unconditioned, universally valid knowledge. Concern for the self-certain critical freedom of the individual was transformed into this epistemological ideal. The various forms of transcendental reduction reflect the stages of the historical development of this thought up to its adaptation to the anti-individualistic and antirationalistic ideology of the present. From it both the “interest of freedom” and interest in the true happiness of the individual have disappeared. The social groups which during their rise to power developed and supported these interests oppose them under present forms of domination. The critical impulses in the theory of essence, abandoned by eidetics as well as positivism, have been incorporated into materialist theory. Here, however, the concept of essence takes on a new form. This theory conceived concern with the essence of man as the task of a rational organization of society, to be achieved through practice that alters its present form. Materialist theory thus transcends the given state of fact and moves toward a different potentiality, proceeding from immediate appearance to the essence that appears in it. But here appearance

M. Schlick, “Erscheinung und Wesen,” op. cit., p. 194.

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and essence become members of a real antithesis arising from the particular historical structure of the social process of life. The essence of man and of things appears within that structure; what men and things could genuinely be appears in “bad,” “perverted” form. At the same time, however, appears the possibility of negating this perversion and realizing in history that which could be. This antagonistic character of the historical process as it is today turns the opposition of essence and appearance into a dialectical relationship and this relationship into an object of the dialectic. Materialist theory takes up the concept of essence where philosophy last treated it as a dialectical concept — in Hegel’s Logic. For Hegel appearance and essence are two modes of being which stand in reciprocal relation to one another, so that the existence of appearance presupposes the suppression of merely self-subsistent essence. Essence is essence only through appearing, that is, through emerging from its mere self-subsistence: “Essence must appear.” And appearance, as the appearance of what is in itself, becomes “what the thing in itself is, or its truth.”44 “By this token essence is neither in back of nor beyond appearance; rather, existence is appearance because it is essence that exists.”45 Hegel conceives of essence as a process in which “mediated being” is posited through the overcoming of unmediated being; essence has a history. And the critical theme of the theory of essence is reactivated in the meaning of this history, in this movement from unmediated “Being” through “essence” to mediated “existence.” “When, further, it is said that all things have an essence, what is being expressed is that they are not in reality what they show themselves to be,” “that their immediate existence does not correspond to what they are in themselves.”46 The movement of essence has the task of doing away with this bad immediacy and positing the sphere of beings (das Seiende) as that which it is in itself: “Now the process of reality is itself of this sort. Reality is not simply something which is immediately, but rather, as essential Being, it is the overcoming of its own immediacy and therefore mediates itself with itself.”47 Essence is conceived as something which “has become,” as a “result” that itself must reappear as a result and that enters into relation with the dynamic categories of the inessential, illusion, and appearance. In this way, it is conceived as part of a process which takes place between unmediated Being, its overcoming and preservation in essence (as its being-in-itself) and the realization of this essence. But with Hegel the process remains ontological; it is the Being of beings which undergoes it and is its subject. It thereby proves itself to be Logos, “reason.” The movement through

Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, in Werke, original edition, IV, pp. 119–20. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, I, VI, p. 260 (§131). 46 Ibid., pp. 224 and 242 (gloss to §112 and gloss 2 to §119). 47 Ibid., p. 292 (gloss to §146). 44 45

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which unmediated Being is “recollected”48 to essence as to its being-initself, “reflection,” in which immediacy is overcome and posited again as mediated existence, is a determination of Being itself, of Being as essence. “Essence as such is one with its reflection and not distinguished from the latter’s own movement.”49 It is not man who recollects essence, who grasps the world of beings which confronts him, overcomes its bad immediacy and posits it anew through the knowledge of essence; rather, for Hegel all this occurs within rational Being itself. Man participates in this process only as the subject of cognition, insofar as he himself is rational Being. Hegel’s conception of essence already contains all the elements of a dynamic historical theory of essence, but in a dimension where they cannot be effective. Essence is for Hegel a movement, but a movement in which there is no longer any actual change, a movement which takes place within itself. “Essence is the absolute unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself; the process of its determination thus remains within this unity and is neither a becoming nor a transition to something else”; it is “the movement of becoming and of transition which remains within itself.”50 Hegel transposes the tension between what could be and what exists, between being-initself (essence) and appearance, into the very structure of Being; as such it is always prior to all states of fact. Hegel’s theory of essence remains transcendental. *** When the materialist dialectic as social theory confronts the opposition of essence and appearance, the concern for man which governs it gives the critical motif in the theory of essence a new sharpness. The tension between potentiality and actuality, between what men and things could be and what they are in fact, is one of the dynamic focal points of this theory of society. It sees therein not a transcendental structure of Being and an immutable ontological difference but a historical relationship which can be transformed in this life by real men; the incongruity of potentiality and actuality incites knowledge to become part of the practice of transformation. That appearance does not immediately coincide with essence, that self-subsistent potentialities are not realized, that the particular stands in conflict with the general, that chance on the one hand and blind necessity on the other rule the world — these conditions represent tasks set for men’s rational practice. For the theory associated with this practice, the statement that all science Translator’s note: “Sich erinnern,” the word for “to remember” or “to recollect” literally means, “to go into oneself.” That is, in remembering one is re-membered or re-collected by returning to oneself from a state of externality, dispersion, or alienation. 49 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 79. 50 Ibid., pp. 5 and 14. 48

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would be superfluous when “the form of appearance and the essence of things immediately coincided”51 has a new meaning. What is the significance here of the divergence of essence and appearance, and of what sort is the process of transcendence from appearance to essence? To the interest governing the materialist dialectic, its object, the totality of the process of social evolution, appears as an inherently multidimensional, organized structure. It is by no means the case that all of its data are equally relevant or “factual.” Some phenomena lie close to the surface, others form part of the central mechanism. From this distinction results a first and still completely formal concretion of essence as what is essential: in a very general sense, essence is the totality of the social process as it is organized in a particular historical epoch. In relation to this process every individual factor, considered as an isolated unit, is “inessential,” insofar as its “essence,” i.e. the concept of the real content of an appearance, can be grasped only in the light of its relation to the totality of the process. Now the latter is structured in a second way; even though they interact, the various levels of social reality nevertheless are grounded in one fundamental level. The manner in which this occurs determines the whole of life. In the current historical period, the economy as the fundamental level has become “essential” in such a way that all other levels have become its “manifestations” (Erscheinungsform). In materialist theory the difference between appearance (manifestation) and essence takes on a third significance, one which permits a further concretion of its object. Basic to the present form of social organization, the antagonisms of the capitalist production process, is the fact that the central phenomena connected with this process do not immediately appear to men as what they are “in reality,” but in masked, “perverted” form. In the cases of work relations, the divisions of the social and political hierarchy, the institutions of justice, education, and science, the form in which they appear conceals their origin and their true function in the total social process. To the extent that individuals and groups base their actions and thoughts on immediate appearances, the latter are, of course, not “mere” appearances but themselves factors essential to the functioning of the process and to the maintenance of its organization. Nevertheless, in the course of the process a stage is reached where it is possible to comprehend the essence in the manifestation and to understand that the difference between essence and appearance is a historical constellation of social relationships. The nature of this difference and the necessarily dichotomous character it gives to materialist theory will be discussed below. The three meanings which we have indicated here of the difference between essence and appearance in materialist theory permit an initial

Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Hamburg: Meissner, 1921–2), III, 2, p. 352.

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understanding of those characteristics fundamental to the dialectical concept of essence. The transcendence leading from facts to essence is historical. Through it, given facts are understood as appearances whose essence can be comprehended only in the context of particular historical tendencies aiming at a different form of reality. The theory’s historical interest enters constitutively into its conceptual scheme and makes the transcendence of “facts” toward their essence critical and polemical. Measured against their real potentialities, the facts reveal themselves to be the “bad” manifestations of a content which must be realized by doing away with these manifestations in opposition to the interests and powers connected with them. Thus, even in the first form in which we encounter it, the dialectical concept of essence is distinguishable from phenomenology’s conception of neutral essences as well as from positivism’s neutral leveling of essence. In place of a static epistemological relationship of essence to fact emerges a critical and dynamic relationship of essence to appearance as parts of a historical process. Connecting at its roots the problem of essence to social practice restructures the concept of essence in its relation to all other concepts by orienting it toward the essence of man. Concern with man moves to the center of theory; man must be freed from real need and real misery to achieve the liberation of becoming himself. When the essence of man becomes the object of inquiry in this way, the relation of essence and appearance is posited as a historical disproportion (Miss-Verhältnis). At the stage of development that man has presently reached, real potentialities for the fulfillment of human life are at hand in all areas, potentialities which are not realized in the present social structure. Here the concept of what could be, of inherent possibilities, acquires a precise meaning. What man can be in a given historical situation is determinable with regard to the following factors: the measure of control of natural and social productive forces, the level of the organization of labor, the development of needs in relation to possibilities for their fulfillment (especially the relation of what is necessary for the reproduction of life to the “free” needs for gratification and happiness, for the “good and the beautiful”), the availability, as material to be appropriated, of a wealth of cultural values in all areas of life. This definition of essence already implies the whole theory of history that deduces the totality of the conditions of life from the mode of social organization and that at the same time provides the methodological and conceptual tools making possible knowledge of the historical tendencies effective at a particular time. On the basis of this theory the essence of man is understood in connection with those tendencies which have as their goal a new form of social life as the “Idea” of that which practice must realize. Considered this way, the image of man represents not only what can already be made of man today, what “in itself” can already be today, but also — and this is the polemical demand theory raises by means of this concept the essence — the

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real fulfillment of everything that man desires to be when he understands himself in terms of his potentialities. In making this demand of the essence of man, theory points the way from the bad current state of humanity to a mankind that disposes of the goods available to it in such a way that they are distributed in accordance with the true needs of the community. Here men would themselves take on the planning and shaping of the social process of life and not leave it to the arbitrariness of competition and the blind necessity of reified economic relations. The power of the conditions of labor over life, along with the separation of the immediate producers from the means of labor, would be abolished. Instead of life being placed in the service of labor, labor would become a means of life. Instead of degrading cultural values to the rank of privilege and object of “leisure,” men would really make them part of the common existence. These determinations of essence are distinguished from utopia in that theory can demonstrate the concrete roads to their realization and can adduce as evidence those attempts at realization which are already under way. Of course these insights cannot be arrived at through a contemplative attitude; in order to justify them knowledge can have recourse neither to evidence afforded by mere perception nor to a universal system of values in which they are anchored. The truth of this model of essence is preserved better in human misery and suffering and the struggle to overcome them than in the forms and concepts of pure thought. This truth is “indeterminate” and remains necessarily so as long as it is measured against the idea of unconditionally certain knowledge. For it is fulfilled only through historical action, and its concretion can thus results only post festum. When orientation toward historical practice replaces orientation toward the absolute certainty and universal validity of knowledge that prevailed in the traditional doctrine of essence, then the concept of essence ceases to be one of pure theory. Consequently it can no longer be fulfilled in pure thought and pure intuition. This does not mean that it gives up its claim to truth or that it contents itself with a “truth” valid only for particular individuals and groups.52 But its verification occurs only within the total structure of the theory in which it has its place and where it is corroborated by all the other concepts. One criterion for the objective validity of dialectical theory’s separation of essence and appearance is the suitability of its concept for service as the organizing principle in the explanation of a given group of appearances (e.g. constellations of political power among states of a specific era, their alliances, and conflicts.) If the historical structure (e.g. “imperialism”) postulated as “essential” for the explanation of such a grouping makes it possible to comprehend causally the situation both in On the concept of truth in dialectical logic see Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1935), pp. 321ff.

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its individual phases as well as in terms of the tendencies effective within it, then it is really the essential in that manifold of appearances. This determination of essence is true; it has held good within the theory. Yet the theory of which it is a part is itself at the same time a factor in the historical struggles that it aims to comprehend: only in them can the essential theoretical truths be ultimately verified.53 And from this very historicity of dialectical concepts grows a new kind of “universal validity” and objectivity. The materialist concept of essence is a historical concept. Essence is conceivable only as the essence of a particular “appearance,” whose factual form is viewed with regard to what it is in itself and what it could be (but is not in fact). This relation, however, originates in history and changes in history. To every attempt to “historicize” the concept of essence, the traditional doctrine of essence has objected that viewing the factually given appearance with regard to what it is in itself presupposes “having” this being-in-itself. In other words, according to this view, “measuring” the appearance against its essence, indeed, merely referring to a being as an “appearance” that does not immediately coincide with what it is in itself, presupposes prior acquaintance with the essence through intuition. Since Plato’s theory of Ideas, this has been a principal motive for establishing the concept of essence as an a priori one. In truth, an a priori element is at work here, but one confirming the historicity of the concept of essence. It leads back into history rather than out of it. The immemorially acquired image of essence was formed in mankind’s historical experience, which is preserved in the present form of reality so that it can be “remembered” and “refined” to the status of essence. All historical struggles for a better organization of the impoverished conditions of existence, as well as all of suffering mankind’s religious and ethical ideal conceptions of a more just order of things, are preserved in the dialectical concept of the essence of man, where they have become elements of the historical practice linked to dialectical theory. There can also be experience of potentialities that have never been realized. They can be derived from reality as forces and tendencies. The a priori nature of the concept of essence has by no means always been comprehended transcendentally and suprahistorically. And the traces of the past within the concept of essence can be understood as an allusion to a historical condition,54 as in Aristotle’s notion of essence as “that which Being was” and Hegel’s notion of the “recollection” of Being to essence.55 Hegel speaks of essence as of “timelessly past” Being. Past, because it is an image of being-in-itself that no longer corresponds to immediate existence; timeless, because recollection has preserved it and On the distinction between confirmation and efficacy and the differentiation from pragmatism that it permits, see ibid., pp. 342–3. 54 Hegel, Enzyklopädie, p. 225 (§112). 55 Aristotle, Met. 1030 a and Hegel Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 3. 53

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kept it from disappearing into the past. In idealist philosophy the timeless past dominates the concept of essence. But when theory associates itself with the progressive forces of history, the recollection of what can authentically be becomes a power that shapes the future. The demonstration and preservation of essence become the motive idea of practice aimed at transformation. Here the thorough difference of the materialist concept of essence from that of idealist philosophy becomes clear for the first time. Just as the content of the materialist notion is historical and oriented toward practice, the way in which it is arrived at is also determined by historical and practical presuppositions. It is not an object of the contemplative receptivity of perception, nor is it a synthesis performed by the spontaneity of pure understanding. Rather, it is determined within the framework set by the historical goals with which materialist theory is linked. Not only do the interests resulting from these goals play a role in establishing what is essential, they enter into the content of the concept of essence. And yet the theory’s particular interests are fulfilled in a real “universality,” that of the general interest, whose material objectivity (in contrast to the formal “universal validity” of the idealist concept of essence) allows essence to validate itself as essence. Even positivism has acknowledged that theory is determined by interests: “Trends in scientific research are . . . never socially neutral, even though they are not always at the center of social conflict”; the sort of “propositional systems” set up depends on the “social situation” of “the group that promotes or tolerates this research.”56 But positivism concludes from this only that systems of hypotheses may be set up in more than one way and that all types can satisfy the requirements of internal consistency and accordance with “protocol sentences.” It either holds the theories’ different interests (like the “facts”) to be indifferent with respect to knowledge or, to compensate for the indeterminacy factor, incorporates them into the propositional system as “personal” evaluations made by the scientist. In contrast to all other theories, materialist theory, precisely by virtue of its guiding interest, advances a claim to truth for which valuefree positivism affords absolutely no basis. Of the many social interests, it represents one and only one, which claims verifiability as “general” and “objective.” Its claim differs completely from those put forth by all other philosophical theories, for it rejects the adequacy of a priori logical or epistemological validation. To be sure, it can be negatively delimited from all antirationalistic theories in that all its propositions must justify themselves before men’s critical reason, and the “interest of freedom,” originally the foundation of the philosophy of reason, is thus preserved in materialist theory. The source of materialist theory’s substantial difference

O. Neurath, Empirische Soziologie (Wien, 1931), pp. 128 and 132.

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is that its particular interests aim at an organization of life in which the individual’s fate depends no longer on chance and the blind necessity of uncontrolled economic relationships but rather on planned shaping of social potentialities. In such a society particular interests can be integrated into a universality which is thus concrete as a community and no longer abstract as a “universal.” For the material conditions of life, previously unmastered, can now be incorporated into a general plan. They can be organized through and by individuals’ social freedom; that is, they can be linked to the “essence” of the individual. At the end of the process, when former social antagonisms have been overcome in such a community, the “subjectivity” of materialist theory becomes objectivity — in the form of an existence where the interests of individuals are truly preserved in the community. But this material universality of theory presupposes a complete change in its subject, which is no longer the isolated, abstract individual at the basis of idealist philosophy. Consciousness no longer stands at the beginning of thought as the fundamentum inconcussum of truth, and it no longer stands at the end as the bearer of the freedom of pure will and pure knowledge. Theory has moved to another subject; its concepts are generated by the consciousness of specific groups and individuals who are part of the fight for a more rational organization of society. Only when it has changed its historical standpoint in this way can theory meet the desideratum for which philosophy has struggled in vain in the last few decades. Dilthey’s lifework can be regarded as an attempt to replace the abstract epistemological subject, who has been the starting point for philosophy since Descartes and in whose veins runs “not real blood but the diluted lymph of reason as mere mental activity,” with concrete historical man in his “real life process.”57 Since Dilthey, the various trends of Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and existentialism have concerned themselves with the concrete “historicity” of theory; phenomenology, too, as was mentioned above, was conceived as the philosophy of concrete material objectivity (Sachlichkeit). All such efforts had to fail, because they were linked (at first unconsciously, later consciously) to the very interests and aims whose theory they opposed. They did not attack the presupposition of bourgeois philosophy’s abstractness: the actual unfreedom and powerlessness of the individual in an anarchic production process. Consequently, the place of abstract reason was taken by an equally abstract “historicity,” which amounted at best to a relativism addressed indifferently to all social groups and structures. Materialist theory moves beyond historical relativism in linking itself with those social forces which the historical situation reveals to be Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, in Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1923), I, p. xviii.

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progressive and truly “universal.” It understands all theory as an element of the social process of life, borne by particular historical interests. Hitherto these interests have governed theory primarily “behind its back,” unconsciously. As long as the production process operates unconsciously and by chance, so to speak, it reproduces life only in a bad form. It changes its content entirely when the reproduction of life is qualitatively (as well as quantitatively) improved by becoming a task for conscious planning. Similarly, the conceptual content of theory changes when its interest is consciously directed toward this task, for it then represents in its true form what formerly functioned as an unconscious motivation. The relationship of the historical concept of essence to traditional general concepts of essence is of this type. Behind the traditional concepts, too, lie concrete historical aims, but in the course of tradition they were watered down to general formal structural concepts and lost their dynamism. Once understood again as historical concepts, the original critical tension between them and reality is restored. What is true in them is preserved in the materialist notion of essence and expressed in accordance with the changed historical situation. Aristotle’s doctrine of the essence of man is not comprehensible simply through his general “definition” of man as zwon logon econ; zwon politukon (zoon logon echon; zoon politikon), for it presupposes his metaphysics as well as his ethics, politics, rhetoric, and psychology, from which come the notions logos, politikon, zoon. It presupposes no less his postulation of domination and servitude as modes of Being and his view of the role of material labor in the totality of the areas of life. In translating logos as ratio and defining man as “rational” late antiquity and the Middle Ages integrated man’s being into Christian theology’s worldview. The meaning of the Aristotelian definition was thereby completely transformed, even though the definitions are literally the same. In a later period, the appeal to reason as that which is essential in man served to proclaim the freedom of the autonomous individual in bourgeois society. But at the same time, when man is conceived to be free only as a rational being, whole dimensions of existence become “inessential,” of no bearing on man’s essence. For Kant, “being master or servant” is one of the “inessential (ausserwesentlich) characteristics” of man,58 designating only an accidental and “external relation of man.” The connection, essential to Aristotle, between being master or servant and the particular mode of possessing logos,59 reason, is completely dissolved. That relationships which were originally held to be essential should become inessential indicates a total change in the content of the concept of essence, even though reason is maintained as a dimension of the concept. That domination and servitude now appear contingent and Kant, Logik, VIII. p. 374. Aristotle, Politics 1254 b 20ff.

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inessential ensues from the form of human social organization which the new concept of essence reflects. With respect to the essence of man, the contingency of the master-servant relationship results from the blind necessity which the power of reified conditions of labor over the producers appears to be. Contingency is recognized as such, but its cause is not yet understood. Since “external relations” are not organized in accordance with man’s needs and potentialities, with his “essence,” they remain as a contingency outside the philosophical determination of essence as well. This determination of the essence of man, which does not include “external relations” such as domination and servitude or the place of the individual in the material process of production in man’s “essential characteristics,” is true insofar as it comprehends man as he actually exists in the bourgeois epoch. Beyond that, it has no validity. When the associated individuals themselves have taken over the direction of the life process and have made the totality of social relations the work of their reason and their freedom, what man is in himself will be related to his existence in a new way. The formerly contingent and “inessential” will now represent the fulfillment of the most authentic potentialities. Man will then have to be “defined” not as a free rational being in opposition to contingent conditions of life but as the free and rational creator of his conditions of life, as the creator of a better and happier life. So far we have attempted to show the significance of the problem of essence for materialist theory chiefly in terms of the concept of the essence of man. This has been by no means an arbitrary example. According to the theory’s governing concern for real, concretely existing men, the questions raised by this concept are really essential to knowledge, and the theory must be linked to them at every point: not in the abstract form in which they have been presented here but as objective circumstances of a given state of the whole society, which in each case is concretized and transformed in historical practice. In this context, the way some other concepts of the theory of essence develop and take on new meaning will be outlined in what follows. The essence that the theory attempts to conceptualize appeared first in the form of man’s potentiality within a particular historical situation, in conflict with his immediate existence. The connection of the concept of essence with that of potentiality is as old as the problem of essence itself; it received its first explicit philosophical interpretation in Aristotle’s notion of dunami? (dynamis). In the postmedieval philosophical tradition the “potential” nature of essence increasingly lost its connection with the notions of force, striving, and tendency and became a matter of (formal and transcendental) logic. Hegel reinstated the notion of “real possibility” (potentiality) in his theory of essence: Formal possibility is reflection-into-itself (Reflexion-in-sich) only as abstract identity, the fact that something is not self-contradictory. But to

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the extent that one goes into the attributes, the circumstances, and the conditions of a thing in order to know its possibility, one is no longer restricting oneself to formal possibility but considering its real possibility. This real possibility is itself immediate existence.60 Real possibility exists. Therefore it can be known as such by theory, and as known it can be taken up by the practice for which theory is the guide and be transformed into reality. For Hegel the existence of a thing’s real possibility consists in the “existing manifold of circumstances which relate to it.”61 The idealist dialectic considers this manifold “indifferent”; in the materialist dialectic, in keeping with the latter’s historical interests, it is accentuated and operates as a tendency in men’s actions and in the course of things. The basis for its determination has already been indicated. Reality, where man’s essence is determined, is the totality of the relations of production. It is no mere “existing manifold of circumstances,” but rather a structure whose organization can be analyzed, and within which it is possible to distinguish between form and content, essence and appearance, the concealed and the obvious. Its content is the maintenance and reproduction of society as a whole — the actual process of production and reproduction, based on a given level of the productive forces and of technology. Its form is the turnover of the production process as the realization of capital. Form and content can be separated, for the former is only a particular historical pattern in which the latter is realized; there are tendencies toward the abolition of the form at work in the content. When considered with regard to them, distinguished from its given form, and seen with a view to a different form, in which it would no longer function as the realization of capital, the content enters the mode of real possibility. In doing so it loses none of its reality, while preserving all its wealth, the full range of the productive forces it has acquired, and the power and amplitude of the work techniques it has developed. All this is, in fact, a condition for the transition to the new form. The content is reality in a “bad” form; it is possibility in that its emancipation from this form and its realization in a new form are still to be accomplished through men’s social practice — but, given the conditions at hand, this transformation can be accomplished. This is what makes the possibility real. Thus the dialectical relationship between reality and possibility is fulfilled: “When real possibility overcomes itself, something double is overcome, for it is itself double in being both reality and possibility.”62 Reality is overcome by being comprehended as the mere possibility of another reality; possibility is overcome by being realized (in this different reality). The relationships of Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 208. Ibid., p. 209. 62 Ibid., p. 210. 60 61

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possibility and reality and of form and content typify a trait of all the ways in which the opposition of essence and appearance appears in the materialist dialectic: both members of the relationship are real in the emphatic sense. The form, for instance, is no less real than the content; it does not exist only “subjectively” or “ideally.” All such distinctions take place and change within the framework of the totality of society. This framework itself is never transcended, not even in concepts such as essence and potentiality. But its historical appearance is always shaped by particular interests and forces and is transcended under the direction of new ones. Essence and appearance belong to different spheres of interests and forces, as do potentiality and actuality, content and form. Nevertheless, the distinctions are not on that account indifferent or arbitrary; they apply not only to those who formulate them but also to their opponents. For these distinctions conceive the social totality from the standpoint of a set of goals toward which the particular goals of individuals can be transcended by being preserved in the real universality of a community. The conceptual scheme of materialist theory in its present form exhibits a dialectical dichotomy grounded in the structure of its object. It derives from the antagonistic character of the social life process as the identity of the processes of production on the one hand and the realization of capital on the other. From this basis the antagonism permeates all areas of life. It brings about the differentiation of true and false consciousness (the former represented by correct theory, which transcends the form of the production process in the direction of its content, the latter by consciousness that remains on this side of such transcendence and considers the historical form of the production process to be eternally valid). Correspondingly, there are two different modes in which phenomena appear to and for consciousness. The concealment and distortion of decisive social matters in the consciousness of the subjects of the production process are caused by the independence from the subject attained by the conditions and relations of work, a process that necessarily follows from the capitalist form of production. This is why it is necessary to distinguish between essence and appearance in all their various forms. To the consciousness of men dominated by reified social relations, the latter appear in a distorted form which does not correspond to their true content — their origin and their actual function in this process. But they are not by that token in any way “unreal.” It is precisely in their distorted form and as motives and “foci” in the calculating consciousness of those groups who control the process of production that they are very real factors which at first confront the immediate producers, degraded to mere objects, as independent, blindly necessary powers. Theory, which aims at overcoming this distortion, has the task of moving beyond appearance to essence and explicating its content as it appears to true consciousness. At this level the tension between essence and appearance, between authentic potentiality and immediate existence, is reflected anew in the

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concrete notions with which theory attempts to grasp the social process of life in its antagonistic character. These concepts belong to two levels; some deal with phenomena in their reified form as they appear immediately, and others aim at their real content, as it presents itself to theory once its phenomenal form has been transcended. Thus Marxian economics works with two different sets of concepts, corresponding to these levels. One set describes the economic process in its immediate appearance as production and reproduction, that is, it abstracts from its character as a process of capital realization. To this group belong concepts such as entrepreneurial profit and wages, employer and employee. The relations they designate are “real,” even though they are only the forms in which things appear; they determine the thought and action of men insofar as they are the subjects and objects of the production process. The second set comprehends the same process in its antagonistic unity of production process and process of capital realization and relates every individual factor to this totality. The relations represented in the first set by such concepts as wages and entrepreneur, are here grasped by means of categories in which the class character of this method of production is expressed (for instance, surplus value). Both groups of concepts are equally necessary to the understanding of the antagonistic reality; nevertheless, they are not on the same level. In terms of dialectical theory, the second group of concepts, which has been derived from the totality of the social dynamic, is intended to grasp the essence and the true content of the manifestations which the first group describes as they appear. The dialectical concepts transcend the given social reality in the direction of another historical structure which is present as a tendency in the given reality. The positive concept of essence, culminating in the concept of the essence of man, which sustains all critical and polemical distinctions between essence and appearance as their guiding principle and model, is rooted in this potential structure. In terms of the positive concept of essence, all categories that describe the given form of existence as historically mutable become “ironic”: they contain their own negation. In economic theory this irony finds its expression in the relationship of the two sets of concepts. If, for instance, it is said that concepts such as wages, the value of labor, and entrepreneurial profit are only categories of manifestations behind which are hidden the “essential relations” of the second set of concepts, it is also true that these essential relations represent the truth of the manifestations only insofar as the concepts which comprehend them already contain their own negation and transcendence — the image of a social organization without surplus value. All materialist concepts contain an accusation and an imperative. When the imperative has been fulfilled, when practice has created men’s new social organization, the new essence of man appears in reality. Then the current historical form of the antithesis of essence and appearance, which

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expresses primarily the externality, lack of planning, and blind necessity of the present material conditions of life in the face of the individuals’ true needs and potentialities, will have disappeared. But this does not mean that all grounds for the distinction between essence and appearance, potentiality and immediate existence would cease. Nature remains a realm of necessity; the overcoming of need (Not), and the satisfaction of human wants will remain a struggle — a struggle, to be sure, which it will only then be possible to conduct in a manner worthy of man and without historically obsolete forms of social conflict. Into it will go the theoretical energy which has hitherto spent itself in the concern with absolutely certain and universally valid knowledge. The characteristics of essence no longer need to be stabilized in timeless eternal forms. The truth according to which the particular interests are preserved in the universal, the resulting objective “validity” of the universal, and the transparent rationality of the life process, will all have to prove themselves in the practice of the associated individuals and no longer in an absolute consciousness divorced from practice. Originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. V (1936).

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“Subject and Object” Theodor Adorno The starting point for “Subject and Object” is the dichotomy between subjectivity (or consciousness) and object-hood, especially material object-hood. On the one hand, Adorno rejects the idea that these two categories can be neatly separated. On the other hand, he thinks that such hypostatizations (frozen distortions, often separations) broadcast true sociological information, albeit in encoded form. With respect to the false-but-diagnostically-significant notion of pure subjectivity, the target is Kant’s “transcendental subject.” With respect to that of pure object-hood, it is Kant’s “transcendental object” first and foremost, but Adorno also has in mind naïve materialism more generally (or reductive physicalism), be it logical positivist or Marxist. Kant’s position, transcendental idealism, was a response to Hume. Kant held that for experience of the type lauded by empiricists to be possible in the first place (and it plainly is, he thought), it would have to be that otherwiseformless sensuous content (i.e. pure object) is rationally synthesized, a priori, into unified, spacio-temporally located objects of experience, bound by relations of cause and effect. Kant referred to the aspect of reason in virtue of which this occurs (i.e. pure subject) as the “transcendental subject”; the otherwise-formless sensuous content he called the “transcendental object.” Kant also posited the existence of what he called the “transcendental ego.” The transcendental ego is pure subjectivity too, but it is pure practical reason as opposed to pure theoretical reason. Action consistent with pure practical reason, undertaken for its own sake, Kant described as autonomous: free and morally correct, because shaped by the very form of rationality itself. All other action Kant took to be deterministically governed by the hold of causal necessitation that—thanks to the machinations of the transcendental subject—characterizes our experience of phenomenal objects. Kant’s iteration of the subject/object divide is only one of many. Pure subjects and pure objects abound in philosophy, and in modern philosophy

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especially. But Adorno returns most often to Kant. Subject and object cannot be pried apart, he insists. To begin with, subjects are always and only embodied: there is no such thing as a subject that is not also an object. Transcendental subjectivity itself therefore turns out to presuppose material objects that are not themselves synthesized a priori by pure reason. For if there were no such objects, there would be no bearers of reason to do the synthesizing. Admittedly, there exist objects that are not subjects—and in this respect the relationship between subject and object is a-symmetrical. Adorno famously refers to this a-symmetry as the “primacy of the object.” But of the objects that are not subjects, many are artifacts that are made by subjects. Moreover—and more important for Adorno—any object that is an object for a subject is thereby directly mediated, for the subject, by the socially-mediated subjectivity that is his or her embodied consciousness. Even if one does not want to go as far as Kant does in the Critique of Pure Reason in saying that it is transcendental subjectivity that constitutes phenomenal objects as objects, nevertheless it would seem to be that, for subjects, there is no access to objects that bypasses subjectivity. Indeed, the very concept of pure materiality presupposes a subject to conceive it. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno suggests that the most basic epistemic challenge is to ensure that the unavoidable mediation of objects by subjects, in our experience of them, does as little damage as possible. But Adorno doesn’t think that the subject/object dichotomy is simply false. Even if in reality there is no absolute divide between consciousness and materiality, the presumption that there is one communicates true information, he says. The real referent for the concept of the transcendental subject, he asserts, is the collective life of society. In so saying, Adorno cites Durkheim, who had made the point in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Durkheim, however, was simply trying to correct Kant. Kant was right, Durkheim thought, to claim that cognitive experience at the level of the individual presupposes supra-individual subjectivity; he was just wrong to have mistaken a sociological phenomenon for an a priori faculty represented metaphorically as a disembodied agent. Adorno agrees that Kant has made the mistake that Durkheim says he did, but (consistent with Marx) he sees the mistake as revealing precisely a situation of alienation and reified consciousness in which people do not know themselves to be the substance of their own social ground. Specifically, transcendental idealism is an expression, Adorno thinks, of the fact that real subjects shape nature in conditions of estranged labor, as Marx put it in 1844—conditions in which our own creative power has assumed the form of an inexorable Law of Value (as Marx went on to put it in 1867), over which we have no control and which we assume we must blindly obey. Thus Adorno writes: [w]hat shows up faithfully in the doctrine of the transcendental subject

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is the priority of the relations … that have their model in exchange. If the exchange form is the standard social structure, its rationality constitutes people; what they are for themselves, what they seem to be for themselves, is secondary. They are deformed beforehand by the mechanism that has been philosophically transfigured as transcendental. And again: the strictures of Kantian transcendental subjectivity “are the reflective form of the reification of humans that has been objectively accomplished in the social relationship.” The transposition also provides for a glimmer of hope, though, in that the fantasy of a-causal spontaneity signals the real possibility of collective selfdetermination. To quote Adorno again, insofar as transcendental subjectivity is represented as “productive imagination, as pure apperception, finally as free action, [it] … logically anticipates freedom.”

“Subject and Object” To engage in reflections on subject and object poses the problem of stating what we are to talk about. The terms are patently equivocal. “Subject,” for instance, may refer to the particular individual as well as to general attributes, to “consciousness in general” in the language of Kant’s Prolegomena. The equivocation is not removable simply by terminological clarification, for the two meanings have reciprocal need of each other; one is scarcely to be grasped without the other. The element of individual humanity—what Schelling calls “egoity”—cannot be thought apart from any concept of the subject; without any remembrance of it, “subject” would lose all meaning. Conversely, as soon as we reflect upon the human individual as an individual at all, in the form of a general concept—as soon as we cease to mean only the present existence of some particular person— we have already turned it into a universal similar to that which came to be explicit in the idealist concept of the subject. The very term “particular person” requires a generic concept, lest it be meaningless. Even in proper names, a reference to that universal is still implied. They mean one who is called by that name, not by any other; and “one” stands elliptically for “one human being.” If on the other hand we tried to define the two terms so as to avoid this type of complication, we would land in an aporia that adds to the problematic of defining, as modern philosophy since Kant has noted time and again, for in a way, the concepts of subject and object—or rather, the things they intend—have priority before all definition. Defining means

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that something objective, no matter what it may be in itself, is subjectively captured by means of a fixed concept. Hence the resistance offered to defining by subject and object. To determine their meanings takes reflection on the very thing which definition cuts off for the sake of conceptual flexibility. Hence the advisability, at the outset, of taking up the words “subject” and “object” as the well-honed philosophical language hands them to us as a historical sediment—not, of course, sticking to such conventionalism but continuing with critical analysis. The starting point would be the allegedly naive, though already mediated, view that a knowing subject, whatever its kind, was confronting a known object, whatever its kind. The reflection, which in philosophical terminology goes by the name of intentio obliqua, is then a re-relation of that ambiguous concept of the object to a no less ambiguous concept of the subject. The second reflection reflects the first, more closely determining those vague subject and object concepts for their content’s sake. The separation of subject and object is both real and illusory. True, because in the cognitive realm it serves to express the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive development. False, because the resulting separation must not be hypostasized, not magically transformed into an invariant. This contradiction in the separation of subject and object is imparted to epistemology. Though they cannot be thought away, as separated, the pseudos of the separation is manifested in their being mutually mediated—the object by the subject, and even more, in different ways, the subject by the object. The separation is no sooner established directly, without mediation, than it becomes ideology, which is indeed its normal form. The mind will then usurp the place of something absolutely independent—which it is not; its claim of independence heralds the claim of dominance. Once radically parted from the object, the subject reduces it to its own measure; the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself. The picture of a temporal or extratemporal original state of happy identity between subject and object is romantic, however—a wishful projection at times, but today no more than a lie. The undifferentiated state before the subject’s formation was the dread of the blind web of nature, of myth; it was in protest against it that the great religions had their truth content. Besides, to be undifferentiated is not to be one; even in Platonic dialectics, unity requires divers items of which it is the unity. For those who live to see it, the new horror of separation will transfigure the old horror of chaos—both are the ever-same. The fear of yawning meaninglessness makes one forget a fear which once upon a time was no less dreadful: that of the vengeful gods of which Epicurean materialism and the Christian “fear not” wanted to relieve mankind. The only way to accomplish this is through the subject. If it were liquidated rather than sublated in a higher form, the effect would be regression—not just of consciousness, but a regression to real barbarism.

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Fate, myth’s bondage to nature, comes from total social tutelage, from an age in which no eyes had yet been opened by self-reflection, an age in which subject did not yet exist. Instead of a collective practice conjuring that age to return, the spell of the old undifferentiatedness should be obliterated. Its prolongation is the sense of identity of a mind that repressively shapes its Other in its own image. If speculation on the state of reconciliation were permitted, neither the undistinguished unity of subject and object nor their antithetical hostility would be conceivable in it; rather, the communication of what was distinguished. Not until then would the concept of communication, as an objective concept, come into its own. The present one is so infamous because the best there is, the potential of an agreement between people and things, is betrayed to an interchange between subjects according to the requirements of subjective reason. In its proper place, even epistemologically, the relationship of subject and object would lie in the realization of peace among men as well as between men and their Other. Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other. In epistemology, “subject” is mostly understood to mean the “transcendental subject.” According to idealist doctrine, it will either construct the objective world with raw material along Kantian lines or, since Fichte, engender that world itself. The critics of idealism were not the first to discover that this transcendental subject constituting the substance of experience was abstracted from living individuals. It is evident that the abstract concept of the transcendental subject—its thought forms, their unity, and the original productivity of consciousness—presupposes what it promises to bring about actual, live individuals. This notion was present in the idealist philosophies. Kant, in his chapter on psychological paralogisms, did try to develop a constitutive-hierarchic difference in principle between transcendental and empirical subject; but his successors, notably Fichte and Hegel, as well as Schopenhauer, resorted to logical subtleties to cope with the immense difficulty of the circle. They frequently had recourse to the Aristotelian motif that what comes first for our consciousness—in this case, the empirical subject—is not the First in itself, that as its condition or its origin it postulates the transcendental subject. Even Husserl’s polemics against psychologism, along with the distinction of genesis and validity, continues the line of that mode of argument. It is apologetic. The conditioned is to be justified as unconditional, the derived as primary. That nothing can be true except the First—or, as Nietzsche critically phrased it, what has not come into being—is a topos of the entire Western tradition; we find it repeated here. There is no mistaking the ideological function of the thesis. The more individuals are really degraded to functions of the social totality as it becomes more systematized, the more will man pure and simple, man as a principle with the attributes of creativity and absolute domination, be consoled by exaltation of his mind.

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Yet for all that, the question of the transcendental subject’s reality weighs heavier than appears in its sublimation as pure mind, fully so in the critical retraction of idealism. In a sense (although idealism would be the last to admit this) the transcendental subject is more real—that is to say, more determinant for the real conduct of men and for the resulting society—than those psychological individuals from which the transcendental one was abstracted. They have little to say in the world, having on their part turned into appendages of the social apparatus and ultimately into ideology. The living human individual, as he is forced to act in the role for which he has been marked internally as well, is the homo oeconomicus incarnate, closer to the transcendental subject than to the living individual for which he immediately cannot but take himself. To this extent, idealistic theory was realistic and did not need to feel embarrassed when charged with idealism by opponents. What shows up faithfully in the doctrine of the transcendental subject is the priority of the relations—abstractly rational ones, detached from the human individuals and their relationships—that have their model in exchange. If the exchange form is the standard social structure, its rationality constitutes people; what they are for themselves, what they seem to be to themselves, is secondary. They are deformed beforehand by the mechanism that has been philosophically transfigured as transcendental. The supposedly most evident of things, the empirical subject, would really have to be viewed as not yet in existence; in this perspective, the transcendental subject is “constitutive.” This alleged origin of all objects is objectified in rigid timelessness, quite in keeping with Kant’s doctrine of the firm and immutable forms of transcendental consciousness. Its solidity and invariance, which according to transcendental philosophy bring forth all objects or at least prescribe their rule, are the reflective form of the reification of humans that has been objectively accomplished in the social relationship. The fetish character, a socially necessary semblance, has historically turned into the prius of what according to its concept would have it be the posterius. The philosophical problem of constitution has reversed into its mirror image; but in this very reversal, it tells the truth about the historic stage that has been reached—in a truth, of course, which a second Copernican turn might theoretically negate again. True, it has its positive aspect as well: society, as prior, keeps its members and itself alive. The particular individual has the universal to thank for the possibility of his existence—witness thought, which is a general relation, and thus a social one. It is not just as fetish that thought takes priority over the individual. Only in idealism, one side is hypostasized, the side which is incomprehensible except in relation to the other. But the datum, the irremovable skandalon of idealism, will demonstrate time and again the failure of the hypostasis. It is not the old intentio recta that is restored by insight into the object’s primacy; not the trustful bondage to the outside world as it is and as it

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appears this side of critique; not an anthropological state devoid of the selfconsciousness that crystallizes only in the context of re-relating knowledge to the knower. The crude confrontation of subject and object in naive realism is indeed historically necessary and not removable by any act of will. At the same time it is a product of the wrong abstraction, already a piece of reification. Once we have seen through this, we would be unable without self-reflection to drag further a consciousness objectified to itself, a consciousness externalized precisely as such and virtually recoiling outward. The turn to the subject, though aiming at its primacy from the start, does not simply vanish with its revision; not the least reason why the revision occurs is the subjective interest of freedom. Rather, by primacy of the object is meant that the subject, for its part an object in a qualitatively different sense, in a sense more radical than the object, which is not known otherwise than through consciousness, is as an object also a subject. What is known through consciousness must be something; mediation aims at the mediated. But the subject, the epitome of mediation, is the How—never the What, as opposed to the object—that is postulated by any comprehensible idea of its concept. Potentially, even if not actually, objectivity can be conceived without a subject; not so subjectivity without an object. No matter how we define the subject, some entity cannot be juggled out of it. If it is not something—and “something” indicates an irreducible objective moment—the subject is nothing at all; even as actus purus, it still needs to refer to something active. The object’s primacy is the intentio obliqua of the intentio obliqua, not the warmed-over intentio recta. It is the corrective of the subjective reduction, not the denial of a subjective share. The object, too, is mediated; but according to its own concept, it is not so thoroughly dependent on the subject as the subject is on objectivity. Idealism has ignored such differences and has thus coarsened a spiritualization that serves abstraction as a disguise. Yet this occasions a revision of the stand toward the subject which prevails in traditional theory. That theory glorifies the subject in ideology and slanders it in epistemological practice. If one wants to reach the object, on the other hand, its subjective attributes or qualities are not to be eliminated, for precisely that would run counter to the primacy of the object. If the subject does have an objective core, the object’s subjective qualities are so much more an element of objectivity. For it is only as something definite that the object becomes anything at all. In the attributes that seem to be attached to it by the subject alone, the subject’s own objectivity comes to the fore: all of them are borrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta. Even according to idealist doctrine, the subjective attributes are not mere attachments; they are always called for by the definiendum as well, and it is there that the object’s primacy is upheld. Conversely, the supposedly pure object lacking any admixture of thought and visuality is the literal reflection of abstract subjectivity: nothing else but abstraction makes the Other like

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itself. Unlike the undefined substrate of reductionism, the object of undiminished experience is more objective than that substrate. The qualities which the traditional critique of knowledge eliminates from the object and credits to the subject are due, in subjective experience, to the object’s primacy; this is what we were deceived about by the ruling intentio obliqua. Its inheritance went to a critique of experience that realized its historical conditionality, and eventually that of society. For society is immanent in experience, not an allo genos. Nothing but the social self-reflection of knowledge obtains for knowledge the objectivity that will escape it as long as it obeys the social coercions that hold sway in it, and does not become aware of them. Social critique is a critique of knowledge, and vice versa. Primacy of the object can be discussed legitimately only when that primacy—over the subject in the broadest sense of the term—is somehow definable, when it is more than the Kantian thing-in-itself as the unknown cause of the phenomenon. Despite Kant, of course, even the thing-in-itself bears a minimum of attributes merely by being distinct from the categorially predicated; one such attribute, a negative one, would be that of acausality. It suffices to set up an antithesis to the conventional view that conforms with subjectivism. The test of the object’s primacy is its qualitative alteration of opinions held by the reified consciousness, opinions that go frictionlessly with subjectivism. Subjectivism does not touch the substance of naive realism; it only seeks to state formal criteria of its validity, as confirmed by the Kantian formula of empirical realism. One argument for primacy of the object is indeed incompatible with Kant’s doctrine of constitution: that in modern natural science, the ratio peers over the very wall it has built, that it grabs a snippet of what differs with its well-honed categories. Such broadening of the ratio shatters subjectivism. But what defines the prior object as distinct from its subjective trappings is comprehensible in the conditionality of what conditions it, in that which in turn defines the categorial apparatus it is to be defined by, according to the subjectivist pattern. The categorial attributes without which there is no objectivity as yet, according to Kant, are posited also, and thus, if you will, they are really “merely subjective.” The reductio ad hominem thus becomes the downfall of anthropocentrism. That even man as a constituens is man-made—this disenchants the creativity of the mind. But since primacy of the object requires reflection on the subject and subjective reflection, subjectivity—as distinct from primitive materialism, which really does not permit dialectics—becomes a moment that lasts. Ever since the Copernican turn, what goes by the name of phenomenalism—that nothing is known save by a knowing subject—has joined with the cult of the mind. Insight into the primacy of the object revolutionizes both. What Hegel intended to place within subjective brackets has the critical consequence of shattering them. The general assurance that innervations, insights, cognitions are “merely subjective” ceases to convince

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as soon as subjectivity is grasped as the object’s form. Phenomenality is the subject’s magical transformation into the ground of its own definition, its positing as true being. The subject itself is to be brought to objectivity; its stirrings are not to be banished from cognition. But the illusion of phenomenalism is a necessary one. It attests to the all but irresistibly blinding context which the subject produces as a false consciousness, and whose member it is at the same time. Such irresistibility is the foundation of the ideology of the subject. Awareness of a defect—of the limits of knowledge—becomes a virtue, so as to make the defect more bearable. A collective narcissism was at work. But it could not have prevailed with such stringency, could not have brought forth the most potent philosophies, if the fundament had not contained a kernel, albeit a distorted one, of truth. What transcendentalism praised in creative subjectivity is the subject’s unconscious imprisonment in itself. Its every objective thought leaves the subject harnessed like an armored beast in the shell it tries in vain to shed; the only difference is that to such animals it did not occur to brag of their captivity as freedom. We may well ask why human beings did so. Their mental imprisonment is exceedingly real. That as cognitive beings they depend on space, on time, on thought forms, marks their dependence on the species. Those constituents were its precipitation; they are no less valid for that reason. The a prior and society are intertwined. The universality and necessity of those forms, their Kantian glory, is none other than that which unites mankind. It needed them to survive. Captivity was internalized; the individual is no less imprisoned in himself than in the universal, in society. Hence the interest in the reinterpretation of captivity as freedom. The categorial captivity of individual consciousness repeats the real captivity of every individual. The very glance that allows consciousness to see through that captivity is determined by the forms it has implanted in the individual. Their impriso­ nment in themselves might make people realize their social imprisonment; preventing this realization was and is a capital interest of the status quo. It was for the sake of the status quo, something hardly less necessary than the forms themselves, that philosophy was bound to lose its way. Idealism was that ideological even before starting to glorify the world as an absolute idea. The primal compensation already includes the notion that reality, exalted into a product of the supposedly free subject, would vindicate itself as free. Identitarian thought, the covering image of the prevailing dichotomy, has ceased in our era of subjective impotence to pose as absolutization of the subject. What is taking shape instead is the type of seemingly antisubjectivist, scientifically objective identitarian thought known as reductionism. (The early Russell used to be called a “neo-realist.”) It is at present the characteristic form of the reified consciousness—false, because of its latent and thus much more fatal subjectivism. The residue is made to the measure of the ordering principles of subjective reason, and being abstract itself, it

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agrees with the abstractness of that reason. The reified consciousness that mistakes itself for nature is naive: having evolved, and being very much mediated in itself, it takes itself—to speak in Husserl’s terms—for a “sphere of Being of absolute origins” and the Other it has equipped for the desired matter. The ideal of depersonalizing knowledge for objectivity’s sake keeps nothing but the caput mortuum of objectivity. One we concede the object’s dialectical primacy, the hypothesis of an unreflected practical science of the object as residual after deducting the subject will collapse. The subject is then no longer a deductible addendum to objectivity. By the elimination of one of its essential elements, objectivity is falsified, not purified. And indeed, the notion that guides objectivity’s residual concept has its primal image in something posited and man-made—by no means in the idea of that in-itself for which it substitutes the cleansed object. It is the model of profit, rather, that stays on the balance sheet after all costs of production have been subtracted. Profit, however, is the subjective interest, limited and reduced to the form of calculation. What counts for the sober realism of profit thinking is anything but “the matter”; the matter is submerged in the yield. But cognition would have to be guided by what exchange has not maimed, or—for nothing is left unmaimed—by what the exchange processes are hiding. The object is no more a subjectless residuum than what the subject posits. The two contradictory definitions fit into each other: the residue, with which science can be put off as its truth, is the product of their subjectively organized manipulative procedures. Defining what the object is would in turn be part of such arrangements. The only way to make out objectivity is to reflect, at each historic and each cognitive step, on what is then presented as subject and object, as well as on the mediations. In that sense, the object is indeed “infinitely given,” as Neo-Kantianism taught. At times, the subject as unlimited experience will come closer to the object than the filtered residuum shaped to fit the requirements of subjective reason. According to its present polemical value in the philosophy of history, unreduced subjectivity can function more objectively than objectivistic reductions. Not the least respect in which all knowledge under the spell has been hexed is that traditional epistemological theses put the case upside down: Fair is foul, and foul is fair. The objective content of individual experience is not produced by the method of comparative generalization; it is produced by dissolving what keeps that experience, as being biased itself, from yielding to the object without reservations—as Hegel put it: with the freedom that would relax the cognitive subject until it truly fades into the object to which it is akin, on the strength of its own objective being. The subject’s key position in cognition is empirical, not formal; what Kant calls formation is essentially deformation. The preponderant exertion of knowledge is destruction of its usual exertion, that of using violence against the object. Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is weaving around the object. It can do this only

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where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experience. In places where subjective reason scents subjective contingency, the primacy of the object is shimmering through—whatever in the object is not a subjective admixture. The subject is the object’s agent, not its constituent; this fact has consequences for the relation of theory and practice. *** Even after the second reflection of the Copernican turn, there remains some truth in Kant’s most questionable theorem: in the distinction between the transcendent thing in itself and the constituted object. For then the object would be the nonidentical, free from the subjective spell and comprehensible through its self-criticism—if it is there at all, if indeed it is not what Kant outlined in his concept of the idea. Such nonidentity would come quite close to Kant’s thing in itself, even though he insisted on the vanishing point of its coincidence with the subject. It would not be a relic of a disenchanted mundus intelligibilis; rather, it would be more real than the mundus sensibilis insofar as Kant’s Copernican turn abstracts from that nonidentity and therein finds its barrier. But then the object, along Kantian lines, is what has been “posited” by the subject, the web of subjective forms cast over the unqualified Something; and finally it is the law that combines the phenomena, disintegrated by their subjective re-relation into an object. The attributes of necessity and generality that Kant attaches to the emphatic concept of the law have the solidity of things and are impenetrably equal to that social world with which the living collide. It is that law, according to Kant, which the subject prescribes to nature; in his conception, it is the highest peak of objectivity, the perfect expression of the subject as well as of its self-alienation: at the peak of its formative pretension, the subject passes itself off as an object. Paradoxically, however, this is not wrong at all: in fact, the subject is an object as well; it only forgets in its formal hypostasis how and whereby it was constituted. Kant’s Copernican turn hits the exact objectification of the subject, the reality of reification. Its truth content is the by no means ontological but historically amassed block between subject and object. The subject erects that block by claiming supremacy over the object and thereby defrauding itself of the object. As truly nonidentical, the object moves the farther from the subject the more the subject “constitutes” the object. The block on which Kantian philosophy racks its brain is at the same time a product of that philosophy. And yet, due to the chorismos of any material, the subject as pure spontaneity and original apperception, seemingly the absolutely dynamic principle, is no less reified than the world of things constituted after the model of natural science. For by that chorismos the claimed absolute spontaneity is brought to a halt—in itself, though not for Kant; it is a form supposed to be the form of something, but

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one which due to its own character cannot interact with any Something. Its abrupt divorcement from the activity of individual subjects, an activity that has to be devalued as contingent-psychological, destroys Kant’s inmost principle, original apperception. His apriorism deprives pure action of the very temporality without which simply nothing can be understood by “dynamics.” Action recoils into a second-class Being—explicitly, as everyone knows, in the late Fichte’s turn away from the 1794 theory of science. Kant codifies such objective ambiguities in the concept of the object, and no theorem about the object has the right to ignore it. Strictly speaking, primacy of the object would mean that there is no object as the subject’s abstract opposite, but that as such it seems necessary. The necessity of that illusion ought to be removed. No more, to be sure, “is there” really a subject. Its hypostasis in idealism leads to absurdities. They may be summarized like this: that the definition of the subject involves what it is posited against—and by no means only because as a constituens it presupposes a constitutum. The subject itself is an object insofar as existence is implied by the idealist doctrine of constitution—there must be a subject so that it can constitute anything at all—insofar as this had been borrowed in turn, from the sphere of facticity. The concept of what “is there” means nothing but what exists, and the subject as existent comes promptly under the heading of “object.” As pure apperception, however, the subject claims to be the downright Other of all existents. This, too, is the negative appearance of a slice of truth: that the reification which the sovereign subject has inflicted on everything, including itself, is mere illusion. The subject moves into the chasm of itself whatever would be exempt from reification—with the absurd result, of course, of thereby issuing a permit for all other reification. By idealism, the idea of true life is wrongly projected inwards. The subject as productive imagination, as pure apperception, finally as free action, encodes that activity in which human life is really reproduced, and in that activity it logically anticipates freedom. This is why so little of the subject will simply vanish in the object or in anything supposed to be higher, in Being as it may be hypostasized. The self-positing subject is an illusion and at the same time historically very real. It contains the potential of sublating its own rule. The difference between subject and object cuts through both the subject and the object. It can no more be absolutized than it can be put out of mind. Actually, everything in the subject is chargeable to the object; whatever part of it is not objective will semantically burst the “is.” According to its own concept, the pure subjective form of traditional epistemology always exists only as a form of something objective, never without such objectivity; without that, it is not even thinkable. The solidity of the epistemological I, the identity of self-consciousness, is visibly modeled after the unreflected experience of the enduring identical object; even Kant essentially relates

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it to that experience. He could not have claimed the subjective forms as conditions of objectivity, had he not tacitly granted them an objectivity borrowed from the one to which he opposes the subject. But in the extreme into which subjectivity contracts, from the point of that extreme’s synthetic unity, what is combined is always only what goes together anyway. Otherwise, synthesis would be nothing but arbitrary classification. True, without a subjectively performed synthesis, such going together is equally inconceivable. Even the subjective a priori can be called objectively valid only insofar as it has an objective side; without that side the object constituted by the a priori would be a pure tautology for the subject. Finally, due to its being insoluble, given, and extraneous to the subject, the object’s content—to Kant, the material for cognition—is also something objective in the subject. It is accordingly easy to look on the subject as nothing—as was not so very far from Hegel’s mind—and on the object as absolute. Yet this is another transcendental illusion. A subject is reduced to nothing by its hypostasis, by making a thing of what is not a thing. It is discredited because it cannot meet the naively realistic innermost criterion of existence. The idealist construction of the subject founders on its confusion with something objective as inherently existent—the very thing it is not; by the standard of the existent, the subject is condemned to nothingness. The subject is the more the less it is, and it is the less the more it credits itself with objective being. As an element, however, it is ineradicable. After an elimination of the subjective moment, the object would come diffusely apart like the fleeting stirrings and instants of subjective life. The object, though enfeebled, cannot be without a subject either. If the object lacked the moment of subjectivity, its own objectivity would become nonsensical. A flagrant instance is the weakness of Hume’s epistemology. It was subjectively directed while believing it might do without a subject. To be judged, then, is the relation between individual and transcendental subject. The individual one is a component of the empirical world, as has, since Kant, been stated in countless variations. But its function, its capacity for experience—which the transcendental subject lacks, for no purely logical construct could have any sort of experience—is in truth far more constitutive than the function ascribed by idealism to the transcendental subject, which is itself a precritical and profoundly hypostasized abstraction from the individual consciousness. Nevertheless, the concept of transcendentality reminds us that thinking, by dint of its immanent moments of universality, transcends its own inalienable individuation. The antithesis of universal and particular, too, is both necessary and deceptive. Neither one exists without the other—the particular only as defined and thus universal; the universal only as the definition of something particular, and thus itself particular. Both of them are and are not. This is one of the strongest motives of nonidealist dialects.

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The subject’s reflection upon its own formalism is reflection on society, and results in a paradox: on the one hand, as the late Durkheim intended, the form-giving constitutive elements have social sources, but on the other hand, as current epistemology can boast, they are objectively valid; in Durkheim’s argumentations, they are already presumed in every proposition that demonstrates their contingency. The paradox is likely to be at one with the subject’s objective imprisonment in itself. The cognitive function, without which there would be neither difference nor unity on the subject’s part, had emerged from a source. It consists essentially in those form-givers; as far as there is cognition, it has to be carried out along their lines even where it looks beyond them. They define the concept of cognition. Yet they are not absolute; they have come to be like the cognitive function itself, and their disappearance is not beyond the realm of the possible. To predicate them as absolute would absolutize the cognitive function, the subject; to relativize them would be a dogmatic retraction of the cognitive function. Against this, we are told that the argument involves a silly sociologism: that God made society and society made man, followed by God in man’s image. But the priority thesis is absurd only as long as the individual or its earlier biological form is hypostasized. In the history of evolution, a more likely presumption would be the temporal prius, or at least the contemporaneousness of the species. That “the” human being antedated the species is either a Biblical reminiscence or sheer Platonism. Nature on its lower levels teems with unindividuated organisms. If, as more recent biologists claim, humans are actually born so much more ill-equipped than other creatures, it probably was only in association, by rudimentary social toil, that they could stay alive; the principium individuationis would be secondary to that, a hypothetical kind of biological division of labor. That any single human should have emerged first, archetypically, is improbable. By the faith in such an emergence, the principium individuationis, historically fully developed already, is mythically projected backwards, or onto the firmament of eternal ideas. The species might individuate itself by mutation, in order then, by individuation, to reproduce itself in individuals along lines of biological singularity. Man is a result, not an eidos; the cognitions of Hegel and Marx penetrate to the inmost core of the so-called questions of constitution. The ontology of “the” human being, the model for the construction of the transcendental subject, is oriented towards the evolved individual, as shown linguistically by the ambiguity in the article “the,” which in German covers both the individual and the member of the species. Thus nominalism, the opponent of ontology, is far ahead of ontology in featuring the primacy of the species, of society. Society, to be sure, joins with nominalism in a prompt denial of the species (perhaps because it reminds them of animal life)—a denial which ontology performs by raising the individual to the form of unity and

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to Being-in-itself as opposed to the Many, and nominalism by unreflectingly proclaiming the individual, after the model of the human individual, as true Being. Nominalism denies society in concepts by disparaging it as an abbreviation for individuals.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Negative Dialectics, selections Theodor Adorno As noted in the Negative Dialectics blurb above, the analysis that Adorno offers in maximally condensed form in Negative Dialectics is presented carefully and plainly in Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Problems of Moral Philosophy and History and Freedom. The following excerpts are included as key passages of a classic text, but I recommend reading them in light of the lectures. Much of what I would say by way of summary here I’ve said in relation to “Subject and Object.” In his Preface to Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes: “To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity—this is what the author felt to be his task ever since he came to trust his own mental impulses.” Kant, Adorno thinks, has mistaken society itself (one marked by the systematic alienation of human intentionality, so it’s understandable) for a Transcendental Subject, and has ascribed to this reified entity object-constituting powers. While it is true that subjects create artifacts out of raw materials, it is not true that objects as such owe their being to the synthetic a priori faculties of subjects. To imagine otherwise is to succumb to delusion, says Adorno; at best, the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity is indicative of a dim awareness that society could be organized differently than it is, i.e. that real relations of production could be consciously and collective controlled. As a matter of ontology, then, Adorno is a materialist. The interesting question is exactly what kind of materialist, and whether or not his position adds up, in the end. This much is clear: Adorno reads Kant, whom he prefers to Hegel as an interlocutor in this regard, as pointing, explicitly or implicitly, to existence of genuine materiality. That which gives empirical content to concepts, as Kant puts it, is not itself consciousness. Nor is it any kind of abstract phenomenon. It is object, not subject. Adorno agrees with Kant about this. And he goes further. Unlike Kant, Adorno at least claims to believe that material objects exist, qua material objects, all by themselves. But

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what Adorno seems to be unwilling to say explicitly is that objects have their own identity, their own form, to put it in Aristotelian terms. It’s possible that his reluctance is borne of an implicit assumption that properties must be universals, and that the very ascription of a universal already implies the act of a subject. Perhaps it would be different if properties were conceived as particulars. In the language of contemporary metaphysics, it might that Adorno would be prepared to say, as Jonathan Lowe does, that material objects are characterized by (though not materially constituted by) tropes. But perhaps not. As an abstraction, “This redness” is no less a construction of thought than is “Redness,” after all, despite being a particular rather than a universal. Adorno also reads Kant as sharing with Hume the view that causation is not a function of anything internal to objects. In the section “Kant’s Concept of Causality,” Adorno writes: “The only feature of Kant’s rescue operation that lifts it above Hume’s denial is that what Hume swept away is to Kant innate in reason … Causality is to arise, not in the objects and their relationship, but solely in inescapable subjective thought.” Adorno recognizes that although Kant has restored necessitation, “[t]he simplest meaning of the phrase that ‘something is the cause of something else’ is ignored.” And again, “A causality rigorously insulated against the interior of objects is no more than its own shell.” It is worth noting that Adorno connects Kant’s “rescue” of necessity via the rule that every cause must have an effect to Kant’s accompanying analysis of freedom, which Adorno believes to be problematic. (This connection is spelled out carefully in the lectures, especially in History and Freedom and Problems of Moral Philosophy.) A substance-based account of causation, he observes (to use the contemporary analytic parlance) would allow for a different conceptualization of freedom.

Negative Dialectics, selections The Indissoluble “Something” There is no Being without entities. “Something”—as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept, including the concept of Being—is the utmost abstraction of the subject-matter that is not identical with thinking, an abstraction not to be abolished by any further thought process. Without “something” there is no thinkable formal logic, and there is no

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way to cleanse this logic of its metalogical rudiment.*1The supposition of an absolute form, of “something at large” that might enable our thinking to shake off that subject-matter, is illusionary. Constitutive for the form of “subject-matter at large” is the substantive experience of subject-matter. Correlatively, at the subjective counter-pole, the pure concept, the function of thinking, is not to be radically segregated from the entity “I.” Idealism’s prw`ton yen`doz ever since Fichte was that the movement of abstraction allows us to get rid of that from which we abstract. It is eliminated from our thought, banished from the realm where the thought is at home, but not annihilated in itself; the faith in it is magical. Without specific thoughts, thinking would contravene its very concept, and these thoughts instantly point to entities—entities which absolute thinking in turn has yet to posit. This simple noteron provteron would remain an offense to the logic of noncontradictoriness; dialectics alone can grasp it in the self-critique of the concept. This critique is objectively caused by epistemology, by the substance of what we discuss in the critique of reason, and it therefore survives the downfall of idealism, which culminated in it. The thought leads to the moment of idealism that runs counter to idealism; it cannot be evaporated once again, into the thought. The Kantian conception still allowed dichotomies such as the ones of form and substance, of subject and object, without being put off by the fact that the antithetical pairs transmit each other; the dialectical nature of that conception, the contradiction implied in its own meaning, went unnoticed. It took Heidegger’s teacher Husserl so to sharpen the idea of apriority that—contrary to both his and Heidegger’s intention—the dialects of the eidh could be derived from their own claim.2 Once dialectics has become inescapable, however, it cannot stick to its principle like ontology and transcendental philosophy. It cannot be maintained as a structure that will stay basic no matter how it is modified. In criticizing ontology we do not aim at another ontology, not even at one of being nonontological. If that were our purpose we would be merely positing another downright “first”—not absolute identity, this time, not the concept, *Hegel, in the first Note to the first Trias of his Logic, refuses to begin with Something instead of with Being (cf. Hegel, Works 4, especially p. 89, also p. 80). The entire work, which seeks to expound the primacy of the subject, is thus in a subjective sense idealistically prejudiced. Hegel’s dialectics would scarcely take another course if—in line with the work’s basic Aristotelianism—he were beginning with an abstract Something. The idea of such something pure and simple may denote more tolerance toward the nonidentical than the idea of Being, but it is hardly less indirect. The concept of Something would not be the end either; the analysis of this concept would have to go on in the direction of Hegel’s thought, the direction of nonconceptuality. Yet even the minimal trace of nonidentity in the approach to logic, of which the word “something” reminds us, is unbearable to Hegel. 1 Cf. Theodor W.Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, Stuttgart 1956, p. 97 and passim.

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not Being, but nonidentity, facticity, entity. We would be hypostatizing the concept of nonconceptuality and thus acting counter to its meaning. A basic philosophy, prwth filosofia, necessarily carries with it the primacy of the concept; whatever withholds itself from the concept is departing from the form of allegedly basic philosophizing. The thoughts of transcendental apperception or of Being could satisfy philosophers as long as they found those concepts identical with their own thoughts. Once we dismiss such identity in principle, the peace of the concept as an Ultimate will be engulfed in the fall of the identity. Since the basic character of every general concept dissolves in the face of distinct entity, a total philosophy is no longer to be hoped for.

Compulsory substantiveness In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation, as “something,” occupies the place of the inextinguishably ontical. But sensation holds no higher cognitive rank than any other real entity. Its “my”—accidental to transcendental analysis and tied to ontical conditions—is mistaken for a legal title by experience, which is nearest to itself and the captive of its own reflective hierarchy. It is as if that which some individual human consciousness takes for the ultimate were an Ultimate in itself, as if every other human consciousness, individual and confined to itself, were not entitled to claim the same privilege for its own sensations. But if sensation were strictly required before the form, the transcendental subject, could function—in other words, before it could pass valid judgments—that subject would be quasi-ontologically tied, not only to pure apperception, but to matter, the counter-pole of apperception. This would have to undermine the entire doctrine of subjective constitution, to which matter, according to Kant, cannot be traced back. With that, however, the idea of something immutable, something identical with itself, would collapse as well. This idea derives from the rule of the concept, from the concept’s tendency to be constant as opposed to its contents, to “matter,” and from its resulting blindness to matter. Sensations— the Kantian matter, without which forms would not even be imaginable, so that the forms also qualify the possibility of cognition—sensations have the character of transiency. Nonconceptuality, inalienable from the concept, disavows the concept’s being-in-itself. It changes the concept. The concept of nonconceptuality cannot stay with itself, with epistemology; epistemology obliges philosophy to be substantive. Whenever philosophy was capable of substantiveness it has managed to deal with historic entities as its objects, long before Schelling and Hegel. Plato already did it, much against his will: it was he who gave to entity, to that which is, the name of “that which is not,” and yet he wrote a doctrine of the state in which the eternal ideas are akin to such empirical definitions as the barter of equivalents and the division of labor.

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In today’s academic usage we have become inured to the difference between a regular, ordinary philosophy—said to have to do with the most sublime concepts, even though their conceptuality may be denied—and a merely genetical, extra-philosophical reference to society, the notorious prototypes of which are found in the sociology of knowledge and in the critique of ideology. The distinction is as invalid as the need for regular philosophy is suspect. A philosophy that fears too late for its purity is not only turning away from all that used to be its substance. Rather, what the philosophical analysis encounters immanently, in the interior of supposedly pure concepts and of their truth content, is that ontical element at which the purity claimants shudder, the element which, trembling with hauteur, they cede to the special sciences. The smallest ontical residue in the concepts that are vainly agitated by the regular philosophy compels that philosophy to include existing things in its own reflection, instead of making do with their mere concepts and feeling sheltered there from what the concept means. The contents of philosophical thinking are neither remnants after deducting space and time nor general findings about spatial-temporal matters. Philosophical thinking crystallizes in the particular, in that which is defined in space and time. The concept of entity pure and simple is the mere shadow of the false concept of Being.

“Peephole metaphysics” Wherever a doctrine of some absolute “first” is taught there will be talk of something inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its logical correlate. Prima philosophia and dualism go together. To escape from this, fundamental ontology must try to avoid defining what comes first to it. What was first to Kant, the synthetic unity of apperception, suffered the same fate. To Kant, every definition of the object is an investment of subjectivity in unqualitative diversity—regardless of the fact that the defining acts, which he takes for spontaneous achievements of transcendental logic, will adjust to a moment which they themselves are not; regardless of the fact that we can synthesize only what will allow and require a synthesis on its own. The active definition is not something purely subjective; hence the triumph of the sovereign subject which dictates its laws to nature is a hollow triumph. But as in truth subject and object do not solidly confront each other as in the Kantian diagram—as they reciprocally permeate each other, rather—Kant’s degrading of the thing to a chaotic abstraction also affects the force that is to give it form. The spell cast by the subject becomes equally a spell cast over the subject. Both spells are driven by the Hegelian fury of disappearance. The subject is spent and impoverished in its categorial performance; to be able to define and articulate what it confronts, so as to turn it into a Kantian object, the subject must dilute itself to the point of mere universality, for the sake

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of the objective validity of those definitions. It must cut loose from itself as much as from the cognitive object, so that this object will be reduced to its concept, according to plan. The objectifying subject contracts into a point of abstract reason, and finally into logical noncontradictoriness, which in turn means nothing except to a definite object. The absolute First remains necessarily as undefined as that which confronts it; no inquiry into something concrete and precedent will reveal the unity of abstract antithesis. Instead, the rigidly dichotomical structure disintegrates by virtue of either pole’s definition as a moment of its own opposite. To philosophical thought, dualism is given and as inescapable as the continued course of thinking makes it false. Transmission—“mediation”—is simply the most general and inadequate way to express this. Yet if we cancel the subject’s claim to be first—the claim which surreptitiously keeps inspiring ontology—that which the schema of traditional philosophy calls secondary is no longer secondary either. It is no longer subordinate in a twofold sense. Its disparagement was the obverse of the trivium that all entity is colored by the observer, by his group or species. In fact, cognition of the moment of subjective mediation in the objective realm implies a critique of the notion that through that realm we get a glimpse of the pure “in-itself,” a forgotten notion lurking behind that trivium. Except among heretics, all Western metaphysics has been peephole metaphysics. The subject—a mere limited moment—was locked up in its own self by that metaphysics, imprisoned for all eternity to punish it for its deification. As through the crenels of a parapet, the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or of Being, is said to rise. And yet it is the very wall around the subject that casts its shadow on whatever the subject conjures: the shadow of reification, which a subjective philosophy will then helplessly fight again. Whatever experience the word “Being” may carry can only be expressed in configurations of entities, not by allergies to entity; otherwise the philosophical substance becomes the poor result of a process of subtraction, not unlike the one-time Cartesian certainty of the subject, the thinking substance. There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within. This is where the truth and the untruth of Kantian philosophy divide. It is true in destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute; it is untrue in describing this Absolute by a model that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, even if that consciousness were the intellectus archetypus. To demonstrate this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; yet this in turn is untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth with the subjectin-itself—as if the pure concept of the subject were the same as Being. ****

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Reversal of the subjective reduction The prevailing trend in epistemological reflection was to reduce objectivity more and more to the subject. This very tendency needs to be reversed. The means employed by philosophical tradition to distinguish the concept of subjectivity from entity are copied from entity. That philosophy, suffering of deficient self-reflection to this day, forgot the mediation in the mediating subject is no more indicative of meritorious sublimity than any forgetting. As though to punish it, the subject will be overcome by what it has forgotten. It no sooner turns into an object of epistemological reflection than it will share that objective character whose absence is so often cited as elevating it above the factual realm. The subject’s essentiality is an existence raised to the second potency and, as Hegel did not fail to state, presupposes the first potency: factuality. Factuality is a condition of the possibility—even though negated—of essentiality. The immediacy of primary reactions was broken, first, in the formation of the I; and broken with these reactions was the spontaneity which the pure I, according to transcendental custom, is to contract into. The centristic identity of the I is acquired at the expense of what idealism will then attribute to it. The constitutive subject of philosophy is more of a thing than the specific psychological content which it excreted, as naturalistic and reified. The more autocratically the I rises above entity, the greater its imperceptible objectification and ironic retraction of its constitutive role. Not only the pure I is ontically transmitted by the empirical I, the unmistakably pellucid model of the first version of the deduction of purely rational concepts; the transcendental principle itself, the supposed “first” of philosophy as against entity, is so transmitted. Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to point out that hidden in this principle, in the general and necessary activity of the mind, lies work of an inalienably social nature. The aporetical concept of the transcendental subject—a nonentity which is nonetheless to act, a universal which is nonetheless to have particular experiences—would be a soap bubble, never obtainable from the autarkic immanent context of consciousness, which is necessarily individual. Compared with consciousness, however, the concept represents not only something more abstract; by virtue of its coining power it also represents something more real. Beyond the magic circle of identitarian philosophy, the transcendental subject can be deciphered as a society unaware of itself. Such unawareness is deducible. Ever since mental and physical labor were separated in the sign of the dominant mind, the sign of justified privilege, the separated mind has been obliged, with the exaggeration due to a bad conscience, to vindicate the very claim to dominate which it derives from the thesis that it is primary and original—and to make every effort to forget the source of its claim, lest the claim lapse.

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Deep down, the mind feels that its stable dominance is no mental rule at all, that its ultima ratio lies in the physical force at its disposal. On pain of perdition, however, it must not put its secret into words. Abstraction— without which the subject would not be the constituens at large at all, not even according to such extreme idealists as Fichte—reflects the separation from physical labor, perceptible by confrontation with that labor. When Marx, in his critique of the Gotha Platform, told the Lassalleans that in contrast to the customary litany of popular socialists labor was not the sole source of social wealth,3 he was philosophically—at a time when the official philosophical thematics lay already behind him—saying no less than that labor could not be hypostatized in any form, neither in the form of diligent hands nor in that of mental production. Such hypostasis merely extends the illusion of the predominance of the productive principle. It comes to be true only in relation to that nonidentical moment which Marx in his disdain for epistemology called first by the crude, too narrow name of “nature,” later on by that of “natural material” and by other less incriminated terms.4 The essence of the transcendental subject ever since the Critique of Pure Reason has been functionality, the pure activity that occurs in the achievements of individual subjects and surpasses them at the same time. It is a projection of freely suspended labor on the pure subject as its origin. In further restricting the subject’s functionality by calling it empty and void without a fitting material, Kant undauntedly noted that social labor is a labor on something; his more consistent idealistic successors did not hesitate to eliminate this. Yet the generality of the transcendental subject is that of the functional context of society, of a whole that coalesces from individual spontaneities and qualities, delimits them in turn by the leveling barter principle, and virtually deletes them as helplessly dependent on the whole. The universal domination of mankind by the exchange value—a domination which a priori keeps the subjects from being subjects and degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object—makes an untruth of the general principle that claims to establish the subject’s predominance. The surplus of the transcendental subject is the deficit of the utterly reduced empirical subject.

Interpreting the transcendental As the extreme borderline case of ideology, the transcendental subject comes close to truth. The transcendental generality is no mere narcissist Cf. Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms, Frankfurt am Main l956, p. 199ff. Cf. Alfred Schmidt, “Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx,” in Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, 11 (Frankfurt 1962), p. 21.

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self-exaltation of the I, not the hubris of an autonomy of the I. Its reality lies in the domination that prevails and perpetuates itself by means of the principle of equivalence. The process of abstraction—which philosophy transfigures, and which it ascribes to the knowing subject alone—is taking place in the factual barter society. The definition of the transcendental as that which is necessary, a definition added to functionality and generality, expresses the principle of the self-preservation of the species. It provides a legal basis for abstraction, which we cannot do without, for abstraction is the medium of selfpreserving reason. It would not take much artifice to parody Heidegger by interpreting the general philosophical idea of necessity as the need to reverse want, to remedy the lack of foodstuffs by organized labor. Thereby, of course, Heidegger’s language mythology itself would be unhinged—that apotheosis of the objective spirit in which reflection on the material process jutting into the spirit is banned from the outset, as inferior. The unity of consciousness is that of the individual human consciousness. Even as a principle it visibly bears its traces, and thus the traces of entity. For transcendental philosophy, the ubiquity of individual self-consciousness will indeed turn it into a universal that may no longer boast of the advantages of concrete self-certainty; but insofar as the unity of consciousness is modeled after objectivity—that is to say, in so far as it is measured by the possibility of constituting objects—it is the conceptual reflex of the total, seamless juncture of the productive acts in society which the objectivity of goods, their “object character,” requires if it is to come about at all. Moreover, the solid, lasting, impenetrable side of the I mimics the outside world’s impenetrability for conscious experience, as perceived by a primitive consciousness. The subject’s real impotence has its echo in its mental omnipotence. The ego principle imitates its negation. It is not true that the object is a subject, as idealism has been drilling into us for thousands of years, but it is true that the subject is an object. The primacy of subjectivity is a spiritualized continuation of Darwin’s struggle for existence. The suppression of nature for human ends is a mere natural relationship, which is why the supremacy of nature-controlling reason and its principle is a delusion. When the subject proclaims itself a Baconian master of all things, and finally their idealistic creator, it takes an epistemological and metaphysical part in this delusion. The practice of its rule makes it a part of what it thinks it is ruling; it succumbs like the Hegelian master. It reveals the extent to which in consuming the object it is beholden to the object. What it does is the spell of that which the subject believes under its own spell. The subject’s desperate self-exaltation is its reaction to the experience of its impotence, which prevents self-reflection. Absolute consciousness is unconscious. In Kantian ethics this is grandiosely attested by an unconcealed contradiction: as an entity, the very subject Kant calls free and exalted is part of

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that natural context above which freedom would lift it. Plato’s doctrine of ideas, a great stride toward demythologization, reiterates the myth: under the name of essences it perpetuates the conditions of dominance which man took over from nature and is now practicing. If the control of nature was a condition of demythologization and a step in it, this dominance would have to spread to that other kind, lest it fall prey to the myth after all. But philosophy’s stress on the constitutive power of the subjective moment always blocks the road to truth as well. This is how animal species like the dinosaur Triceratops or the rhinoceros drag their protective armor with them, an ingrown prison which they seem—anthropomorphically, at least—to be trying vainly to shed. The imprisonment in their survival mechanism may explain the special ferocity of rhinoceroses as well as the unacknowledged and therefore more dreadful ferocity of homo sapiens. The subjective moment is framed, as it were, in the objective one. As a limitation imposed on the subject, it is objective itself.

“Transcendental delusion” All this, according to traditional norms of philosophy, whether idealistic or ontological, has a touch of nsteron proteron attached to it. One may say in a voice resonant with stringency that what we do in such reflections, without owning up to it, is to presuppose as transmitting what we would deduce as transmitted: the subject and its thought. Just by being definitions, one may say, all our definitions are already definitions of thought. But it is not the purpose of critical thought to place the object on the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the subject. On that throne the object would be nothing but an idol. The purpose of critical thought is to abolish the hierarchy. The delusion that the transcendental subject is the Archimedean fixed point from which the world can be lifted out of its hinges—this delusion, purely in itself, is indeed hard to overcome altogether by subjective analysis. For contained in this delusion, and not to be extracted from the forms of cogitative mediation, is the truth that society comes before the individual consciousness and before all its experience. The insight into the fact that thinking is mediated by objectivity does not negate thinking, nor does it negate the objective laws that make it thinking. The further fact that there is no way to get out of thinking points to the support found in nonidentity— to the very support which thought, by its own forms, seeks and expresses as much as it denies it. Still transparent, however, is the reason for the delusion that is transcendental far beyond Kant: why our thinking in the intentio obliqua will inescapably keep coming back to its own primacy, to the hypostasis of the subject. For while in the history of nominalism

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ever since Aristotle’s critique of Plato the subject has been rebuked for its mistake of reifying abstraction, abstraction itself is the principle whereby the subject comes to be a subject at all. Abstraction is the subject’s essence. This is why going back to what it is not must impress the subject as external and violent. To the subject, what convicts it of its own arbitrariness—and convicts its prius of aposteriority—will always sound like a transcendent dogma. When idealism is criticized strictly from within, it has the handy defense of thus being sanctioned by the critic—of virtually having the criticism within itself, by the critic’s use of its own premises, and accordingly being superior to the criticism. Objections from without, on the other hand, will be dismissed by idealism as pre-dialectical, belonging to the philosophy of reflection. But there is no need for analysis to abdicate in view of this alternative. Immanence is the totality of those identitarian positions whose principle falls before immanent critique. As Marx put it, idealism can be made to “dance to its own tune.” The nonidentity which determines it from within, after the criterion of identity, is at the same time the opposite of its principle, that which it vainly claims to be controlling. No immanent critique can serve its purpose wholly without outside knowledge, of course—without a moment of immediacy, if you will, a bonus from the subjective thought that looks beyond the dialectical structure. That moment is the moment of spontaneity, and idealists should be the last to ostracize it, because without it there would be no idealism. Spontaneity breaks through an idealism whose inmost core was christened “spontaneity.” The subject as ideology lies under a spell from which nothing but the name of subjectivity will free it, just as only the herb named “Sneezejoy” will free the enchanted “Dwarf Nose” in Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale. This herb was kept a secret from the dwarf, and as a result he never learned to prepare “pâté Suzeraine,” the dish that bears the name of sovereignty in decline. No amount of introspection would let him discover the rules governing his deformity and his labor; he needs an outside impulse, the wisdom of “Mimi the Goose.” To philosophy, and to Hegel’s most of all, such an impulse is heresy. The limit of immanent critique is that the law of the immanent context is ultimately one with the delusion that has to be overcome. Yet that instant— truly the first qualitative leap—comes solely in the performance of immanent dialectics, which tends to transcend itself in a motion not at all unlike the passage from Platonic dialectics to the ideas, which “are in-themselves.” If it became totally conclusive, dialectics would be the totality that goes back to the identity principle. This was the interest served—against Hegel—by Schelling, who thus invited jeers at the abdication of a thought in flight to mysticism. The materialistic moment in Schelling, who credited matter as such with something like a driving force, may contribute to that aspect of

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his philosophy. But neither can we hypostatize the leap, as Kierkegaard does, lest we blaspheme against reason. Our sense of dialectics makes us restrict dialectics. Yet our disappointment at philosophy’s failure to awaken from its dream by its own motion, without any leap—at its need for something else, for something new, for that which its spell keeps at a distance—this disappointment is none other than the disappointment of a child who reads Hauff’s fairy tale and mourns because the dwarf, though no longer misshapen, did not get a chance to serve the duke his pâté Suzeraine.

The object’s preponderance Carried through, the critique of identity is a groping for the preponderance of the object. Identitarian thinking is subjectivistic even when it denies being so. To revise that kind of thinking, to debit identity with untruth, does not bring subject and object into a balance, nor does it raise the concept of function to an exclusively dominant role in cognition; even when we merely limit the subject, we put an end to its power. Its own absoluteness is the measure by which the least surplus of nonidentity feels to the subject like an absolute threat. A minimum will do to spoil it as a whole, because it pretends to be the whole. Subjectivity changes its quality in a context which it is unable to evolve on its own. Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject. An object can be conceived only by a subject but always remains something other than the subject, whereas a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object as well. Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject. That the I is an entity is implicit even in the sense of the logical “I think, which should be able to accompany all my conceptions,” because the sequence of time is a condition of its possibility and there is no sequence of time save in temporality. The pronoun “my” points to a subject as an object among objects, and again, without this “my” there would be no “I think.” The being of a subject is taken from objectivity—a fact that lends a touch of objectivity to the subject itself; it is not by chance that the Latin word subiectum, the underlying, reminds us of the very thing which the technical language of philosophy has come to call “objective.” The word “object,” on the other hand, is not related to subjectivity until we reflect upon the possibility of it definition. This does not mean that objectivity is something immediate, that we might forget our critique of naïve realism. To grant precedence to the object

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means to make progressive qualitative distinctions between things which in themselves are indirect; it means a moment in dialectics—not beyond dialectics, but articulated in dialectics. Kant still refused to be talked out of the moment of objective preponderance. He used an objective intention to direct the subjective analysis of the cognitive faculty in his Critique of Pure Reason,5 and he stubbornly defended the transcendent thing-in-itself.*6 To him it was evident that being-in-itself did not run directly counter to the concept of an object, that the subjective indirectness of that concept is to be laid less to the object’s idea than to the subject’s insufficiency. The object cannot get beyond itself for Kant either, but he does not sacrifice the idea of otherness. Without otherness, cognition would deteriorate into tautology; what is known would be knowledge itself. To Kant’s meditation this was clearly more irksome than the inconcinnity of the thing-in-itself being the unknown cause of phenomena even thought the category of causality ends up on the subject’s side in his critique of reason. The construction of transcendental subjectivity was a magnificently paradoxical and fallible effort to master the object in its opposite pole; but in this respect too, the accomplishment of what was merely proclaimed in positive, idealistic dialectics requires a critique of that construction. An ontological moment is needed in so far as ontology will critically strip the subject of its cogently constitutive role without substituting it through the object, in a kind of second immediacy. The object’s preponderance is solely attainable for subjective reflection, and for reflection on the subject. The state of facts is difficult to reconcile with the rules of current logic, and absurd in its abstract expression; it may clarify it to consider that one might write a primeval history of the subject—as outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment*7—but one cannot write a primeval history of the object. Any such history would be dealing with specific objects. Nor does an ontological supremacy of consciousness follow from the counter-argument that without a knowing subject nothing can be known about the object. Every statement to the effect that subjectivity “is,” no matter what or how, includes an objectivity which the subject, by means 4 Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Works III, p. 93ff. *Literally, the preponderance of the object might be traced back to the point where a thought believes it has won its own absolute objectivity by rejecting any objectivity that is not thought—in other words, to formal logic. The “something” to which all logical propositions refer even when they are free to ignore it entirely is a copy of that which a thought means, and without which it could not be. The non-cogitative is a logically immanent condition of the cogitative. In fact, the copula “is” always conveys some objectivity already, after the model of existential judgments. This disposes of all the hopes kindled by our craving for security: that in formal logic we might possess something downright unconditional as the sure foundation of philosophy. *Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Amsterdam 1947 [Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York 1972].

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of its absolute being, claims to have yet to establish. Only because the subject in turn is indirect—because it is not the radical otherness required to legitimize the object—is it capable of grasping objectivity at all. Rather than constitutive for objectivity, the subjective mediation is a block to objectivity; it fails to absorb entity, which objectivity is in essence. Genetically, the consciousness that has achieved independence, the epitome of what is done in cognitive performance, has branched off from the libidinous energy of the species. Human nature is not indifferent to this; it certainly does not define a “sphere of absolute origins,” as Husserl thought. Consciousness is a function of the living subject, and no exorcism will expel this from the concept’s meaning. The objection that in the process the empirical moment of subjectivity would be mixed with its transcendental or essential moment is a feeble one. Without any relation to an empirical consciousness, to the living I, there would be no transcendental, purely mental consciousness. Analogous reflections on the object’s genesis would be meaningless. Mediation of the object means that it must not be statically, dogmatically hypostatized but can be known only as it entwines with subjectivity; mediation of the subject means that without the moment of objectivity it would be literally nil. An index of the object’s preponderance is the impotence of the mind—in all its judgments as well as, to this day, in the organization of reality. The negative fact that the mind, failing in identification, has also failed in reconcilement, that its supremacy has miscarried, becomes the motor of its disenchantment. The human mind is both true and a mirage: it is true because nothing is exempt from the dominance which it has brought into pure form; it is untrue because, interlocked with dominance, it is anything but the mind it believes and claims to be. Enlightenment thus transcends its traditional selfunderstanding: it is demythologization—no longer merely as a reductio ad hominem, but the other way round, as a reductio hominis, an insight into the delusion of the subject that will style itself an absolute. The subject is the late form of the myth, and yet the equal of its oldest form. ****

Kant’s concept of causality The famous, utterly formal Kantian definition of causality is that whatever happens presupposes a previous condition “upon which it inevitably follows in line with a rule.”85 Historically it was directed against the 5

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 308.

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Leibniz school and its interpretation of the sequence of conditions as due to inner necessity, a being-in-itself. On the other hand, Kant’s view differs from Hume’s, holding that unanimous experience is not possible without the regularity of thought which Hume turned over to the accident of convention, and pointing out that in any particular spot Hume must talk causally in order to make plausible what as a convention he would make indifferent. To Kant, however, causality becomes a function of subjective reason, and what it means is therefore more and more attenuated. It dissolves like a bit of mythology. Causality approximates the principle of reason as such, of thinking in line with rules. Judgments about causal connections turn into semi-tautologies: reason employs them to determine what it effects anyway, as the faculty of laws. That it prescribes nature’s laws—or law, rather— denotes no more than a subsumption under rational unity. This unity, the principle of reason’s own identity, is transformed from reason to the objects and palmed off, then, as their cognition. Once causality is as thoroughly disenchanted as it would be by tabooing the inner determination of objects, it will disintegrate in itself as well. The only feature of Kant’s rescue operation that lifts it above Hume’s denial is that what Hume swept away is to Kant innate in reason—its necessary nature, so to speak, if not an anthropological accident. Causality is to arise, not in the objects and their relationship, but solely in inescapable subjective thought. Kant, too, is dogmatic about the thesis that a state of things might have something essential, something specific to do with the succeeding state of things; but it would be quite possible, in line with his conception, to devise legalities for successions without anything to remind us of a causal connection. The interrelation of objects that have passed through inwardness virtually turns here into something outward for the theorem of causality. The simplest meaning of the phrase that “something is the cause of something else” is ignored. A causality rigorously insulated against the interior of objects is no more than its own shell. The reductio ad hominem in the concept of law is a mere borderline value where the law has ceased to say anything about the objects; the expansion of causality into a concept of pure reason negates causality. Kant’s causality is one without a causa. As he cures it of naturalistic prejudice it dissolves in his hands. That consciousness cannot escape from causality, as its inborn form, is certainly an answer to the weak point in Hume’s argument; but when Kant maintains that the subject must think causally, his analysis of the constituents, according to the literal sense of “must,” is following the very causal proposition to which he would be entitled to subject only the constituta. If the constitution of causality by pure reason—which, after all, is supposed to be freedom—is already subject to causality, freedom is so compromised beforehand that hardly any place for it remains outside a consciousness complaisant toward the law.

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In this entire antithetical construction, freedom and causality intersect. Kant’s freedom, being the same as rational action, is also according to law, and free acts also “follow from rules.” What has come out of this is the intolerable mortgage imposed on post-Kantian philosophy: that freedom without law is not freedom, that freedom exists only in identification with the law. Via the German idealists, this heritage has been passed on, with incalculably vast political consequences, to Friedrich Engels*9; it is the theoretical source of the false reconcilement.

The plea for order The end of the coercive epistemological character of causality would also end the claim to totality that will be made for causality as long as it coincides with the subjective principle. The very thing which in idealism can appear as freedom only in paradoxical form would then, substantially, become the moment that transcends the bracketing of the world’s course with fate. If in causality we were looking for a definition of things themselves—no matter how subjectively conveyed—such specification would open the perspective of freedom as opposed to the undiscriminated One of pure subjectivity. It would apply to that which is distinguished from compulsion. Compulsion, then, would no longer be extolled as an act of the subject; its totality would no longer evoke an affirmative response. It would be stripped of its a priori power that was extrapolated from real compulsion. The chance of freedom increases along with the objectiveness of causality; this is not the least of the reasons why he who wants freedom must insist upon necessity. Kant, however, calls for freedom and prevents it. The argument for the thesis of the Third Antinomy, the thesis of the absolutely spontaneous

*“Hegel was the first to present a correct picture of the relationship of freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. ‘Necessity is blind only if it is not understood.’ Freedom does not lie in dreams about independence of the laws of nature; it lies in the knowledge of these laws, and in the ability conferred by that knowledge, to make the laws work according to plan and to definite ends. This applies in regard to the laws of external nature as well as to those which regulate the physical and mental existence of man himself—two sets of laws which we can separate, at best, in imagination, but not in reality. Free will, therefore, means nothing other than the faculty of being able to decide with material knowledge. The freer a man’s judgment in regard to a specific point in question, the greater, therefore, the necessity with which the content of his judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty based on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and contradictory possibilities of decision, demonstrates precisely thereby its unfreedom, its being dominated by the very object it ought to dominate. Freedom thus consists in our control, based upon our knowledge of the natural necessities, of ourselves and of external nature; it is thus necessarily a product of historic evolution.” (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, Berlin 1962, vol. 20, p. 106.)

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cause—a secularization of the free divine act of creation—is Cartesian in style: it applies so that the method will be satisfied. Complete cognition is set up as the epistemological criterion; we are told that without freedom “the sequence of phenomena even in the natural course is never complete on the side of the causes.”106 The totality of cognition, which is here tacitly equated with truth, would be the identity of subject and object. Kant restricts it as a critic of cognition and teaches it as a theoretician of truth. A cognition that has at its disposal as complete a sequence as Kant holds to be conceivable only under the hypostasis of an original act of absolute freedom—in other words, a cognition that no longer leaves any sensorily given thing outside— would be a cognition not confronted with anything unlike itself. The critique of such identity would strike not merely at the positiveontological apotheosis of the subjective causal concept, but at the Kantian proof of the necessity of freedom, a proof about whose pure form there is something contradictory anyway. That there must be freedom is the supreme iniuria committed by the lawmaking autonomous subject. The substance of its own freedom—of the identity which has annexed all nonidentity—is as one with the “must,” with the law, with absolute dominion. This is the spark that kindles the pathos of Kant. He construes even freedom as a special case of causality. To him, it is the “constant laws” that matter. His timid bourgeois detestation of anarchy matches his proud bourgeois antipathy against tutelage. Here, too, society intrudes all the way into his most formal reflections. Formality in itself is a bourgeois trait: on the one hand, it frees the individual from the confining definitions of what has come to be just so, not otherwise, while on the other hand it has nothing to set against things as they are, nothing to base itself upon except dominion, which has been raised to the rank of a pure principle. Hidden in the root of Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals lies Comte’s later sociological dichotomy between laws of progress and laws of order, along with the bias favoring the latter type. Order, on the strength of its legality, is to hold progress in check. We hear such overtones in a Kantian line from the proof of the antithesis: “Freedom (independence) from the laws of nature is indeed a deliverance from compulsion, but also from the guideline of all rules.”17 This guideline is to be “torn” by an “unconditional causality”—which is to say: by the free productive act; where this act is scientifically criticized in the antithesis, it has the epithet “blind”128 bestowed on it by Kant, as the stubborn fact has elsewhere. The haste with which Kant thinks of freedom as the law above shows that he is no more scrupulous about it than his class has ever been. Long before it dreaded the industrial proletariat—in the economics of Adam Smith, for example—that Ibid., p. 310. Ibid., p. 309. 8 Ibid., p. 311. 6 7

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class used to combine praise of individual emancipation with the apologia for an order in which, one heard, the “invisible hand” was taking care of both the beggar and the king, while even the free competitor in this order had to observe the—feudal—rules of “fair play.” Kant’s popularizer* was not misrepresenting his philosophical mentor when he called order “heaven’s bounteous daughter,” nor when he emphasized in the same poem that “welfare can’t thrive when peoples free themselves.” Neither man would hear of it that the “chaos” which their generation saw in the relatively modest horrors of the French Revolution (the atrocities of the Chouans shocked them far less) was produced by a repression whose traits live on in those who rise against it. All the other German geniuses who had been constrained at first to hail that revolution could not vilify it fast enough, once Robespierre gave them a pretext; and the same sense of relief is perceptible in Kant’s proof of the antithesis, when “legality” is praised at the expense of “lawlessness” and we actually hear the word “mirage of freedom.” 9 Laws receive the encomiastic epithet “constant,” which is to raise them above the dread specter of anarchy without allowing the suspicion to dawn that they precisely are the old evil of unfreedom. How much Kant is dominated by the concept of law shows in the fact that he cites it, as their supposedly higher unity, in arguing for the thesis as well as in arguing for the antithesis.

*A reference to Friedrich Schiller. Quotes are from Schiller’s poem Die Glocke (The Bell).—Trans. 9 Ibid.

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PART THREE

Method

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CHAPTER NINE

“Traditional and Critical Theory” Max Horkheimer

In “Traditional and Critical Theory” Horkheimer describes a form of reason the exercise of which is meant to help bring about collective self-determination. Horkheimer associates reason of the type in question, which he calls “critical theory,” with what he takes to be Marx’s method in Capital. He contrasts critical theory with what he calls “traditional theory,” which he connects to Descartes. The discussion ranges from formal aspects of the contrasting models to their implied conceptions of (a) the relationship between the knowing subject and her object of inquiry; and (b) the relationship of theory to the whole of the society within which it is produced. Traditional theory as Horkheimer conceives it is a highly compartmentalized, primarily technically-oriented account of conditions that are presumed to be given. Paradigmatically, a traditional explanation consists of a core set of general claims plus some number of more specific statements that are related to them deductively. Horkheimer invokes Descartes in depicting the approach, but it is safe to assume that the account of knowledge endorsed by logical positivists conforms to his notion of traditional theory. He writes: “We are thus working with conditional propositions as applied to a given situation. If circumstances a, b, c, and d are given, then event q must be expected; if d is lacking, event r; if g is added, event s, and so on.” Traditional theory is atomistic, in that the parts of such an explanation are expected to be meaningful in isolation, and a-temporal, in that the theory thought to not have to change over time. Outside of the life sciences, Horkheimer says, traditional theory features a non-productive, Humean account of causation. This may not be so in biology, Horkheimer thinks, but even if such fields allow for the existence of genuinely dynamic processes, their proponents do not imagine human beings’ scientific theories to be implicated in those same processes. Rather, in all cases traditional theorists take the activity of

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science to be independent of the reproduction of the social context in which it occurs. Traditional theory is declared to be value free, and it is regarded as truth conducive in virtue of mapping on to existing conditions. Critical theory, by contrast, is a reflexively self-conscious effort to grasp the “inner dynamism” of the current socio-historical situation, the essence of which is “the exchange relationship,” so as to try to end the suffering caused when we are governed by the Law of Value (i.e. the imperatives of capital accumulation) rather than by our own shared ends. As an intellectual undertaking, it differs from traditional theory on every score. At the most basic level, the propositions of critical theory track causal connections rather than logical connections. Critical theory is also holistic. The assumption is that if the object of inquiry is a structured totality, then the individual parts of a theory that accounts for such a whole will have little significance considered on their own. (Horkheimer’s path to holism is different from Quine’s, but analytic readers might find reference to “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” useful as a heuristic.) Critical theory is inherently temporal, in that it is an effort to specify the dynamics of an on-going process. Moreover, it is an effort to do so by subjects who are themselves participants in the process, whether they like it or not. This last point, concerning the relationship between subject and object (knowers and that which is known), can be further elaborated. Traditional theory presupposes that subject and object can be easily separated. Subjects, here scientists, are thought to confront objects of inquiry that exist independently of them, the nature of which is beyond their control. The goal is to understand such phenomena as they are, not how the scientist might wish them to be. The subject therefore aims to investigate the object without disturbing it, the epitome of the norm being the passive empiricist knower who simply registers sense impressions (or, at the level of social science, collects data over which she generalizes). In the case of critical theory, by contrast, subject and object alike are thought to be products of the activity of (embodied) subjects. With respect to the former, even our perceptual abilities are socially conditioned, says Horkheimer. And certainly the same is true of the remarkable display of subjectivity that is science. The object, meanwhile (i.e. society itself), is created by us even if it remains at present an emergent effect of uncoordinated, mostly compulsory local actions, undertaken by separate individuals who are unaware of their sociality. The social relations under which we live have not yet become expressions of our as-yet unrealized collective free will, but they are our doing all the same. Unlike traditional theory, critical theory is recognized by its authors as being a part of the totality that is its object domain. But beyond this, it is intended to be a tool for transforming that domain. Specifically, it is meant to aid us in bringing society under our own rational control. From the perspective of critical theory, so-called value-neutrality is simply an indicator of alienation: the very relations of coercion and suffering that should be

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rectified by us in accordance with the dictates of reason are thought to be unassailable facts in relation to which we are directed to be, qua knowers, morally unresponsive. Indeed, reason itself has become alienated. Standard forms of inquiry in the social sciences amount to negotiating conditions that are presumed to be externally given. Critical theory can be seen as sharing with traditional theory the function of aiding prediction and control. But the regulative capability is one that would follow from there being direct collective determination of social reality, not one that presumes governance by the Law of Value. This kind of theorizing—identifying the essential features of present with an eye to a bringing about a radically democratic future—requires a cognitively active knower. Kant, says Horkheimer, gives us an idealized account of such subjectivity. Kant argued that subject and object come together via the synthetic unity of apperception that yields phenomenal objects, and also that we act autonomously insofar as we choose to act in accordance with moral law (i.e. for Kant, in accordance with the form of pure practical reason). Critical theory in Horkheimer’s hands is a historicized, materialist transposition of Kant’s account: subject and object will align in the future, Horkheimer says, at the point at which society as a whole is an expression of the rational autonomous action of which we are capable. But to bring such a future about, we cannot rely upon a model of knowledge that allows only for descriptions of the present. We need the “obstinately” counter-factual force of a critical theory, not the “cog” that is traditional theory.

“Traditional and Critical Theory” What is “theory”? The question seems a rather easy one for contemporary science. Theory for most researchers is the sum-total of propositions about a subject, the propositions being so linked with each other that a few are basic and the rest derive from these. The smaller the number of primary principles in comparison with the derivations, the more perfect the theory. The real validity of the theory depends on the derived propositions being consonant with the actual facts. If experience and theory contradict each other, one of the two must be reexamined. Either the scientist has failed to observe correctly or something is wrong with the principles of the theory. In relation to facts, therefore, a theory always remains a hypothesis. One must be ready to change it if its weaknesses begin to show as one works through the material. Theory is stored-up knowledge, put in a form that makes it useful for the closest possible description of facts. Poincaré compares science to a library that must ceaselessly expand. Experimental physics is the librarian who takes care of acquisitions, that is, enriches knowledge

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by supplying new material. Mathematical physics—the theory of natural science in the strictest sense—keeps the catalogue; without the catalogue one would have no access to the library’s rich contents. “That is the rôle of mathematical physics. It must direct generalisation, so as to increase what I have called just now the output of science.”1 The general goal of all theory is a universal systematic science, not limited to any particular subject matter but embracing all possible objects. The division of sciences is being broken down by deriving the principles for special areas from the same basic premises. The same conceptual apparatus which was elaborated for the analysis of inanimate nature is serving to classify animate nature as well, and anyone who has once mastered the use of it, that is, the rules for derivation, the symbols, the process of comparing derived propositions with observable fact, can use it at any time. But we are still rather far from such an ideal situation. Such, in its broad lines, is the widely accepted idea of what theory is. Its origins supposedly coincide with the beginnings of modern philosophy. The third maxim in Descartes’ scientific method is the decision to carry on my reflections in due order, commencing with objects that were the most simple and easy to understand, in order to rise little by little, or by degrees, to knowledge of the most complex, assuming an order, even if a fictitious one, among those which do not follow a natural sequence relative to one another. The derivations as usually practiced in mathematics is to be applied to all science. The order in the world is captured by a deductive chain of thought. Those long chains of deductive reasoning, simple and easy as they are, of which geometricians make use in order to arrive at the most difficult demonstrations, had caused me to imagine that all those things which fall under the cognizance of men might very likely be mutually related in the same fashion; and that, provided only that we abstain from receiving anything as true which is not so, and always retain the order which is necessary in order to deduce the one conclusion from the other, there can be nothing so remote that we cannot reach it, nor so recondite that we cannot discover it.2 Depending on the logician’s own general philosophical outlook, the most universal propositions from which the deduction begins are themselves regarded as experiential judgments, as inductions (as with John Stuart Mill), as evident insights (as in rationalist and phenomenological schools), or as Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, tr. by W[illiam] J[ohn] G[reenstreet] (London: Walter Scott, 1905), p. 145. 2 Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, tr. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19312), volume 1, p. 92. 1

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arbitrary postulates (as in the modern axiomatic approach). In the most advanced logic of the present time, as represented by Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, theory is defined “as an enclosed system of propositions for a science as a whole.”3 Theory in the fullest sense is “a systematically linked set of propositions, taking the form of a systematically unified deduction.”4 Science is “a certain totality of propositions . . ., emerging in one or other manner from theoretical work, in the systematic order of which propositions a certain totality of objects acquires definition.”5 The basic requirement which any theoretical system must satisfy is that all the parts should intermesh thoroughly and without friction. Harmony, which includes lack of contradictions, and the absence of superfluous, purely dogmatic elements which have no influence on the observable phenomena, are necessary conditions, according to Weyl.6 In so far as this traditional conception of theory shows a tendency, it is towards a purely mathematical system of symbols. As elements of the theory, as components of the propositions and conclusions, there are ever fewer names of experiential objects and ever more numerous mathematical symbols. Even the logical operations themselves have already been so rationalized that, in large areas of natural science at least, theory formation has become a matter of mathematical construction. The sciences of man and society have attempted to follow the lead of the natural sciences with their successes. The difference between those schools of social science which are more oriented to the investigation of facts and those which concentrate more on principles has nothing directly to do with the concept of theory as such. The assiduous collecting of facts in all the disciplines dealing with social life, the gathering of great masses of detail in connection with problems, the empirical inquiries, through careful questionnaires and other means, which are a major part of scholarly activity, especially in the Anglo-Saxon universities since Spencer’s time—all this adds up to a pattern which is, outwardly, much like the rest of life in a society dominated by industrial production techniques. Such an approach seems quite difference from the formulation of abstract principles and the analysis of basic concepts by an armchair scholar, which are typical, for example, of one sector of German sociology. Yet these divergences do not signify a structural difference in ways of thinking. In recent periods of contemporary society the so-called human studies Geisteswissenschaften) have had but a fluctuating market value and must

Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik (Halle, 1929), p. 89. Husserl, op. cit., p. 79. 5 Husserl, op. cit., p. 91. 6 Herman Weyl, Philosphie der Naturwissenschaft, in Handbuch der Philosophie, Part 2 (Munich-Berlin, 1927), pp. 118ff. 3 4

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try to imitate the more prosperous natural sciences whose practical value is beyond question. There can be no doubt, in fact, that the various schools of sociology have an identical conception of theory and that it is the same as theory in the natural sciences. Empirically oriented sociologists have the same idea of what a fully elaborated theory should be as their theoretically oriented brethren. The former, indeed, are persuaded that in view of the complexity of social problems and the present state of science any concern with general principles must be regarded as indolent and idle. If theoretical work is to be done, it must be done with an eye unwaveringly on the facts; there can be no thought in the foreseeable future of comprehensive theoretical statements. These scholars are much enamored of the methods of exact formulation and, in particular, of mathematical procedures, which are especially congenial to the conception of theory described above. What they object to is not so much theory as such but theories spun out of their heads by men who have no personal experience of the problems of an experimental science. Distinctions like those between community and society (Tönnies), mechanical and organic solidarity (Durkheim), or culture and civilization (A. Weber) as basic forms of human sociality prove to be of questionable value as soon as one attempts to apply them to concrete problems. The way that sociology must take in the present state of research is (it is argued) the laborious ascent from the description of social phenomena to detailed comparisons and only then to the formation of general concepts. The empiricist, true to his traditions, is thus led to say that only complete inductions can supply the primary propositions for a theory and that we are still far from having made such inductions. His opponent claims the right to use other methods, less dependent on progress in data-collection, for the formation of primary categories and insights. Durkheim, for example, agrees with many basic views of the empirical school but, in dealing with principles, he opts for an abridgement of the inductive process. It is impossible, he claims, to classify social happenings on the basis of purely empirical inventories, nor can research make classification easier in the way in which it is expected to do so. Its [induction’s] role is to put into our hands points of reference to which we can refer other observations than those which have furnished us with these very points of reference. But for this purpose it must be made not from a complete inventory of all the individual characteristics but from a small number of them, carefully chosen . . . It will spare the observer many steps because it will guide him . . . We must, then, choose the most essential characteristics for our classification.7 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, tr. from the eighth edition by Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 80.

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Whether the primary principles are gotten by selection, by intuition, or by pure stipulation makes no difference, however, to their function in the ideal theoretical system. For the scientist must certainly apply his more or less general propositions, as hypotheses, to ever new facts. The phenomenologically oriented sociologist will indeed claim that once an essential law has been ascertained every particular instance will, beyond any doubt, exemplify the law. But the really hypothetical character of the essential law is manifested as soon as the question arises whether in a particular case we are dealing with an instance of the essence in question or of a related essence, whether we are faced with a poor example of one type or a good example of another type. There is always, on the one hand, the conceptually formulated knowledge and, on the other, the facts to be subsumed under it. Such a subsumption or establishing of a relation between the simple perception or verification of a fact and the conceptual structure of our knowing is called its theoretical explanation. We need not enter here into the details of the various kinds of classification. It will be enough to indicate briefly how the traditional concept of theory handles the explanation of historical events. The answer emerged clearly in the controversy between Eduard Meyer and Max Weber. Meyer regarded as idle and unanswerable the question of whether, even if certain historical personages had not reached certain decisions, the wars they caused would nonetheless sooner or later have occurred. Weber tried to show that if the question were indeed idle and unanswerable, all historical explanation would become impossible. He developed a “theory of objective possibility,” based on the theories of the physiologist, von Kries, and of writers in jurisprudence and national economy such as Merkel, Liefmann, and Radbruch. For Weber, the historian’s explanations, like those of the expert in criminal law, rest not on the fullest possible enumeration of all pertinent circumstances but on the establishment of a connection between those elements of an event which are significant for historical continuity, and particular, determinative happenings. This connection, for example the judgment that a war resulted from the policies of a statesman who knew what he was about, logically supposes that, had such a policy not existed, some other effect would have followed. If one maintains a particular causal nexus between historical events, one is necessarily implying that had the nexus not existed, then in accordance with the rules that govern our experience another effect would have followed in the given circumstances. The rules of experience here are nothing but the formulations of our knowledge concerning economic, social, and psychological interconnections. With the help of these we reconstruct the probable course of events, going beyond the event itself to what will serve as explanation.8 We are thus working with conditional propositions as Max Weber, “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences I: A Critique of Eduard Meyer’s Methodological Views,” in Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and tr. by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949), pp. 113–63.

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applied to a given situation. If circumstances a, b, c, and d, are given, then event q must be expected; if d is lacking, event r; if g is added, event s, and so on. This kind of calculation is a logical tool of history as it is of science. It is in this fashion that theory in the traditional sense is actually elaborated. What scientists in various fields regard as the essence of theory thus corresponds, in fact, to the immediate tasks they set for themselves. The manipulation of physical nature and of specific economic and social mechanism demand alike the amassing of a body of knowledge such as is supplied in an ordered set of hypotheses. The technological advances of the bourgeois period are inseparably linked to this function of the pursuit of science. On the one hand, it made the facts fruitful for the kind of scientific knowledge that would have practical application in the circumstances, and, on the other, it made possible the application of knowledge already possessed. Beyond doubt, such work is a moment in the continuous transformation and development of the material foundations of that society. But the conception of theory was absolutized, as though it were grounded in the inner nature of knowledge as such or justified in some other ahistorical way, and thus it became a reified, ideological category. As a matter of fact, the fruitfulness of newly discovered factual connections for the renewal of existent knowledge, and the application of such knowledge to the facts, do not derive from purely logical or methodological sources but can rather be understood only in the context of real social processes. When a discovery occasions the restructuring of current ideas, this is not due exclusively to logical considerations or, more particularly, to the contradiction between the discovery and particular elements in current views. If this were the only real issue, one could always think up further hypotheses by which one could avoid changing the theory as a whole. That new views in fact win out is due to concrete historical circumstances, even if the scientist himself may be determined to change his views only by immanent motives. Modern theoreticians of knowledge do not deny the importance of historical circumstance, even if among the most influential nonscientific factors they assign more importance to genius and accident than to social conditions. In the seventeenth century, for example, men began to resolve the difficulties into which traditional astronomy had fallen, no longer by supplemental constructions but by adopting the Copernican system in its place. This change was not due to the logical properties alone of the Copernican theory, for example its greater simplicity. If these properties were seen as advantages, this very fact points beyond itself to the fundamental characteristics of social action at that time. That Copernicanism, hardly mentioned in the sixteenth century, should now become a revolutionary force is part of the larger historical process by which mechanistic thinking came to prevail.9 A description of this development may be found in Henryk Grossmann, “Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanischen Philosophie und die Manufaktur,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 4 (1935), 161ff.

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But the influence of the current social situation on change in scientific structures is not limited to comprehensive theories like the Copernican system. It is also true for special research problems in everyday life. Sheer logic alone will not tell us whether the discovery of new varieties in particular areas of inorganic or organic nature, whether in the chemical laboratory or in paleontological research, will be the occasion for modifying old classifications or for elaborating new ones. The theoreticians of knowledge usually rely here on a concept of theology which only in appearance is immanent to their science. Whether and how new definitions are purposefully drawn up depends in fact not only on the simplicity and consistency of the system but also, among other things, on the directions and goals of research. These last, however, are not self-explanatory nor are they, in the last analysis, a matter of insight. As the influence of the subject matter on the theory, so also the application of the theory to the subject matter is not only an intrascientific process but a social one as well. Bringing hypotheses to bear on facts is an activity that goes on, ultimately, not in the savant’s head but in industry. Such rules as that coal-tar under certain conditions becomes colored or that nitro-glycerin, saltpeter, and other materials have great explosive force, are accumulated knowledge which is really applied to reality in the great industrial factories. Among the various philosophical schools it is the Positivists and the Pragmatists who apparently pay most attention to the connections between theoretical work and the social life-process. These schools consider the prevision and usefulness of results to be a scientific task. But in reality this sense of practical purpose, this belief in the social value of his calling is a purely private conviction of the scholar. He may just as well believe in an independent, “suprasocial,” detached knowledge as in the social importance of his expertise: such opposed interpretations do no influence his real activity in the slightest. The scholar and his science are incorporated into the apparatus of society; his achievements are a factor in the conservation and continuous renewal of the existing state of affairs, no matter what fine names he gives to what he does. His knowledge and results, it is expected, will correspond to their proper “concept,” that is, they must constitute theory in the sense described above. In the social division of labor the savant’s role is to integrate facts into conceptual frameworks and to keep the latter up-to-date so that he himself and all who use them may be masters of the widest possible range of facts. Experiment has the scientific role of establishing facts in such a way that they fit into theory as currently accepted. The factual material or subject matter is provided from without; science sees to its formulation in clear and comprehensible terms, so that men may be able to use the knowledge as they wish. The reception, transformation, and rationalization of factual knowledge is the scholar’s special form of spontaneity, namely theoretical activity, whether

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there is question of as detailed as possible an exposition of a subject as in history and the descriptive branches of other special disciplines, or of the synthesis of masses of data and the attainment of general rules as in physics. The dualism of thought and being, understanding and perception is second nature to the scientist. The traditional idea of theory is based on scientific activity as carried on within the division of labor at a particular stage in the latter’s development. It corresponds to the activity of the scholar which takes place alongside all the other activities of a society but in no immediately clear connection with them. In this view of theory, therefore, the real social function of science is not made manifest; it speaks not of what theory means in human life, but only of what it means in the isolated sphere in which for historical reasons it comes into existence. Yet as a matter of fact the life of society is the result of all the work done in the various sectors of production. Even if therefore the division of labor in the capitalist system functions but poorly, its branches, including science, do not become for that reason self-sufficient and independent. They are particular instances of the way in which society comes to grips with nature and maintains its own inherited form. They are moments in the social process of production, even if they be almost or entirely unproductive in the narrower sense. Neither the structures of industrial and agrarian production nor the separation of the so-called guiding and executory functions, services, and works, or of intellectual and manual operations are eternal or natural states of affairs. They emerge rather from the mode of production practiced in particular forms of society. The seeming self-sufficiency enjoyed by work processes whose course is supposedly determined by the very nature of the object corresponds to the seeming freedom of the economic subject in bourgeois society. The latter believe they are acting according to personal determinations, whereas in fact even in their most complicated calculations they but exemplify the working of an incalculable social mechanism. The false consciousness of the bourgeois savant in the liberal era comes to light in very diverse philosophical systems. It found an especially significant expression at the turn of the century in the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school. Particular traits in the theoretical activity of the specialist are here elevated to the rank of universal categories, of instances of the world-mind, the eternal “Logos.” More accurately, decisive elements in social life are reduced to the theoretical activity of the savant. Thus “the power of knowledge” is called “the power of creative origination.” “Production” means the “creative sovereignty of thought.” For any datum it must be possible to deduce all its determinations from theoretical systems and ultimately from mathematics; thus all finite magnitudes may be derived from the concept of the in finitely small by way of the infinitesimal calculus, and this process is precisely their “production.” The ideal to be striven for is a unitary system of science which, in the sense just described, will be

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all-powerful. Since everything about the object is reduced to conceptual determinations, the end-result of such theoretical work is that nothing is to be regarded as material and stable. The determinative, ordering, unifying function is the sole foundation for all else, and towards it all human effort is directed. Production is production of unity, and production is itself the product.10 Progress in awareness of freedom really means, according to this logic, that the paltry snippet of reality which the savant encounters finds ever more adequate expression in the form of differential quotients. In reality, the scientific calling is only one, nonindependent, element in the work or historical activity of man, but in such a philosophy the former replaces the latter. To the extent that it conceives of reason as actually determining the course of events in a future society, such a hypostatization of Logos as reality is also a camouflaged utopia. In fact, however, the selfknowledge of present-day man is not a mathematical knowledge of nature which claims to be the eternal Logos, but a critical theory of society as it is, a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life. The isolated considerations of particular activities and branches of activity, along with their contents and objects, requires for its validity an accompanying concrete awareness of its own limitations. A conception is needed which overcomes the one-sidedness that necessarily arises when limited intellectual processes are detached from their matrix in the total activity of society. In the idea of theory which the scholar inevitably reaches when working purely within his own discipline, the relation between fact and conceptual ordering of fact offers a point of departure for such a corrective conception. The prevailing theory of knowledge has, of course, recognized the problem which this relation raises. The point is constantly stressed that identical objects provide for one discipline problems to be resolved only in some distant future, while in another discipline they are accepted as simple facts. Connections which provide physics with research problems are taken for granted in biology. Within biology, physiological processes raise problems while psychological processes do not. The social sciences take human and nonhuman nature in its entirety as given and are concerned only with how relationships are established between man and nature and between man and man. However, an awareness of this relativity, immanent in bourgeois science, in the relationship between theoretical thought and facts, is not enough to bring the concept of theory to a new stage of development. What is needed is a radical reconsideration, not of the scientist alone, but of the knowing individual as such. The whole perceptible world as present to a member of bourgeois society and as interpreted within a traditional worldview which is in continuous

Cf. Hermann Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenninis (Berlin, 1914), pp. 23ff.

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interaction with that given world, is seen by the perceiver as a sum-total of facts; it is there and must be accepted. The classificatory thinking of each individual is one of those social relations by which men try to adapt to reality in a way that best meets their needs. But there is at this point an essential difference between the individual and society. The world which is given to the individual and which he must accept and take into account is, in its present and continuing form, a product of the activity of society as a whole. The objects we perceive in our surroundings––cities, villages, fields, and woods––bear the mark of having been worked on by man. It is not only in clothing and appearance, in outward form and emotional make-up that men are the product of history. Even the way they see and hear is inseparable from the social life-process as it has evolved over the millennia. The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception. The opposition of passivity and activity, which appears in knowledge theory as a dualism of senseperception and understanding, does not hold for society, however, in the same measure as for the individual. The individual sees himself as passive and dependent, but society, though made up of individuals, is an active subject, even if a nonconscious one and, to that extent, a subject only in an improper sense. This difference in the existence of man and society is an expression of the cleavage which has up to now affected the historical forms of social life. The existence of society has either been founded directly on oppression or been the blind outcome of conflicting forces, but in any event not the result of conscious spontaneity on the part of free individuals. Therefore the meaning of “activity” and “passivity” changes according as these concepts are applied to society or to individual. In the bourgeois economic mode the activity of society is blind and concrete, that of individuals abstract and conscious. Human production also always has an element of planning to it. To the extent then that the facts which the individual and his theory encounter are socially produced, there must be rationality in them, even if in a restricted sense. But social action always involves, in addition, available knowledge and its application. The perceived fact is therefore co-determined by human ideas and concepts, even before its conscious theoretical elaboration by the knowing individual. Nor are we to think here only of experiments in natural science. The so-called purity of objective event to be achieved by the experimental procedure is, of course, obviously connected with technological conditions, and the connection of these in turn with the material process of production is evident. But it is easy here to confuse two questions: the question of the mediation of the factual through the activity of society as a whole, and the question of the influence of the measuring

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instrument, that is, of a particular action, upon the object being observed. The latter problem, which continually plagues physics, is no more closely connected with the problem that concerns us here than is the problem of perception generally, including perception in everyday life. Man’s physiological apparatus for sensation itself largely anticipates the order followed in physical experiment. As man reflectively records reality, he separates and rejoins pieces of it, and concentrates on some particulars while failing to notice others. This process is just as much a result of the modern mode of production, as the perception of a man in a tribe of primitive hunters and fishers is the result of the conditions of his existence (as well, of course, as of the object of perception). In this context the proposition that tools are prolongations of human organs can be inverted to state that the organs are also prolongations of the tools. In the higher stages of civilization conscious human action unconsciously determines not only the subjective side of perception but in larger degree the object as well. The sensible world which a member of industrial society sees about him every day bears the marks of deliberate work: tenement houses, factories, cotton, cattle for slaughter, men, and, in addition, not only objects such as subway trains, delivery trucks, autos, and airplanes, but the movements in the course of which they are perceived. The distinction within this complex totality between what belongs to unconscious nature and what to the action of man in society cannot be drawn in concrete detail. Even where there is question of experiencing natural objects as such, there very naturalness is determined by contrast with the social world and, to that extent, depends upon the latter. The individual, however, receives sensible reality, as a simple sequence of facts, into his world of ordered concepts. The latter too, though their context changes, have developed along with the life process of society. Thus, though the ordering of reality by understanding and the passing of judgment on objects usually takes place as a foregone conclusion and with surprising unanimity among members of a given society, yet the harmony between perception and traditional thought and among the monads or individual subjects of knowledge is not a metaphysical accident. The power of healthy human understanding, or common sense, for which there are no mysteries, as well as the general acceptance of identical views in areas not directly connected with class conflicts, as for example in the natural sciences, are conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to grasp it conceptually. In Kant’s philosophy this state of affairs is expressed in idealist form. The doctrine of purely passive sensation and active understanding suggests to him the question of whence the understanding derives its assured expectation that the manifold given in sensation will always obey the rules of the understanding. He explicitly rejects the thesis of a pre-established harmony,

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“a kind of preformation-system of pure reason,” in which reason has innate and sure rules with which objects are in accord.11 His own explanation is that sensible appearances are already formed by the transcendental subject, that is, through the activity of reason, when they are received by perception and consequently judged.12 In the most important chapters of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant tried to give a more detailed explanation of the “transcendental affinity” or subjective determination of sensible material, a process of which the individual is unaware. The difficulty and obscurity which, by Kant’s own admission, mark the sections on the deduction and schematism of the pure concepts of understanding may be connected with the fact that Kant imagines the supra-individual activity, of which the individual is unaware, only in the idealist form of a consciousness-in-itself, that is a purely intellectual source. In accordance with the theoretical vision available in his day, he does not see reality as product of a society’s work, work which taken as a whole is chaotic, but at the individual level is purposeful. Where Hegel glimpses the cunning of a reason that is nonetheless world-historical and objective, Kant sees “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.”13 At least Kant understood that behind the discrepancy between fact and theory which the scholar experiences in his professional work, there lies a deeper unity, namely, the general subjectivity upon which individual knowledge depends. The activity of society thus appears to be a transcendental power, that is, the sum-total of spiritual factors. However, Kant’s claim that its reality is sunk in obscurity, that is, that it is irrational despite all its rationality, is not without its kernel of truth. The bourgeois type of economy, despite all the ingenuity of the competing individuals within it, is not governed by any plan; it is not consciously directed to a general goal; the life of society as a whole proceeds from this economy only at the cost of excessive friction, in a stunted form, and almost, as it were, accidentally. The internal difficulties in the supreme concepts of Kantian philosophy, especially the ego of transcendental subjectivity, pure or original apperception, and consciousness-in-itself, show the depth and honesty of his thinking. The two-sidedness of these Kantian concepts, that is, their supreme unity and purposefulness, on the one hand, and their obscurity, unknownness, and impenetrability, on the other, reflects exactly the contradiction-filled form of human activity in the modern period. The collaboration of men in society is the mode of existence Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 167, tr. by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan 1933), p. 175. 12 Cf. Kant, op. cit., A 110, pp. 137–8. 13 Cf. Kant, op. cit., B 181, p. 183. 11

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which reason urges upon them, and so they do apply their powers and thus confirm their own rationality. But at the same time their work and its results are alienated from them, and the whole process with all its waste of work-power and human life, and with its wars and all its senseless wretchedness, seems to be an unchangeable force of nature, a fate beyond man’s control. In Kant’s theoretical philosophy, in his analysis of knowledge, this contradiction is preserved. The unresolved problem of the relation between activity and passivity, a priori and sense data, philosophy and psychology, is therefore not due to purely subjective insufficiency but is objectively necessary. Hegel discovered and developed these contradictions, but finally resolved them in a higher intellectual realm. Kant claimed that there existed a universal subject which, however, he could not quite describe. Hegel escaped this embarrassment by postulating the absolute spirit as the most real thing of all. According to him, the universal has already adequately evolved itself and is identical with all that happens. Reason need no longer stand over against itself in purely critical fashion; in Hegel reason has become affirmative, even before reality itself is affirmed as rational. But, confronted with the persisting contradictions in human existence and with the impotence of individuals in face of situations they have themselves brought about, the Hegelian solution seems a purely private assertion, a personal peace treaty between the philosopher and an inhuman world. The integration of facts into existing conceptual systems and the revision of facts through simplification or elimination of contradictions are, as we have indicated, part of general social activity. Since society is divided into groups and classes, it is understandable that theoretical structures should be related to the general activity of society in different ways according as the authors of such structures belong to one or other social class. Thus when the bourgeois class was first coming into being in a feudal society, the purely scientific theory which arose with it tended chiefly to the break-up of the status quo and attacked the old form of activity. Under liberalism this theory was accepted by the prevailing human type. Today, development is determined much less by average men who complete with each other in improving the material apparatus of production and its products, than by conflicting national and international cliques of leaders at the various levels of command in the economy and the State. In so far as theoretical thought is not related to highly specialized purposes connected with these conflicts, especially war and the industry that supports it, interest in theory has waned. Less energy is being expended on forming and developing the capacity of thought without regard to how it is to be applied. These distinctions, to which others might be added, do not at all change the fact that a positive social function is exercised by theory in its traditional

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form: that is, the critical examination of data with the aid of an inherited apparatus of concepts and judgments which is still operative in even the simplest minds, as well as the interaction between facts and theoretical forms that goes on in daily professional activity. In this intellectual work the needs and goals, the experiences and skills, the customs and tendencies of the contemporary form of human existence have all played their part. Like a material tool of production, it represents potentially an element not only of the contemporary cultural totality but of a more just, more differentiated, more harmoniously organized one as well. To the extent that this theoretical thinking does not deliberately lend itself to concerns which are external and alien to the object but truly concentrates on the problems which it meets in the wake of technical development and, in this connection, itself turns up new problems and transforms old concepts where necessary—to this extent it may rightly regard the technological and industrial accomplishments of the bourgeois era as its own justification and be confident of its own value. This kind of theoretical thinking considers itself to belong to the realm of the hypothetical, of course, not of certainty. But the hypothetical character is compensated for in many ways. The uncertainty involved is no greater than it need be, given the intellectual and technological means at hand at any given time, with their proven general usefulness. The very elaboration of such hypotheses, however small their probability may be, is itself a socially necessary and valuable accomplishment which is not at all hypothetical. The construction of hypotheses and theoretical activity in general are a kind of work which in present social circumstances has a real usefulness; that is, there is a demand for it. In so far as it is underpaid or even neglected, it only shares the fate of other concrete and possibly useful kinds of work which have gotten lost in the present economy. Yet these very kinds of work presuppose the present economy and are part of the total economic process as it exists under specific historical conditions. This has nothing to do with the question of whether scientific labor is itself productive in the narrow sense of the term. In the present order of things there is a demand for an immense number of so-called scientific creations; they are honored in very varying ways, and part of the goods emerging from strictly productive work is handed over for them, without anything at all being thereby settled about their own productivity. Even the emptiness of certain areas of university activity, as well as all the idle ingenuity and the construction of metaphysical and nonmetaphysical ideologies have their social significance, no less than do other needs arising out of social conflicts. However, they do not therefore further the interests of any important large sector of society in the present age. An activity which in its existing forms contributes to the being of society need not be productive al all, that is be a money-making enterprise. Nevertheless it can belong to the existing order and help make it possible, as is certainly the case with specialized science.

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We must go on now to add that there is a human activity which has society itself for its object.14 The aim of this activity is not simply to eliminate one or other abuse, for it regards such abuses as necessarily connected with the way in which the social structure is organized. Although it itself emerges from the social structure, its purpose is not, either in its conscious intention or in its objective significance, the better functioning of any element in the structure. On the contrary, it is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing. The individual as a rule must simply accept the basic conditions of his existence as given and strive to fulfill them; he finds his satisfaction and praise in accomplishing as well as he can the tasks connected with his place in society and in courageously doing his duty despite all the sharp criticism he may choose to exercise in particular matters. But the critical attitude of which we are speaking is wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members. The separation between individual and society in virtue of which the individual accepts as natural the limits prescribed for his activity is relativized in critical theory. The latter considers the overall framework which is conditioned by the blind interaction of individual activities (that is, the existent division of labor and the class distinctions) to be a function which originates in human action and therefore is a possible object of planful decision and rational determination of goals. The two-sided character of the social totality in its present form becomes, for men who adopt the critical attitude, a conscious opposition. In recognizing the present form of economy and the whole culture which it generates to be the product of human work as well as the organization which mankind was capable of and has provided for itself in the present era, these men identify themselves with this totality and conceive it as will and reason. It is their own world. At the same time, however, they experience the fact that society is comparable to nonhuman natural processes, to pure mechanisms, because cultural forms which are supported by war and oppression are not the creations of a unified, self-conscious will. That world is not their own but the world of capital. Previous history thus cannot really be understood; only the individuals and specific groups in it are intelligible, and even these not totally, since their internal dependence on an inhuman society means that even in their conscious action such individuals and groups are still in good measure mechanical functions. The identification, then, of men of critical mind with In the following pages this activity is called “critical” activity. The term is used here less in the sense it has in the idealist critique of pure reason then in the sense it has in the dialectical critique of political economy. It points to an essential espect of the dialectical theory of society.

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their society is marked by tension, and the tension characterizes all the concepts of the critical way of thinking. Thus, such thinkers interpret the economic categories of work, value, and productivity exactly as they are interpreted in the existing order, and they regard any other interpretation as pure idealism. But at the same time they consider it rank dishonesty simply to accept the interpretation; the critical acceptance of the categories which rule social life contains simultaneously their condemnation. This dialectical character of the self-interpretation of contemporary man is what, in the last analysis, also causes the obscurity of the Kantian critique of reason. Reason cannot become transparent to itself as long as men act as members of an organism which lacks reason. Organism as a naturally developing and declining unity cannot be a sort of model for society, but only a form of deadened existence from which society must emancipate itself. An attitude which aims at such an emancipation and at an alteration of society as a whole might well be of service in theoretical work carried on within reality as presently ordered. But it lacks the pragmatic character which attaches to traditional thought as a socially useful professional activity. In traditional theoretical thinking, the genesis of particular objective facts, the practical application of the conceptual systems by which it grasps the facts, and the role of such systems in action, are all taken to be external to the theoretical thinking itself. This alienation, which finds expression in philosophical terminology as the separation of value and research, knowledge and action, and other polarities, protects the savant from the tensions we have indicated and provides an assured framework for his activity. Yet a kind of thinking which does not accept this framework seems to have the ground taken out from under it. If a theoretical procedure does not take the form of determining objective facts with the help of the simplest and most differentiated conceptual systems available, what can it be but an aimless intellectual game, half conceptual poetry, half impotent expression of states of mind? The investigation into the social conditioning of facts and theories may indeed be a research problem, perhaps even a whole field for theoretical work, but how can such studies be radically different from other specialized efforts? Research into ideologies, or sociology of knowledge, which has been taken over from the critical theory of society and established as a special discipline, is not opposed either in its aim or in its other ambitions to the usual activities that go on within classificatory science. In this reaction to critical theory, the self-awareness of thought as such is reduced to the discovery of the relationship that exists between intellectual positions and their social location. Yet the structure of the critical attitude, inasmuch as its intentions go beyond prevailing social ways of acting, is no more closely related to social disciplines thus conceived than it is to natural science. Its opposition to the traditional concept of theory springs in general from a difference not so much of objects as of subjects. For men of the critical mind, the facts, as they emerge from the work of society, are

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not extrinsic in the same degree as they are for the savant or for members of other professions who all think like little savants. The latter look towards a new kind of organization of work. But in so far as the objective realities given in perception are conceived as products which in principle should be under human control and, in the future at least, will in fact come under it, these realities lose the character of pure factuality. The scholarly specialist “as” scientist regards social reality and its products as extrinsic to him, and “as” citizen exercises his interest in them through political articles, membership in political parties or social service organizations, and participation in elections. But he does not unify these two activities, and his other activities as well, except, at best, by psychological interpretation. Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society. There will always be something that is extrinsic to man’s intellectual and material activity, namely nature as the totality of as yet unmastered elements with which society must deal. But when situations which really depend on man alone, the relationships of men in their work, and the course of man’s own history are also accounted part of “nature,” the resultant extrinsicality is not only not a suprahistorical eternal category (even pure nature in the sense described is not that), but it is a sign of contemptible weakness. To surrender to such weakness is nonhuman and irrational. Bourgeois thought is so constituted that in reflection on the subject which exercises such thought a logical necessity forces it to recognize an ego which imagines itself to be autonomous. Bourgeois thought is essentially abstract, and its principle is an individuality which inflatedly believes itself to be the ground of the world or even to be the world without qualification, an individuality separated off from events. The direct contrary of such an outlook is the attitude which holds the individual to be the unproblematic expression of an already constituted society; an example would be a nationalist ideology. Here the rhetorical “we” is taken seriously; speech is accepted as the organ of the community. In the internally rent society of our day, such thinking, except in social questions, sees nonexistent unanimities and is illusory. Critical thought and its theory are opposed to both the types of thinking just described. Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sum-total of individuals. Its subject is rather a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships

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with the social totality and with nature. The subject is no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is the construction of the social present. Furthermore, the thinking subject is not the place where knowledge and object coincide, nor consequently the starting-point for attaining absolute knowledge. Such as illusion about the thinking subject, under which idealism has lived since Descartes, is ideology in the strict sense, for in it the limited freedom of the bourgeois individual puts on the illusory form of perfect freedom and autonomy. As a matter of fact, however, in a society which is untransparent and without self-awareness the ego, whether active simply as thinker or active in other ways as well, is unsure of itself too. In refection on man, subject and object are sundered; their identity lies in the future, not in the present. The method leading to such an identification may be called explanation in Cartesian language, but in genuinely critical thought explanation signifies not only a logical process but a concrete historical one as well. In the course of it both the social structure as a whole and the relation of the theoretician to society are altered, that is both the subject and the role of thought are changed. The acceptance of an essential unchangeableness between subject, theory, and object thus distinguishes the Cartesian conception from every kind of dialectical logic. How is critical thought related to experience? One might maintain that if such thought were not simply to classify but also to determine for itself the goals which classification serves, in other words its own fundamental direction, it would remain locked up within itself, as happened to idealist philosophy. If it did not take refuge in utopian fantasy, it would be reduced to the formalistic fighting of sham battles. The attempt legitimately to determine practical goals by thinking must always fail. If thought were not content with the role given to it in existent society, if it were not to engage in theory in the traditional sense of the word, it would necessarily have to return to illusions long since laid bare. The fault in such reflections as these on the role of thought is that thinking is understood in a detachedly departmentalized and therefore spiritualist way, as it is today under existing conditions of the division of labor. In society as it is, the power of thought has never controlled itself but has always functioned as a nonindependent moment in the work process, and the latter has its own orientation and tendency. The work process enhances and develops human life through the conflicting movement of progressive and retrogressive periods. In the historical form in which society has existed, however, the full measure of goods produced for man’s enjoyment has, at any particular stage, been given directly only to a small group of men. Such a state of affairs has found expression in thought, too, and left its mark on philosophy and religion. But from the beginning the desire to bring the same enjoyment to the majority has stirred in the depths of men’s hearts; despite all the material appropriateness of

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class organization, each of its forms has finally proved inadequate. Slaves, vassals, and citizens have cast off their yoke. This desire, too, has found expression in cultural creations. Now, inasmuch as every individual in modern times has been required to make his own the purposes of society as a whole and to recognize these in society, there is the possibility that men would become aware of and concentrate their attention upon the path which the social work process has taken without any definite theory behind it, as a result of disparate forces interacting, and with the despair of the masses acting as a decisive factor at major turning points. Thought does not spin such a possibility out of itself but rather becomes aware of its own proper function. In the course of history men have come to know their own activity and thus to recognize the contradiction that marks their existence. The bourgeois economy was concerned that the individual should maintain the life of society by taking care of his own personal happiness. Such as economy has within it, however, a dynamism which results in a fantastic degree of power for some, such as reminds us of the old Asiatic dynasties, and in material and intellectual weakness for many others., The original fruitfulness of the bourgeois organization of the life process is thus transformed into a paralyzing barrenness, and men by their own toil keep in existence a reality which enslaves them in ever greater degree. Yet, as far as the role of experience is concerned, there is a difference between traditional and critical theory. The viewpoints which the latter derives from historical analysis as the goals of human activity, especially the idea of a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community, are immanent in human work but are not correctly grasped by individuals or by the common mind. A certain concern is also required if these tendencies are to be perceived and expressed. According to Marx and Engels such a concern is necessarily generated in the proletariat. Because of its situation in modern society the proletariat experiences the connection between work which puts ever more powerful instruments into men’s hands in their struggle with nature, and the continuous renewal of an outmoded social organization. Unemployment, economic crises, militarization, terrorist regimes––in a word, the whole condition of the masses––are not due, for example, to limited technological possibilities, as might have been the case in earlier periods, but to the circumstances of production which are no longer suitable to our time. The application of all intellectual and physical means for the mastery of nature is hindered because in the prevailing circumstances these means are entrusted to special, mutually opposed interests. Production is not geared to the life of the whole community while heeding also the claims of individuals; it is geared to the power-backed claims of individuals while being concerned hardly at all with the life of the community. This is the inevitable result, in the present property system, of the principle that it is enough for individuals to look out for themselves.

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But it must be added that even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge. The proletariat may indeed have experience of meaninglessness in the form of continuing and increasing wretchedness and injustice in its own life. Yet this awareness is prevented from becoming a social force by the differentiation of social structure which is still imposed on the proletariat from above and by the opposition between personal class interests which is transcended only at very special moments. Even to the proletariat the world superficially seems quite different than it really is. Even an outlook which could grasp that no opposition really exists between the proletariat’s own true interests and those of society as a whole, and would therefore derive its principles of action from the thoughts and feelings of the masses, would fall into slavish dependence on the status quo. The intellectual is satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat and finds satisfaction in adapting himself to it and canonizing it. He fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort (which the passivity of his own thinking spares him) and of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need be. His own thinking should in fact be a critical, promotive factor in the development of the masses. When he wholly accepts the present psychological state of that class which, objectively considered, embodies the power to change society, he has the happy feeling of being linked with an immense force and enjoys a professional optimism. When the optimism is shattered in periods of crushing defeat, many intellectuals risk falling into a pessimism about society and a nihilism which are just as ungrounded as their exaggerated optimism had been. They cannot bear the thought that the kind of thinking which is most topical, which has the deepest grasp of the historic al situation, and is most pregnant with the future, must at certain times isolate its subject and throw him back upon himself. If critical theory consisted essentially in formulations of the feelings and ideas of one class at any given moment, it would not be structurally different from the special branches of science. It would be engaged in describing the psychological contents typical of certain social groups; it would be social psychology. The relation of being to consciousness is different in different classes of society. If we take seriously the ideas by which the bourgeoisie explains its own order––free exchange, free competition, harmony of interests, and so so––and if we follow them to their logical conclusion, they manifest their inner contradiction and therewith their real opposition to the bourgeois order. The simple description of bourgeois self-awareness thus does not give us the truth about this class of men. Similarly, a systematic presentation of the contents of proletarian consciousness cannot provide a true picture of proletarian existence and interests. It would yield only an application of traditional theory to a specific problem, and not the

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intellectual side of the historical process of proletarian emancipation. The same would be true if one were to limit oneself to appraising and making known the ideas not of the proletariat in general but of some more advanced sector of the proletariat, for example a party or its leadership, The real task set here would be the registering and classifying of facts with the help of the most suitable conceptual apparatus, and the theoretician’s ultimate goal would be the prediction of future socio-psychological phenomena. Thought and the formation of theory would be one thing and its object, the proletariat, another. If, however, the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges. The course of the conflict between the advanced sectors of the class and the individuals who speak out the truth concerning it, as well as of the conflict between the most advanced sectors with their theoreticians and the rest of the class, is to be understood as a process of interactions in which awareness comes to flower along with its liberating but also its aggressive forces which incite while also requiring discipline. The sharpness of the conflict shows in the ever present possibility of tension between the theoretician and the class which his thinking is to serve. The unity of the social forces which promise liberation is at the same time their distinction (in Hegel’s sense); it exists only as a conflict which continually threatens the subjects caught up in it. This truth becomes clearly evident in the person of the theoretician; he exercises an aggressive critique not only against the conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, conformist, or utopian tendencies within his own household. The traditional type of theory, one side of which finds expression in formal logic, is in its present form part of the production process with its division of labor. Since society must come to grips with nature in future ages as well, this intellectual technology will not become irrelevant but on the contrary is to be developed as fully as possible. But the kind of theory which is an element in action leading to new social forms is not a cog in an already existent mechanism. Even if victory or defeat provides a vague analogy to the confirmation or failure of scientific hypotheses, the theoretician who sets himself up in opposition to society as it is does not have the consolidation that such hypotheses are part of his professional work. He cannot sing for himself the hymn of praise which Poincaré sang to the enrichment deriving even from hypotheses that must be rejected.15 His profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is

Poincaré, op. cit., pp. 150–1.

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a part and not something self-sufficient and separable from the struggle. Of course, many elements of theory in the usual sense enter into his work: the knowledge and prognosis of relatively isolated facts, scientific judgments, the elaboration of problems which differ from those of other theoreticians because of his specific interests but nonetheless manifest the same logical form. Traditional theory may take a number of things for granted: its positive role in a functioning society, an admittedly indirect and obscure relation to the satisfaction of general needs, and participation in the self-renewing life process. But all these exigencies about which science need not trouble itself because their fulfillment is rewarded and confirmed by the social position of the scientist, are called into question in critical thought. The goal at which the later aims, namely the rational state of society, is forced upon him by present distress. The theory which projects such a solution to the distress does not labor in the service of an existing reality but only gives voice to the mystery of that reality. However cogently absurdities and errors may be uncovered at any given moment, however much every error may be shown to be taking its revenge, yet the overall tendency of the critical theoretical undertaking receives no sanction from so-called healthy human understanding; it had no custom on its side, even when it promises success. Theories, on the contrary, which are confirmed or disproved in the building of machines, military organizations, even successful motion pictures, look to a clearly distinguishable consumer group, even when like theoretical physics they are pursued independently of any application or consist only in a joyous and virtuous playing with mathematical symbols; society proves its humaneness by rewarding such activity. But there are no such examples of the form consumption will take in that future with which critical thinking is concerned. Nonetheless the idea of a future society as a community of free men, which is possible thought technical means already at hand, does have a content, and to it there must be fidelity amid all change. In the form of an insight that the dismemberment and irrationality of society can now be eliminated and how this is to be accomplished, this idea is constantly being renewed amid prevailing conditions. But the state of affairs upon which judgment is passed in this conception and the tendencies inciting men to build a rational society are not brought into existence outside thought by forces extrinsic to it, with thought then, as it were, accidentally recognizing its own reflection in the product of these forces. Rather, one and the same subject who wants a new state of affairs, a better reality, to come to pass, also brings it forth. Out of the obscure harmony between being and thought, understanding and sense perception, human needs and their satisfaction in today’s economy, a harmony which seems an accident to the bourgeois eye, there will emerge in the future age the relation between rational intention and its realization. The struggle for the future provides but a fragmentary reflection of this

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relation, to the extent that a will which aims at the shaping of society as a whole is already consciously operative in the construction of the theory and practice which will lead to it. Despite all the discipline, justified by the need to win through, the community of those engaged in the struggle experiences something of the freedom and spontaneity which will mark the future. Where the unity of discipline and freedom has disappeared, the movement becomes a matter of interest only to its own bureaucracy, a play that already belongs to the repertory of modern history. That the future being striven for should be a vital reality even in the present proves nothing, however. The conceptual systems of classificatory understanding, the categories into which dead and living things, social, psychological, and physical phenomena have all been absorbed together, the division of objects and of judgments on them into the various pigeonholes of the special area of knowledge––all this makes up the apparatus of thought as it has proved and refined itself in connection with the real work process. This world of concepts makes up the consciousness of most men, and it has a basis to which its proponents can appeal. The concerns of critical thought, too, are those of most men, but they are not recognized to be such. The concepts which emerge under its influence are critical of the present. The Marxist categories of class, exploitation, surplus value, profit, pauperization, and breakdown are elements in a conceptual whole, and the meaning of this whole is to be sought not in the preservation of contemporary society but in its transformation into the right kind of society. Consequently, although critical theory at no point proceeds arbitrarily and in chance fashion, It appears, to prevailing modes of thought, to be subjective and speculative, one-sided and useless. Since it runs counter to prevailing habits of thought, which contribute to the persistence of the past and carry on the business of an outdated order of things (both past and outdated order guaranteeing a faction-ridden world), it appears to be biased and unjust. Above all, however, critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself. The change which it seeks to bring about is not effected gradually, so that success even if slow might be steady. The growth in numbers of more or less clear-minded disciples, the influence of some among them on governments, the power position of parties which have a positive attitude towards this theory or at least do not outlaw it––all these are among the vicissitudes encountered in the struggle for a higher stage of man’s life in community and are not found at the beginnings of the struggle. Such successes as these may even prove, later on, to have been only apparent victories and really blunders. Again: fertilization in agriculture, for example, or the application of a medical therapy may be far removed from ideal reality and yet accomplish something. Perhaps the theories underlying such technology may have to be refined, revised, or abolished in connection with specialized activity and with discoveries in other areas.

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Through such techniques, nonetheless, a certain amount of labor is saved in achieving results, and many an illness is healed or alleviated.16 But the first consequence of the theory which urges a transformation of society as a whole is only an intensification of the struggle with which the theory is connected. Furthermore, although material improvements, originating in the increased powers of resistance of certain groups, are indirectly due to the critical theory, the groups in question are not sectors of society whose steady spread would finally bring the new society to pass. Such ideas mistake the fundamental difference between a fragmented society in which material and ideological power operates to maintain privileges and an association of free men in which each has the same possibility of self-development. Such as association is not an abstract utopia, for the possibility in question can be shown to be real even at the present stage of productive forces. But how many tendencies will actually lead to this association, how many transitional phases have been reached, how desirable and intrinsically valuable individual preliminary stages may be, and what their historical importance is in relation to the idea––all this will be made clear only when the idea is brought to realization. One thing which this way of thinking has in common with fantasy is that an image of the future which springs indeed from a deep understanding of the present determines men’s thoughts and actions even in periods when the course of events seems to be leading far away from such a future and seems to justify every reaction except belief in fulfillment. It is not the arbitrariness and supposed independence of fantasy that is the common bond here, but its obstinacy. Within the most advanced group it is the theoretician who must have this obstinacy. The theoretician of the ruling class, perhaps after difficult beginnings, may reach a relatively assured position, but, on the other hand, the theoretician is also at times an enemy and criminal, at times a solitary utopian; even after his death the question of what he really was is not decided. The historical significance of his work is not self-evident; it rather depends on men speaking and acting in such a way as to justify it. It is not a finished and fixed historical creation. The capacity for such acts of thought as are required in everyday action, social or scientific, has been developed in men by a realistic training over many centuries. Failure here leads to affliction, failure, and punishment. The intellectual modality to which we refer consists essentially in this, that the conditions for bringing about an effect which has always appeared in the same circumstances before are known and in the appropriate context are supplied. There is an object-lesson kind of instruction through good and bad experiences and through organized experiment. The issue here is The same is true of insights in the areas of political economy and financial technology, and their use in economic policy.

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direct individual self-preservation, and in bourgeois society men have the opportunity of developing a sense of this. Knowledge in this traditional sense, including every type of experience, is preserved in critical theory and practice. But in regard to the essential kind of change at which the critical theory aims, there can be no corresponding concrete perception of it until it actually comes about. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the eating here is still in the future. Comparison with similar historical events can be drawn only in a limited degree. Constructive thinking, then, plays a more important role than empirical verification in this theory as a whole, in comparison with what goes on in the activity of common sense. This is one of the reasons why men who in particular scientific areas or in other professional activity are able to do extremely competent work, can show themselves quite limited and incompetent, despite good will, when it comes to questions concerning society as a whole. In all past periods when social change was on the agenda, people who thought “too much” were regarded as dangerous. This brings us to the problem of the general relation of the intelligentsia to society. The theoretician whose business it is to hasten developments which will lead to a society without injustice can find himself in opposition to views prevailing even among the proletariat, as we said above. If such a conflict were not possible, there would be no need of a theory; those who need it would come upon it without help. The conflict does not necessarily have anything to do with the class to which the theoretician belongs; nor does it depend on the kind of income he has. Engels was a businessman. In professional sociology, which derives its concept of class not from a critique of the economy but from its own observations, the theoretician’s social position is determined neither by the source of his income nor by the concrete content of his theory but by the formal element of education. The possibility of a wider vision, not the kind possessed by industrial magnates who know the world market and direct whole states from behind the scenes, but the kind possessed by university professors, middle-level civil servants, doctors, lawyers, and so forth, is what constitutes the “intelligentsia,” that is, a special social or even suprasocial stratum. It is the task of the critical theoretician to reduce the tension between his own insight and oppressed humanity in whose service he thinks. But in the sociological concept of which we speak detachment from all classes is an essential mark of the intelligentsia, a sort of sign of superiority of which it is proud.17 Such a neutral category corresponds to the abstract self-awareness typical of the savant. To the bourgeois consumer under liberalism knowledge meant knowledge that was useful in some circumstances The author is referring, here and in the following paragraphs, to Karl Mannheim’s theory, in his sociology of knowledge, of the specific condition and outlook of the intelligentsia in the bourgeois era.

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or other, no matter what kind of knowledge might be in question; the sociology we speak of approaches knowledge in the same way at the theoretical level. Marx and Mises, Lenin and Liefmann, Jaurès and Jevons all come under the same sociological heading, unless the politicians are left out of the list and put down as potential students of the political scientists, sociologists, and philosophers who are the real men of knowledge. From them the politician is to learn to use “such and such a means” when he takes “such and such a stand”; he must learn whether the practical position he adopts can be implemented with logical consistency.18 A division of labor is established between men who in social conflicts affect the course of history and the social theoreticians who assign them their standpoint. Critical theory is in contradiction to the formalistic concept of mind which underlies such an idea of the intelligentsia. According to this concept there is only one truth, and the positive attributes of honesty, internal consistency, reasonableness, and striving for pease, freedom, and happiness may not be attributed in the same sense to any other theory and practice. There is likewise no theory of society, even that of the sociologist concerned with general laws, that does not contain political motivations, and the truth of these must be decided not in supposedly neutral reflection but in personal thought and action, in concrete historical activity. Now, it is disconcerting that the intellectual should represent himself in this way, as though a difficult labor of thought, which he alone could accomplish, were the prime requirement if men were accurately to choose between revolutionary, liberal, and fascist ends and means. The situation has not been like that for many decades. The avant-garde in the political struggle need prudence, but not academic instruction on their so-called standpoint. Especially at a time when the forces of freedom in Europe are themselves disoriented and seeking to regroup themselves anew, when everything depends on nuances of position within their own movement, when indifference to substantive content, created by defeat, despair, and corrupt bureaucracy, threatens to overwhelm all the spontaneity, experience, and knowledge of the masses despite the heroic efforts of a few, a conception of the intelligentsia which claims to transcend party lines and is therefore abstract represents a view of problems that only hides the decisive questions. Mind is liberal. It tolerates no external coercion, no revamping of its results to suit the will of one or other power. But on the other hand it is not cut loose from the life of society; it does not hang suspended over it. In so far as mind seeks autonomy or man’s control over his own life no less than over nature, it is able to recognize this same tendency as a force operative in history. Considered in isolation, the recognition of such a tendency seems neutral; but just as mind is unable to recognize it without having first been stimulated and Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation’” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tr. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 151.

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become concerned, neither can it make such recognition a generally accepted fact without a struggle. To that extent, mind is not liberal. Intellectual efforts which arise here and there without any conscious connection with a particular practical commitment but vary according to different academic or other tasks that promise success, intellectual efforts which take now this, now that for their field of concentration, may be useful in the service of one or other historical tendency. But for all their formal correctness (and what theoretical structure, however radically faulted, cannot fulfill the requirements of formal correctness?), they can also hinder and lead astray the development of the mind. The abstract sociological concept of an intelligentsia which is to have missionary functions is, by its structure, an hypostatization of specialized science. Critical theory is neither “deeply rooted” like totalitarian propaganda nor “detached” like the liberalist intelligentsia. Our consideration of the various functions of traditional and critical theory brings to light the difference in their logical structure. The primary propositions of traditional theory define universal concepts under which all facts in the field in question are to be subsumed; for example, the concept of a physical process in physics or an organic process in biology. In between primary propositions and facts there is the hierarchy of genera and species with their relations of subordination. Facts are individual cases, examples, or embodiments of classes. There are no differences due to time between the unities in the system. Electricity does not exist prior to an electrical field, nor a field prior to electricity, any more than wolf as such exists before or after particular wolves. As far as an individual knower is concerned there may be one or other temporal sequence among such relationships, but no such sequence exists in the objects themselves. Furthermore, physics has also ceased to regard more general characteristics as causes or forces hidden in the concrete facts and to hypostatize these logical relationships; it is only sociology that is still unclear on this point. If new classes are added to the system or other changes are introduced, this is not usually regarded as proof that the determinations made earlier are necessarily too rigid and must turn out to be inadequate, for the relationship to the object or even the object itself may change without losing its identity. Changes are taken rather as an indication that our earlier knowledge was deficient or as a substitution of some aspects of an object for others, as a map, for example, may become dated because forests have been cut down, new cities built, or different borders drawn. In discursive logic, or logic of the understanding, the evolution of living beings is conceived in the same way. This person is now a child, then an adult; for such logic this can only mean that there is an abiding stable nucleus, “this person,” who successively possesses the attributes of being a child and an adult. For positivism, of course, there is simply no identity: first there is a child, later there is an adult, and the two are simply distinct complexes of facts. But this view cannot come to grips with the fact that a person changes and yet is identical with himself.

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The critical theory of society also begins with abstract determinations; in dealing with the present era it begins with the characterization of an economy based on exchange.19 The concepts Marx uses, such as commodity, value, and money, can function as genera when, for example, concrete social relations are judged to be relations of exchange and when there is question of the commodity character of goods. But the theory is not satisfied to relate concepts of reality by way of hypotheses. The theory beings with an outline of the mechanism by which bourgeois society, after dismantling feudal regulations, the guild system, and vassalage, did not immediately fall apart under the pressure of its own anarchic principle but managed to survive. The regulatory effects of exchange are brought out on which bourgeois economy is founded. The conception of the interaction of society and nature, which is already exercising its influence here, as well as the idea of a unified period of society, of its self-preservation, and so on, spring from a radical analysis, guided by concern for the future, of the historical process. The relation of the primary conceptual interconnections to the world of facts is not essentially a relation of classes to instances. It is because of its inner dynamism that the exchange relationship, which the theory outlines, dominates social reality, as, for example, the assimilation of food largely dominates the organic life of plant and brute beast. In critical theory, as in traditional theory, more specific elements must be introduced in order to move from fundamental structure to concrete reality. But such an intercalation of more detailed factors––for example the existence of large money reserves, the diffusion of these in sectors of society that are still precapitalist, foreign trade––is not accomplished by simple deduction as in theory that has been simplified for specialized use. Instead, every step rests on knowledge of man and nature which is stored up in the sciences and in historical experience. This is obvious, of course, for the theory of industrial technology. But in other areas too a detailed knowledge of how men react is applied throughout the doctrinal developments to which we have been referring. For example, the statement that under certain conditions the lowest strata of society have the most children plays an important role in explaining how the bourgeois society built on exchange necessarily leads to capitalism with its army of industrial reserves and its crises. To give the psychological reasons behind the observed fact about the lower classes is left to traditional science. Thus the critical theory of society begins with the idea of the simple exchange of commodities and defines the idea with the help of relatively universal concepts. It then moves further, using all knowledge available and taking suitable material from the research of others as well as from On the logical structure of the critique of political economy, cf. the essay “Zum Problem der Wahreit,” in Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie, vol I (Frankfurt, 1968), pp. 265ff.

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specialized research. Without denying its own principles as established by the special discipline of political economy, the theory shows how an exchange economy, given the condition of men (which, of course, changes under the very influence of such an economy), must necessarily lead to a heightening of those social tensions which in the present historical era lead in turn to wars and revolutions. The necessity just mentioned, as well as the abstractness of the concepts, are both like and unlike the same phenomena in traditional theory. In both types of theory there is a strict deduction if the claim of validity for general definitions is shown to include a claim that certain factual relations will occur. For example, if you are dealing with electricity, such and such an event must occur because such and such characteristics belong to the very concept of electricity, To the extent that the critical theory of society deduces present conditions from the concept of simple exchange, it includes this kind of necessity, although it is relatively unimportant that the hypothetical form of statement be used. That is, the stress is not on the idea that wherever a society based on simple exchange prevails, capitalism must develop––although this is true. The stress is rather on the fact that the existent capitalist society, which has spread all over the world from Europe and for which the theory is declared valid, derives from the basic relation of exchange. Even the classificatory judgments of specialized science have a fundamentally hypothetical character, and existential judgments are allowed, if at all, only in certain areas, namely the descriptive and practical parts of the discipline.20 But the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment. To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism. The individual steps within the theory are, at least in intention, as rigorous as the deductions in a specialized scientific theory; each is an element in the building up of that comprehensive existential judgment. Particular parts of the theory can be changed into general or specific hypothetical judgments and applied after the fashion of traditional theory; for example, the idea There are connections between the forms of judgment and the historical periods. A brief indication will show what is meant. The classificatory judgment is typical of prebourgeois society: this is the way it is, and man can do nothing about it. The hypothetical and disjunctive forms belong especially to the bourgeois world: under certain circumstances this effect can take place; it is either thus or so. Critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality, and the necessary conditions for such change already exist.

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that increasing productivity usually devalues capital. In many areas of the theory there thus arise propositions the relation of which to reality is difficult to determine. From the fact that the representation of a unified object is true as a whole, it is possible to conclude only under special conditions the extent to which isolated parts of the representation can validly be applied, in their isolation, to isolated parts of the object. The problem that arises as soon as particular propositions of the critical theory are applied to unique or recurring events in contemporary society has to do not with the truth of the theory but with how suitable the theory is for traditional kinds of intellectual operation with progressively extended goals. The special sciences, and especially contemporary political economics, are unable to derive practical profit from the fragmentary questions they discuss. But this incapacity is due neither to these sciences nor to critical theory alone, but to their specific role in relation to reality. Even the critical theory, which stands in opposition to other theories, derives its statements about real relationships from basic universal concepts, as we have indicated, and therefore presents the relationships as necessary. Thus both kinds of theoretical structure are alike when it comes to logical necessity. But there is a difference as soon as we turn from logical to real necessity, the necessity involved in factual sequences. The biologist’s statement that internal processes cause a plant to wither or that certain processes in the human organism lead to its destruction leaves untouched the question whether any influences can alter the character of these processes or change them totally. Even when an illness is said to be curable, the fact that the necessary curative measures are actually taken is regarded as purely extrinsic to the curability, a matter of technology and therefore nonessential as far as the theory of such is concerned. The necessity which rules society can be regarded as biological in the sense described, and the unique character of critical theory can therefore be called in question on the grounds that in biology as in other natural sciences particular sequences of events can be theoretically constructed just as they are in the critical theory of society. The development of society, in this view, would simple be a particular series of events, for the presentation of which conclusions from various other areas of research are used, just as a doctor in the course of an illness or a geologist dealing with the earth’s prehistory has to apply various other disciplines. Society here would be the individual reality which is evaluated on the basis of theories in the special sciences. However many valid analogies there may be between these different intellectual endeavors, there is nonetheless a decisive difference when it comes to the relation of subject and object and therefore to the necessity of the event being judged. The object with which the scientific specialist deals is not affected at all by his own theory. Subject and object are kept strictly apart. Even if it turns out that at a later point in time the objective event is influenced by human intervention, to science this is just another fact. The

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objective occurrence is independent of the theory, and this independence is part of its necessity: the observer as such can effect no change in the object. A consciously critical attitude, however, is part of the development of society: the construing of the course of history as the necessary product of an economic mechanism simultaneously contains both a protest against this order of things, a protest generated by the order itself, and the idea of self-determination for the human race, that is the idea of a state of affairs in which man’s actions no longer flow from a mechanism but from his own decision. The judgment passed on the necessity inherent in the previous course of events implies here a struggle to change it from a blind to a meaningful necessity. If we think of the object of the theory in separation from the theory, we falsify it and fall into quietism or conformism. Every part of the theory presupposes the critique of the existing order and the struggle against it along lines determined by the theory itself. The theoreticians of knowledge who started with physics had reason, even if they were not wholly right, to condemn the confusion of cause and operation of forces and to substitute the idea of condition or function for the idea of cause. For the kind of thinking which simply registers facts there are always only series of phenomena, never forces and counterforces; but this, of course, says something about this kind of thinking, not about nature. If such a method is applied to society, the result is statistics and descriptive sociology, and these can be important for many purposes, even for critical theory. For traditional science either everything is necessary or nothing is necessary, according as necessity means the independence of event from observer or the possibility of absolutely certain prediction. But to the extent that the subject does not totally isolate himself, even as thinker, from the social struggles of which he is a part and to the extent that he does not think of knowledge and actions as distinct concepts, necessity acquires another meaning for him. If he encounters necessity which is not mastered by man, it takes shape either as that realm of nature which despite the far-reaching conquests still to come will never wholly vanish, or as the weakness of the society of previous ages in carrying on the struggle with nature in a consciously and purposefully organized way. Here we do have forces and counterforces. Both elements in this concept of necessity––the power of nature and the weakness of society––are interconnected and are based on the experienced effort of man to emancipate himself from coercion by nature and from those forms of social life and of the juridical, political, and cultural orders which have become a straitjacket for him. The struggle on two fronts, against nature and against society’s weakness, is part of the effective striving for a future condition of things in which whatever man wills is also necessary and in which the necessity of the object becomes the necessity of a rationally mastered event. The application, even the understanding, of these and other concepts in the critical mode of thought, demand activity and effort, an exercise of

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will power, in the knowing subject. The effort may be made, of course, to supply for a deficient understanding of these ideas and of how they are linked together, simply by greater attention to their logical implications and the elaboration of apparently more exact definitions, even of a “unified language,” but the effort cannot succeed. The issue is not simply one of misunderstanding but of a real opposition of outlooks. The concept of necessity in the critical theory is itself a critical concept; it presupposes freedom, even if a not yet existent freedom. But the idea of freedom as a purely interior reality which is always there even when men are enslaved is typical of the idealist mentality. The tendency immanent in this not wholly false but surely distorted conception of freedom was most clearly expressed by the young Fichte: “I am now fully convinced that the human will is free and that the purpose of our existence is not to be happy but only to deserve happiness.”21 Here we see the real identity underlying fundamental metaphysical polarities and schools. The claim that events are absolutely necessary means in the last analysis the same thing as the claim to be really free here and now: resignation in practice. The inability to grasp in thought the unity of theory and practice and the limitation of the concept of necessity to inevitable events are both due, from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge, to the Cartesian dualism of thought and being. That dualism is congenial both to nature and to bourgeois society in so far as the latter resembles a natural mechanism. The idea of a theory which becomes a genuine force, consisting in the self-awareness of the subjects of a great historical revolution, is beyond the grasp of a mentality typified by such a dualism. If scholars do not merely think about such a dualism but really take it seriously, they cannot act independently. In keeping with their own way of thinking, they can put into practice only what the closed causal system of reality determines them to do, or they count only as individual units in a statistic for which the individual unit really has no significance. As rational beings they are helpless and isolated. The realization that such a state of affairs exists is indeed a step towards changing it, but unfortunately the situation enters bourgeois awareness only in a metaphysical, ahistorical shape. In the form of a faith in the unchangeableness of the social structure it dominates the present. Reflecting on themselves men see themselves only as onlookers, passive participants in a mighty process which may be foreseen but not modified. Necessity for them refers not to events which man masters to his own purposes but only to events which he anticipates as probable. Where the interconnection of willing and thinking, thought and action is admitted as in many sectors of the most recent sociology, it is seen only as adding to that objective complexity which the observer must take into account. The thinker must

Fichte, Briefwechsel, ed. by H. Schulz, volume 1 (Leipzig, 1925), p. 127.

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relate all the theories which are proposed to the practical attitudes and social strata which they reflect. But he removes himself from the affair; he has no concern except––science. The hostility to theory as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with critical thinking. Opposition starts as soon as theorists fail to limit themselves to verification and classification by means of categories which are as neutral as possible, that is, categories which are indispensable to inherited ways of life. Among the vast majority of the ruled there is the unconscious fear that theoretical thinking might show their painfully won adaptation to reality to be perverse and unnecessary. Those who profit from the status quo entertain a general suspicion of any intellectual independence. The tendency to conceive theory as the opposite of a positive outlook is so strong that even the inoffensive traditional type of theory suffers from it at times. Since the most advanced form of thought at present is the critical theory of society and every consistent intellectual movement that cares about man converges upon it by its own inner logic, theory in general falls into disrepute. Every other kind of scientific statement which does not offer a deposit of facts in the most familiar categories and, if possible, in the most neutral form, the mathematical, is already accused of being theoretical. This positivist attitude need not be simply hostile to progress. Although in the intensified class conflicts of recent decades rulers have had to rely increasingly on the real apparatus of power, ideology is nonetheless still a fairly important cohesive force for holding together a social structure threatened with collapse. In the determination to look at facts alone and to surrender every kind of illusion there still lurks, even today, something like a reaction against the alliance of metaphysics and oppression. It would be a mistake, however, not to see the essential distinction between the empiricist Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and that of today. In the eighteenth century a new society had already been developed within the framework of the old. The task now was to free an already existent bourgeois economy from its feudal limitations and to let it operate freely. Bourgeois scientific thought, too, needed, fundamentally, only to shake off the old dogmatic chains in order to progress along a path it had already mapped out. Today, on the contrary, in the transition from the present form of society to a future one mankind will for the first time be a conscious subject and actively determine its own way of life. There is still need of a conscious reconstruction of economic relationships. Indiscriminate hostility to theory, therefore, is a hindrance today. Unless there is continued theoretical effort, in the interest of a rationally organized future society, to shed critical light on present-day society and to interpret it in the light of traditional theories elaborated in the special sciences, the ground is taken from under the hope of radically improving human existence. The demand therefore for a positive outlook and for acceptance

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of a subordinate position threatens, even in progressive sectors of society, to overwhelm any openness to theory. The issue, however, is not simply the theory of emancipation; it is the practice of it as well. The individual parts of a theory which attempts to deduce the complicated reality of liberal capitalism and ultimately of the capitalism of the huge combines from the model of a simple commodity economy cannot be as indifferent to the time-element as the steps in a deductive system of classification are. Within the hierarchic systems of organisms, the digestive function, so important for men too, finds its pure expression, as it were, in the class of the Aschelminthes. Similarly there are historical forms of society which show, at least approximately, a simple commodity economy. As we indicated above, the conceptual development is, if not parallel, at least in verifiable relation to the historical development. But the essential relatedness of theory to time does not reside in the correspondence between individual parts of the conceptual construction and successive periods of history; that is a view on which Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and Logic and Marx’s Capital, examples of the same method, are in agreement. It consists rather in the continuous alteration of the theoretician’s existential judgment on society, for this judgment is conditioned by its conscious relation to the historical practice of society. This kind of alteration has nothing to do with the principle by which modern metaphysics and philosophy of religion have rejected every consistently developed theoretical structure: any specific theoretical content must be constantly and “radically questioned,” and the thinker must be constantly beginning anew. Critical theory does not have one doctrinal substance today, another tomorrow. The changes in it do not mean a shift to a wholly new outlook, as long as the age itself does not radically change. The stability of the theory is due to the fact that amid all change in society the basic economic structure, the class relationship in its simplest form, and therefore the idea of the supersression of these two remain identical. The decisive substantive elements in the theory are conditioned by these unchanging factors and they themselves therefore cannot change until there has been a historical transformation of society. On the other hand, however, history does not stand still until such a point of transformation has been reached. The historical development of the conflicts in which the critical theory is involved leads to a reassignment of degrees of relative importance to individual elements of the theory, forces further concretizations, and determines which results of specialized science are to be significant for critical theory and practice at any given time. In order to explain more fully what is meant, we shall use the concept of the social class which disposes of the means of production. In the liberalist period economic predominance was in great measure connected with legal ownership of the means of production. The large class of private

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property owners exercised leadership in the society, and the whole culture of the age bears the impress of this fact. Industry was still broken up into a large number of independent enterprises which were small by modern standards. The directors of factories, as was suitable for this stage of technological development, were either one or more of the owners or their direct appointees. Once, however, the development of technology in the last century had led to a rapidly increasing concentration and centralization of capital, the legal owners were largely excluded from the management of the huge combines which absorbed their small factories, and management became something quite distinct from ownership before the law. Industrial magnates, the leaders of the economy, came into being. In many cases these managers were initially the major owners of the concerns. Today, however, such ownership has become unimportant, and there are now some powerful managers who dominate whole sectors of industry while owning a steadily decreasing part of the businesses they direct. This economic process brings with it a change in the way the political and legal apparatus functions, as well as in ideologies. Without the juridical definition of ownership being changed at all, owners become increasingly powerless before the directors and their staffs. In a lawsuit which owners might bring against managers in the course of a difference of views, the managers’ direct control of the means which these huge enterprises have at their disposal gives them such an advantage that a victory of their opponents is for the most part hardly possible. The influence of management, which may initially be exercised only over lower judicial and administrative authorities, finally extends to the higher ones and ultimately to the State and its power apparatus. Once the legal owners are cut off from the real productive process and lose their influence, their horizon narrows; they become increasingly unfitted for important social positions, and finally the share which they still have in industry due to ownership and which they have done nothing to augment comes to seem socially useless and morally dubious. These and other changes are accompanied by the rise of ideologies centering on the great personality and the distinction between productive and parasitic capitalists. The idea of a right with a fixed content and independent of society at large loses its importance. The very same sector of society which brutally maintains its private power to dispose of the means of production (and this power is at the heart of the prevailing social order) sponsors political doctrines which claim that unproductive property and parasitic incomes must disappear. The circle of really powerful men grows narrower, but the possibility increases of deliberately constructing ideologies, of establishing a double standard of truth (knowledge for insiders, a cooked-up story for the people), and of cynicism about truth and thought generally. The end result of the process is a society dominated no longer by independent owners but by cliques of industrial and political leaders.

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Such changes do not leave the structure of the critical theory untouched. It does not indeed fall victim to the illusion that property and profit no longer play a key role, an illusion carefully fostered in the social sciences. On the one hand, even earlier it had regarded juridical relations not as the substance but as the surface of what was really going on in society. It knows that the disposition of men and things remains in the hands of a particular social group which is in competition with other economic power groups, less so at home but all the more fiercely at the international level. Profit continues to come from the same social sources and must in the last analysis be increased by the same means as before. On the other hand, in the judgment of the critical theorist the loss of all rights with a determined content, a loss conditioned by the concentration of economic power and given its fullest form in the authoritarian state, has brought with it the disappearance not only of an ideology but also of a cultural factor which has a positive value and not simply a negative one. When the theory takes into account these changes in the inner structure of the entrepreneurial class, it is led to differentiate others of its concepts as well. The dependence of culture on social relationships must change as the latter change, even in details, if society indeed be a single whole. Even in the liberalist period political and moral interpretations of individuals could be derived from their economic situation. Admiration for nobility of character, fidelity to one’s word, independence of judgment, and so forth, are traits of a society of relatively independent economic subjects who enter into contractual relationships with each other. But this cultural dependence was in good measure psychologically mediated, and morality itself acquired a kind of stability because of its function in the individual. (The truth that dependence on the economy thoroughly pervaded even this morality was brought home when in the recent threat to the economic position of the liberalist bourgeoisie the attitude of freedom and independence began to disintegrate.) Under the conditions of monopolistic capitalism, however, even such a relative individual independence is a thing of the past. The individual no longer has any ideas of his own. The content of mass belief, in which no one really believes, is an immediate product of the ruling economic and political bureaucracies, and its disciples secretly follow their own atomistic and therefore untrue interests; they act as mere functions of the economic machine. The concept of the dependence of the cultural on the economic has thus changed. With the destruction of the classically typical individual, the concept has as it were become more materialistic, in the popular sense of the term, than before. The explanation of social phenomena has become simpler yet also more complicated. Simpler, because economic factors more directly and consciously determine men and because the solidity and relative capacity for resistance of the cultural spheres are disappearing. More complicated, because the economic dynamism which has been set

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in motion and in relation to which most individuals have been reduced to simple means, quickly brings ever new visions and portents. Even advanced sectors of society are discouraged and gripped by the general sense of helplessness. The permanency of truth, too, is connected with the constellations of reality. In the eighteenth century truth had on its side a bourgeoisie that was already economically developed. But under the conditions of later capitalism and the impotence of the workers before the authoritarian state’s apparatus of oppressed, truth has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men. But these have been decimated by terrorism and have little time for refining the theory. Charlatans profit by this situation and the general intellectual level of the great masses is rapidly declining. What has been said is intended to show that the continuous change of social relationships, due immediately to economic developments and finding its most direct expression in the formation of the ruling class, does not affect only some areas of the culture. It also affects the way in which the culture depends on the economy and, thus, the key ideas in the whole conception. This influence of social development on the structure of the theory is part of the theory’s doctrinal content. Thus new contents are not just mechanically added to already existent parts. Since the theory is a unified whole which has its proper meaning only in relation to the contemporary situation, the theory as a whole is caught up in an evolution. The evolution does not change the theory’s foundations, of course, any more than recent changes essentially alter the object which the theory reflects, namely contemporary society. Yet even the apparently more remote concepts of the theory are drawn into the evolution. The logical difficulties which understanding meets in every thought that attempts to reflect a living totality are due chiefly to this fact. If we take individual concepts and judgments out of their context in the theory and compare them with concepts and judgments from an earlier version of the theory, contradictions arise. This is true whether we think of the historical developmental stages through which the theory passes or of the logical steps with the theory itself. Amid all the abiding identity of the concepts of enterprise and entrepreneur there is nonetheless distinction, according as the concepts are taken from the presentation of the early form of bourgeois economy or from the presentation of developed capitalism, and according as they are taken from the nineteenth-century critique of political economy which has the liberalist manufacturer in view or from the twentieth-century critique which envisages the monopolist. The representation of the entrepreneur, like the entrepreneur himself, passes through an evolution. The contradictions which arise when parts of the theory are taken as independent entities are thus not due to errors or to a neglect of clear definitions. They are due to the fact that the theory has a historically changing

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object which, however, remains identical amid all the changes. The theory is not a storehouse of hypotheses on the course of particular events in society. It constructs a developing picture of society as a whole, an existential judgment with a historical dimension. What the bourgeois entrepreneur or even the bourgeois man as such was (the fact, for example, that his character showed not only rationalist traits but also an element of that irrationalism which presently prevails in middle-class mass movements) depends on the original economic situation of the bourgeoisie. The basic concepts of the theory capture this reality. But those economic origins manifest themselves so clearly only in the conflicts of the present day. The reason for this is not that the bourgeois is understanding change at the present time but that in connection with present-day change the interests and attention of the theoretician lead him to accentuate new aspects of this object. It may be of systematic interest and not entirely useless to classify and juxtapose the various kinds of dependency, commodity, class, entrepreneur, and so forth, as they occur in the logical and historical phases of the theory. But the sense of these concepts ultimately becomes clear only when we grasp the whole conceptual structure with its demands for adaptation to ever new situation. Consequently such systems of classes and subclasses, of definitions and specifications of concepts, which are extracted from the critical theory do not have even the value of the conceptual inventories found in other specialized science, for the latter are at least applied in the relatively uniform practice of daily life. To transform the critical theory of society into a sociology is, on the whole, an undertaking beset with serious difficulties. The question we have been touching on, concerning the relation between thought and time, has, it must be admitted, a special difficulty connected with it. The objection is urged that it is impossible to speak in any strict sense of changes in a theory properly so called. The claim that such changes occur presupposes rather a theory that only glosses over the difficulty. No one can turn himself into a different subject than what he is at this historical moment. To speak of the constancy or changeableness of truth is strictly meaningful only in a polemical context. That is, one would be opposing the idea of an absolute, suprahistorical subject or the possibility of exchanging subjects, as though a person could remove himself from his present historical juncture and truly insert himself into any other he wished. How far this last is in fact possible or impossible is not our concern here. In any event the critical theory is indeed incompatible with the idealist belief that any theory is independent of men and even has a growth of its own. Documents have a history but a theory does not have its vicissitudes. The claim, then, that certain elements have been added to it and that it must adapt itself to new situations in the future without changing its essential content is rather an integral part of the theory as it exists today and seeks

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to affect practice. Those who have the theory in their heads have it there in its totality and act according to that totality. The continuous progress of a truth that is independent of the thinking subject or a trust in the advance of science can refer in the proper and strict sense only to that function of knowledge which will continue to be necessary even in a future society, namely the mastering of nature. This knowledge, too, admittedly belongs to the existent social totality. Here, however, the presupposition of claims that this knowledge lasts or changes, namely the continuance of economic production and reproduction in familiar forms, really has, in a certain way, the same meaning as the claim that the subjects of knowledge are interchangeable. The fact that class society is divided does not render illusory, in this context, the equivalence of human subjects. Knowledge in this instance is itself a thing which one generation passes on to another; to the extent that men must live, they need it. In this respect, too, then, the traditional scientist can be reassured. The idea of a transformed society, however, does not have the advantage of widespread acceptance, as long as the idea has not yet had its real possibility tested. To strive for a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression, in which an all-embracing subject, namely selfaware mankind, exists, and in which it is possible to speak of a unified theoretical creation and a thinking that transcends individuals––to strive for all this is not yet to bring it to pass. The transmission of the critical theory in its strictest possible form is, of course, a condition of its historical success. But the transmission will not take place via solidly established practice and fixed ways of acting but via concern for social transformation. Such a concern will necessarily be aroused ever anew by prevailing injustice, but it must be shaped and guided by the theory itself and in turn react upon the theory. The circle of transmitters of this tradition is neither limited nor renewed by organic or sociological laws. It is constituted and maintained not by biological or testamentary inheritance, but by a knowledge which brings its own obligations with it. And even this knowledge guarantees only a contemporary, not a future community of transmitters. The theory may be stamped with the approval of every logical criterion, but to the end of the age it will lack the seal of approval which victory brings. Until then, too, the struggle will continue to grasp it aright and to apply it. A version of it which has the propaganda apparatus and a majority on its side is not therefore the better one. In the general historical upheaval the truth may reside with numerically small groups of men. History teaches us that such groups, hardly noticed even by those opposed to the status quo, outlawed but imperturbable, may at the decisive moment become the leaders because of their deeper insight. Today, when the whole weight of the existing state of affairs is pushing mankind towards the surrender of all culture and relapse into darkest

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barbarism, the circle of solidarity is narrow enough. The opponents, the masters of this age of decline, possess indeed neither fidelity nor solidarity. Such concepts, on the contrary, are elements of the right theory and practice. Cut loose from such theory and practice, these concepts change their meaning as do all parts of a living whole. It is true, of course, that in a gang of thieves, for example, positive traits of human community can make their appearance, but this very possibility points to a deficiency in the larger community within which the gang exists. In an unjust society criminals are not necessarily inferior as human beings, whereas in a fully just society they would be unhuman. Only in a context can particular judgments about what is human acquire their correct meaning. There are no general criteria for judging the critical theory as a whole, for it is always based on the recurrence of events and thus on a selfreproducing totality. Nor is there a social class by whose acceptance of the theory one could be guided. It is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology, however much, for its circumstances, it may be bent on truth. For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice. This negative formulation, if we wish to express it abstractly, is the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason. In a historical period like the present true theory is more critical than affirmative, just as the society that corresponds to it cannot be called “productive.” The future of humanity depends on the existence today of the critical attitude, which of course contains within it elements from traditional theories and from our declining culture generally. Mankind has already been abandoned by a science which in its imaginary self-sufficiency thinks of the shaping of practice, which it serves and to which it belongs, simply as something lying outside its borders and is content with this separation of thought and action. Yet the characteristic mark of the thinker’s activity is to determine for itself what it is to accomplish and serve, and this not in fragmentary fashion but totally. Its own nature, therefore, turns it towards a changing of history and the establishment of justice among men. Behind the loud calls for “social spirit” and “national community,” the opposition between individual and society grows ever greater. The self-definition of science grows ever more abstract. But conformism in thought and the insistence that thinking is a fixed vocation, a self-enclosed realm within society as a whole, betrays the very essence of thought.

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Postscript1 In the preceding essay I pointed out two ways of knowing: one is based on the Discourse on Method, the other on Marx’s critique of political economy. Theory in the traditional sense established by Descartes and everywhere practiced in the pursuit of the specialized sciences organizes experience in the light of questions which arise out of life in present-day society. The resultant network of disciplines contains information in a form which makes it useful in any particular circumstances for the greatest possible number of purposes. The social genesis of problems, the real situations in which science is put to use, and the purposes which it is made to serve are all regarded by science as external to itself. The critical theory of society, on the other hand, has for its object men as producers of their own historical way of life in its totality. The real situations which are the starting-point of science are not regarded simply as data to be verified and to be predicted according to the laws of probability. Every datum depends not on nature alone but also on the power man has over it. Objects, the kind of perception, the questions asked, and the meaning of the answers all bear witness to human activity and the degree of man’s power. In thus relating matter––that is, the apparently irreducible facts which the scientific specialist must respect––to human production, the critical theory of society agrees with German idealism. Ever since Kant, idealism has insisted on the dynamic moment in the relationship and has protested against the adoration of facts and the social conformism this brings with it. “As in mathematics,” says Fichte, “so in one’s whole view of the world; the only difference is that in interpreting the world one is unconscious that he is interpreting, for the interpretation takes place necessarily, not freely.”2 This thought was a commonplace in German idealism. But the activity exercised on the matter presented to man was regarded as intellectual; it was the activity of a metempirical consciousness-in-itself, an absolute ego, the spirit, and consequently the victory over the dumb, unconscious, irrational side of this activity took place in principle in the person’s interior, in the realm of thought. In the materialist conception, on the contrary, the basic activity involved is work in society, and the class-related form of this work puts its mark on all human patterns of reaction, including theory. The intervention of reason in the processes whereby knowledge and its object are constituted, or the The “Postscript” appeared in the Zietschrift für Sozialforschung, volume 6, number 3, along with an essay by Herbert Marcuse entitles “Philosophie und kritische Theorie.” Marcuse’s essay has since been reprinted in his Kultur and Gsellscahft, volume 1 (Frankfurt am Main 1965), pages 102ff. English translation: “Philosophy and critical theory,” in: Negations. Essays in Critical Theory, with translations from the German by Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). 2 Fichte, “Logik and Metaphysik,” in Nachgelassene Schriften, volume 2 (Berlin, 1937), p. 47. 1

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subordination of these processes to conscious control, does not take place therefore in a purely intellectual world, but coincides with the struggle for certain real ways of life. The elaboration of theories in the traditional sense is regarded in our society as an activity set off from other scientific and nonscientific activities, needing to know nothing of the historical goals and tendencies of which such activity is a part. But the critical theory in its concept formation and in all phases of its development very consciously makes its own that concern for the rational organization of human activity which it is its task to illumine and legitimate. For this theory is not concerned only with goals already imposed by existent ways of life, but with men and all their potentialities. To that extent the critical theory is the heir not only of German idealism but of philosophy as such. It is not just a research hypothesis which shows its value in the ongoing business of men; it is an essential element in the historical effort to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of men. However extensive the interaction between the critical theory and the special sciences whose progress the theory must respect and on which it has for decades exercised a liberating and stimulating influence, the theory never aims simply at an increase of knowledge as such. Its goal is man’s emancipation from slavery. In this it resembles Greek philosophy, not so much in the Hellenistic age of resignation as in the golden age of Plato and Aristotle. After the fruitless political projects of both these men the Stoics and Epicureans confined themselves to developing a doctrine of individualistic practices. The new dialectical philosophy, however, has held on to the realization that the free development of individuals depends on the rational constitution of society. In radically analyzing present social conditions it became a critique of the economy. Critique, however, is not identical with its object. Philosophy has not provided a teaching on national economy. The curves of the mathematical political economics of our day are no more able to maintain a link with essentials than are positivist or existential philosophy. Concepts in these disciplines have lost any relation to the fundamental situations of the age. Rigorous investigation has always required the isolating of structures, but today the guidelines for this process are no longer being supplied, as in Adam Smith’s time, by conscious, inspiring, historical concerns. Modern analyses have lost all connection with any rounded knowledge that deals with historical reality. It is left to others or to a later generation or to accident to establish a relation to the analyses to reality and specific goals. As long as there is a social demand for and recognition of such activity, the sciences are not disturbed by reality or leave the care of it to other disciplines, for example sociology or philosophy, which of course act the same way in turn. The forces which guide the life of society, those rulers of the day, are thereby tacitly accepted by science itself as judges of its meaning and value, and knowledge is declared powerless.

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Unlike modern specialized science, however, the critical theory of society has continued to be a philosophical discipline even when it engages in a critique of the economy. For its content is the transformation of the concepts which dominate the economy into their opposites: fair exchange into a deepening of social injustice, a free economy into monopolistic control, productive work into rigid relationships which hinder production, the maintenance of society’s life into the pauperization of the peoples. Of central importance here is not so much what remains unchanged as the historical movement of the period which is now approaching its end. Capital is no less exact in its analyses than the political economics it criticizes, but in even its most refined estimates of particular, periodically recurring events knowledge of the historical course of society as a whole supplies the dynamic motif. Its distinction from the views of the pure economic specialist is due not to some special philosophical object but to its regard for the tendencies of society as a whole, which regard plays a decisive role even in the most abstract logical and economic discussions. The philosophical character of the critical theory emerges by comparison not only with political economy but also with economism in practice. The struggle against the illusory harmonies of liberalism and the broadcasting of the contradictions immanent in it and in the abstractness of its concept of freedom have been taken up verbally in very different parts of the world and turned into reactionary slogans. The economy must serve man, not man the economy: this is in the mouths of the very men who have always meant by the economy their own patrons. Society as a whole and the community are being glorified by people who cannot think of them in their simple and proper meaning but only in opposition to the individual. They are identified with the depraved order of things which these people themselves represent. In the concept of “holy egoism” and of the vital concerns of the imaginary “national community,” the concern of real men for an uninhibited development and a happy existence is confused with the hunger of influential groups for power. The popular materialism of practice pure and simple, which dialectical materialism criticizes, is camouflaged by idealist slogans whose very transparency makes them attractive to its most faithful practitioners, and it has become the real religion of the age.3 Professional scholars, eager to conform, may reject every connection of their disciplines with so-called The form and the content of faith are not indifferent to each other. What is believed influences the act of holding something to be true. The contents of nationalist ideology, which are inconsistent with the level the mind has reached in the industrial world, are not known the way a truth is know. Even the most devoted accept these contents only at the surface of their minds, and all know what the real truth of the matter is. If the listeners realize that the speaker does not believe what he is saying, his power over them is only increased. They bask in the sun of maliciousness. When circumstances get very much worse, such a community, of course, will not survive.

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value judgments and firmly pursue the separation of thought and political attitude. But the real wielders of power in their nihilism take such rejections of illusion with brutal seriousness. Value judgments, they say, belong either in the nation’s poetry or in the people’s courts but certainly not in the tribunals of thought. The critical theory, on the contrary, having the happiness of all individuals as its goal, does not compromise with continued misery, as do the scientific servants of authoritarian States. Reason’s intuition of itself, regarded by philosophy in former times as the highest degree of happiness, is transformed in modern philosophy into the materialist concept of a free, self-determining society, while retaining from idealism the conviction that men have other possibilities than to lose themselves in the status quo or to accumulate power and profit. Some elements of the critical theory reappear, with a distorted meaning, in the theory and practice of its opponents. To such an extent, since the setback of all progressive efforts in the developed countries of Europe, has confusion spread even among the enemies of such efforts. The abolition of social relationships which presently hinder development is in fact the next historical goal. But abolition is a dialectical concept. The takeover of what belongs to the individual into the state’s keeping, the spread of industry, even in the widespread satisfaction of the masses are facts whose historical significance is determined only by the nature of the totality to which they belong. However important they may be in comparison with realities which are survivals from the past, they can nonetheless be swept up with the latter into a retrogressive movement. The old world is in decline because of an outdated principle of economic organization, and the cultural collapse is bound up with it as well. The economy is the first cause of wretchedness, and critique, theoretical and practical, must address itself primarily to it. It would be mechanistic, not dialectical thinking, however, to judge the future forms of society solely according to their economy. Historical change does not leave untouched the relations between the spheres of culture, and if in the present state of society economy is the master of man and therefore the lever by which he is to be moved to change, in the future men must themselves determine all their relationships in the face of natural necessities. Economics in isolation will therefore not provide the norm by which the community of men is to be measured. This is also true for the period of transition in which politics will win a new independence from the economy. Only at the end of that period will political problems be reduced to simple problems of administration. Before that point is reached the whole situation can change; thus even the character of the transition remains indeterminate. Economism, to which the critical theory is often reduced, does not consist in giving too much importance to the economy, but in giving it too narrow a scope. The theory is concerned with society as a whole, but this broad scope is forgotten in economism where limited phenomena are made the final court of appeal. According to critical theory the present

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economy is essentially determined by the fact that the goods which men produce beyond their needs do not pass directly into the hands of society but are privately acquired and exchanged. The abolition of this state of affairs aims at a higher principle of economic organization and not at all at some philosophical utopia. The old principle drives mankind into a series of catastrophes. But the concept of socialization, which describes the change to a new state of society, contains more than elements from political economy or jurisprudence. If industrial production is under state control, this is a historical fact the significance of which in the critical theory would have to be analyzed for each state. Whether a real socialization is going on, that is, whether a higher principle of economic life is actually being developed, does not depend simply on, for example, a change in certain property relations or on increased productivity in new forms of social collaboration. It depends just as much on the nature and development of the society in which all these particular developments are taking place. The issue, then, is the real nature of new relations of production. Even if “natural privileges” which depend on individual talent and efficiency continue to exist for a while, at least no new social privileges are to replace them. In such a provisional situation inequality must not be allowed to become fixed but must be increasingly eliminated. What is to be produced and how, whether relatively fixed social groups with special interests are to exist and social distinctions to be preserved or even deepened, furthermore the active relation of the individual to government, the relation of key administrative acts involving individuals to their own knowledge and will, the dependence of all situations that can be mastered by men upon real agreement––in brief, the degree of development of the essential elements in real democracy and partnership is part of the concept of socialization. None of these elements is separable from the economic. The critique of economism, however, consists not in turning away from economic analysis but in engaging in it more fully and along the lines indicated by history. The dialectic theory does not practice any criticism based solely on ideas. Even in its idealist form it had rejected the notion of a good-in-itself wholly set over against reality. It does not judge by what is beyond time but by what is within time. When a totalitarian State proceeds to a partial nationalization of property, it justifies itself by appeals to community and collectivist practices. Here the falsehood is obvious. But even where steps are honestly taken, the critical theory has the dialectical function of measuring every historical stage in the light not only of isolated data and concepts but of its primary and total content, and of being concerned that this content be vitally operative. The right philosophy today does not take the form of withdrawing from concrete economic and social analyses in order to work on empty minutiae which are related to nothing and are calculated to hide reality at every point. The critical theory has never been reducible to

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specialized economic science. The dependence of politics on the economy has been its object, not its program. Among those who appeal to the critical theory today some with full awareness degrade it to being a pure rationalization of their current enterprises. Others restrict themselves to shallow concepts which even verbally have become odd-sounding and make of it a leveling-down ideology which everyone understands because no thoughts at all pass through anyone’s mind. Since its beginning, however, dialectical thought has meant the most advanced state of knowledge, and it is only from this, in the last analysis, that decisive action can come. Its representatives in times of setback have always been relatively few, something it has in common with philosophy. As long as thought has not won a definitive victory, it cannot feel secure in the shadow of power. But if its concepts, which sprang from social movements, today seen empty because no one stands behind them but its pursuing persecutors, yet the truth of them will out. For the thrust towards a rational society, which admittedly seems to exist today only in the realms of fantasy, is really innate in every man. That is not a claim that should bring a sigh of relief. For the realization of possibilities depends on historical conflicts. The truth about the future does not take the form of a verification of data which differ from others only in having some special importance. Rather, man’s own will plays a part in that truth, and he may not take his ease if the prognosis is to come true. And even after the new society shall have come into existence, the happiness of its members will not make up for the wretchedness of those who are being destroyed in our contemporary society. Nor does the theory bring salvation to those who hold it. Inseparable from drive and will, it preaches no psychic condition, as does the Stoa or Christianity. The martyrs of freedom have not sought their own peace of soul. Their philosophy was politics, and if their souls remained calm in the face of terror, this was not their goal. Nor could the dread they experienced bear witness against them. The apparatus of power has not really gotten less refined since Galileo’s penance and recantation; if it took second place to other kinds of machination in the nineteenth century, it has more than made up for its backwardness in the twentieth. Here again the end of the era proves to be a return to its beginnings, but on a higher level. Goethe said that individuality is happiness. Another poet added that its possession is a social achievement and can be lost at any time; Pirandello, who leaned towards fascism, knew his own times better than he realized. Under the totalitarian lordship of evil, men may retain not simply their lives but their very selves only by accident, and recantations mean less today than in the Renaissance. A philosophy that thinks to find peace within itself, in any kind of truth whatsoever, has therefore nothing to do with the critical theory. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell

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CHAPTER TEN

“The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” Max Horkheimer “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” is a critique of logical positivism. Horkheimer frames the discussion by identifying a “contradiction,” as he puts it, between metaphysics and science—one with which “[a]ll systematic thought of the last centuries has concerned itself.” There have been two types of response to the antagonism, he says. One is to treat science as distinct from and “subordinate” to true knowledge. Romantic spiritualism, Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology are the examples he gives of this first kind of reaction. The other is to banish metaphysics altogether, as per logical positivism. Horkheimer points out that early on empiricism was used to challenge the scholastic and idealist metaphysics that served to legitimate the status quo. In this respect (if no other) it was at one time an instrument of critical thought. But contemporary empiricism is no longer such a tool. Notwithstanding its proponents’ commitment to scientificity, and by extension to genuine insight into social reality, positivist social “science” simply affirms existing conditions. Classical empiricism differed from twentieth century logical positivism in that proponents of the former “defended the claim of the individual that society was organized in his behalf.” At the level of epistemology, this attitude translated into Locke and Hume having taken individual sensory experience to be the basic unit of knowledge. Their account is psychologistic, says Horkheimer, but it has “at least this dynamic element—the relation to a knowing subject.” Twentieth century logical positivists replaced impressions with so-called “protocol sentences,” free-standing statements about impressions. Protocol sentences, which logical positivists argued are the only non-analytic kind with meaning, must refer to empirically verifiable sense data. A. J. Ayer called this updated version of Hume’s meaning-empiricism “the verification criterion of meaning,” though there were disagreements amongst

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logical positivists over whether it is sentences or some other propositional unit that is foundational. In keeping with the shift from impressions to protocol sentences, logical positivists also accord greater significance to formal operations (specifically, logical relations between protocol sentences), in the context of empirical knowledge, than did classical empiricists. Horkheimer’s objections to logical positivism are as follows. First, there are problems with the positivist conception of knowledge itself. Second, there are associated problems with the role its proponents assign to knowers. Third, given the first two points, positivist social science does not, and cannot, afford genuine insight into social reality. Appeals to scientificity notwithstanding, logical positivism is not, therefore, an epistemic advance over metaphysics. With respect to the model of knowledge, he first considers the element of empiricism, then that of formalism. Empiricism comes up short because its proponents believe that knowledge consists of aggregates of individual observation statements, any one of which may be regarded as meaningful and be assessed for its truth-value independent of its relation to any or all other statements. Moreover, not only are protocol sentences conceived atomistically (and allowed to contain only immediately accessible content), they are also conceived a-temporally: their meaning is taken to be independent of statements about the past, too. The commitment to immediacy, atomism and stasis gives rise to a model of knowledge that in principle cannot be used to capture, in thought, the inner workings of a dynamic totality. An attempt to do so would be akin to trying to understand a developing conversation by making a list of all of the words used in one component sentence. The element of logical formalism is also problematic. Here the issue is that as soon as we are dealing with propositions that are more complicated than “Tommy has a cold in the head” (Horkheimer’s example), it is very difficult to know which sentences are meaningful in the first place, such that they would be viable objects of abstract analysis. “The idea that it is possible to [separate form and content] without resort to extralogical considerations turns out to be an illusion,” Horkheimer writes. In practice this means that logical positivism as an epistemic apparatus allows one to attend only to banal “root conceptions,” trivial claims “the meanings of which are unmistakable even when torn from their context.” There is, however, “no reason to restrict the designation ‘thought’ to those instances from among which this logic culls its examples.” With respect to the knower, meanwhile, logical positivism is a philosophy that “reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.” The subject so construed is not one who is capable of the active, synthetic analysis required to achieve genuinely scientific knowledge of social reality. She cannot think about the unobserved; she cannot contextualize facts; she cannot conceptualize a totality, let alone one that undergoes change; she cannot think about how, or why, to try to direct that change.

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And this, finally, is Horkheimer’s point: logical positivist social science is not scientific knowledge at all. It is a superficial, ideologically functional registry of present conditions, in the form of statements about disaggregated, ostensibly timeless facts. “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” contains some of Horkheimer’s most powerful language to this effect. He compares society to sadistic prison: so long as a veneer of decency were maintained, a positivist investigator would never know that things are not as they appear. Genuinely scientific thinking, by contrast, Horkheimer calls “dialectical.” He discusses this form of thought at length elsewhere (e.g. in “Traditional and Critical Theory”), but it is not hard to see, by way of comparison, what its main features will be.

“The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” It is difficult to reconcile science with metaphysics. While metaphysics treats of essential being, substance, the soul, and immortality, science has little use for any of these. Metaphysics claims to apprehend being, to grasp totality, and to lay bare by means of cognitive methods available to every man a meaning of the world independent of man. From the inner structure of reality, it derives precepts for the conduct of life; for example, the dictum that man’s most fitting and worthy activity is to occupy himself with supreme ideas, the transcendental, or with the primary cause. As a rule, metaphysical theories harmonize well with the belief that hardship is an eternal necessity for the great majority of men and that the individual must always surrender himself to the designs of the powers that be. Metaphysics bases this belief not on the Bible, but on allegedly indubitable insights. With the authority of direct revelation badly shaken in modern times, metaphysical systems sought the use of natural reason to justify the categories of faith and to sustain the belief that human life has a deeper meaning. All such attempts are futile, however; the assertions of metaphysics are in perpetual conflict with the type of thinking that is supposed to uphold them. The incompatibility between natural reason and metaphysical categories may be observed in two historical processes: in the reciprocal destruction of the metaphysical systems and in the banishment of their concepts from science, where the natural reason to which metaphysics lays claim has its true and proper home. The scientific textbooks of the twentieth century say very little about substance as such, about man and the soul, and nothing at all about eternal meaning. Scientists do not think for a moment that the validity of their theories logically depends on such ideas, whether as postulates or as necessary adjuncts. On the contrary, they

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endeavor, without the assistance of metaphysics, to reduce their systems to ever more simple principles. Metaphysical and moral categories have no place in their theories. This does not signify, as is sometimes assumed, that science is erecting a special world of its own behind the real world. The mathematical formulae in which the conceptions of physics are formulated embody that knowledge about the physical world as an isolate which has been acquired up to the present time by means of highly developed techniques, precise instruments, and refined methods of calculation. The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time. Science as it stands today is the body of knowledge which a given society has assembled in its struggle with nature. At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which in the main pursue purely scientific aims. They offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character. Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to uses obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violates the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper. It turns out, however, that many of these ideas are not merely superfluous, but also meaningless. Notions of absolute space, absolute time, and other metaphysical categories have been proved untenable. In addition, the doctrines of substance, causality, the soul, the mind-body relation, at least in their traditional form, have come into conflict with modern scientific methods. Yet, for all that, the pattern of ordinary thinking has not changed. This fact is really the projection of a contradiction that has persisted throughout the modern era. The public thinking of the bourgeoisie has never been in complete harmony with its science. The religious conception of a preestablished harmony among all things, including man, was abandoned by science as early as the seventeenth century. Descartes held that man was no mere automaton like an animal, no mere collection of blindly driven corpuscles, but that his essential attribute was thought. Cartesian science, however, had no more to say about the thinking self or ego than Kant did about the self of pure and original apperception. All we know, they said, is necessarily connected to that self. For the rest, the self, the fundamental concept of modern philosophy, was relegated to faith rather than to science which could do nothing with it. Psychology, as well, failed to show the way out of the blind interplay of matter. Very early, psychology had constituted itself as a theory of affective phenomena which, according to Descartes, had nothing to do with the

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self and even threatened to destroy it. Metaphysicians have persevered for centuries in their assertion that a soul exists, is subject to ethical laws, and has an eternal destiny. But their lack of assurance about these matters betrays itself in the fact that their systems are patched together at the most crucial points by mere opinions, improbable statements, and outright fallacies. Their systems express the confused and contradictory thought of the savant. Scientific knowledge is formally recognized to be correct; at the same time, metaphysical views are retained. With science alone, mirroring as it does the chaotic reality in nature and society, the dissatisfied masses and thinking individuals would be left in a dangerous and desperate state. Neither their private nor public store of ideas can do without a coveringover ideology. For this reason it was necessary to maintain science and metaphysical ideology side by side. All systematic thought of the last centuries has concerned itself with this contradiction. The traditional task of philosophy, as handed down from the Middle Ages, consisted in explaining the world view of religion by means of natural reasons, that is, scientifically. To this day, the Cartesian solution that there are two distinct substances prevails in the average consciousness as the most plausible answer. According to this doctrine, there is, on the one hand, a world of sense which can be construed realistically or spiritually. It is possible to observe and predict regularities in this world. The world, nevertheless, does not exist through itself alone, but is transitory, as are all things. On the other hand, there is man who, as a rational being, is thought to participate in a higher order, whether in the sense that his character and his actions are regarded as a product of transcendental forces and decisions or in the sense that they have transcendental consequences. In any event, the true being of man belongs to different spheres from those of natural or merely human history. Belief in design is thus linked with science. To deny the observations and theories of science would have been absurd. The whole body of science is itself nothing but the refined body of empirical knowledge of the bourgeois individual. His society could not entirely dispense with illusions, however. Metaphysical illusions and higher mathematics form constituent elements, as it were, of his mentality. Philosophy is merely the domain in which a systematic effort was made to reconcile the two in some manner. Every man of science and, to some extent, every member of bourgeois society finds his own private solution to the problem, or at least keeps this problem more or less definitely in the background of his consciousness. We need only study the memoirs and biographies of the typical representatives of the modern era to find this fact confirmed. As the interests of outstanding scientists become increasingly specialized, the naïve simplicity of their solution conflicts ever more strongly with the accuracy and rigor of the methods they use in their scientific procedure. Max Planck, the originator of the quantum theory, is thoroughly convinced, on the basis of his scientific experience, that all events, even those in the “realm of mind”

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are conditioned by natural occurrence. On the other hand, he is unwilling to give up the metaphysical conception of free will because the moral and political views he entertains presuppose that conception. The will of the other person is governed by causal laws; his every volition, provided that we possess reasonably accurate information regarding antecedent conditions, may, in principle, at least, be conceived as a necessary effect of causal laws and predictable in every detail . . . One’s own will, however, can be comprehended causally only as regards acts in the past; as to acts in the future, our will is free.1 The remote plausibility of this explanation is typical of the proposals of the more straightforward scientists. Their education, based on bourgeois traditions, is responsible for the uneasiness which assails them when they examine the world they serve. The price paid them in money, position, and influence attests to their contribution to the social whole; yet they see this society as “in many respects comfortless.”2 They dare not call its present form into question; therefore, they seek refuge in metaphysical beliefs like the idealistic view of conscience and freedom. Philosophy patches the objective rigor of science and such beliefs into a world-view so as “to assure in our conduct of life perfect harmony with our own selves, internal peace.”3 And with this peace in their hearts, the savants placidly witness the destruction of the human race. The various attempts at harmonization fall into two extremes. One is the statement that science is the only possible form of knowledge and that the last traces of metaphysical thought must give way before it. The other is the deprecation of science as a mere intellectual technique answering to subordinate considerations of human existence. True knowledge, it is urged, must emancipate itself from science. During and after the war the typical directions taken by this antiscientific view were romantic spiritualism, Lebensphilosophie, and material and existential phenomenology. The new metaphysics, an outgrowth of religion, preserved the belief that man could expect more through and from himself alone than from the existing order. It was a manifestation of man’s dissatisfaction with the valuation attached to him and with what he experiences. It does not take long to see what this valuation for which metaphysics attempts to compensate really is. A man discovers what he is actually worth in this world when he faces society merely as a man, without money, name, or powerful connections, stripped of all but his native potentialities. He soon finds that nothing has less weight than his human qualities. They are prized so low that the market does not even list them. Strict science, which acknowledges man only as a

Max Planck, Vom Wesen der Willensfreiheit (Leipzig, 1936), pp. 20f. Planck, op. cit., p. 24. 3 Ibid. 1 2

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biological concept, reflects man’s lot in the actual world; in himself, man is nothing more than a member of a species. In the eyes of the world, the quality of humanity confers no title to existence, nay, not even a right of sojourn. Such title must be certified by special social circumstances stipulated in documents to be presented on demand. If these are inadequate or nonexistent, the least that can happen to a man is that he is marked down as an outsider; at every wicket he will be answered accordingly. This category of alien or outsider is nothing but the reverse side of bourgeois self-interest. From the free towns of the Middle Ages, through the times of princely dominations and national states, down to this very day when every country has been turned into a huge military camp, these two sides have never been merged into a new unity. The ego of the bourgeois sees the outsider as his opposite; with reference to that opposite the bourgeois determines his own position. He knows he is somebody, not just anybody. “Anybody” has a contemptuous ring. Since, however, within our commodity society the equality of all is part and parcel of everyone’s consciousness despite the particularization of all individuals, the bourgeois must constantly hold himself in contempt, while at the same time he esteems himself and pursues his interests. Each individual stands in the center of his own universe. As for the world outside, he is fully aware that he is superfluous there. The dreams of metaphysics provide an escape from these experiences of everyday life which have been etched deeply into his soul, try as he might to eradicate them. In these dreams the isolated, insignificant individual can identify himself with superhuman forces, with omnipotent nature, with the stream of life, or an inexhaustible world-ground. Metaphysics gives significance to his existence; it explains that his lot in this society is mere appearance. The world of appearance, it asserts, sustains its value through his inner decisions, through the metaphysical freedom of the personality, and it stands in relation to genuine and true existence. The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflict between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his face within that society. In private life this philosophical belittling of science acts as an opiate; in society, as a fraud. In contrast to this metaphysics, positivism is hostile to everything that savors of illusion. Here, only experience, purified experience in the strict sense it has received in natural science, is called knowledge. To know is neither to believe nor to hope. The most fitting formulation of man’s knowledge is positive science; for the rest, the starting points of science, direct observation and the language of everyday life, may also be of service as crude implements. This emphasis cannot be linked with any one name in the history of philosophy. Metaphysicians like Descartes and Spinoza showed it to an extent, while positivists like Comte and Spencer, who gave the trend its name, had too many admixtures of Weltanschauung to personify Simon-pure positivism. Present-day positivism usually races its

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origin to Hume on the one side and to Leibniz on the other. It combines skeptical empiricism with a rationalized logic which it seeks to render more fruitful for science. The ideal it pursues is knowledge in the form of a mathematically formulated universal science deducible from the smallest possible number of axioms, system which assures the calculation of the probable occurrence at all events. Society, too, is to be explained in this way. This last, positivism admits, is an ideal that is still far off, but it holds out hope that in the not too distant future, social phenomena will be completely clarified and brought into suitable relation with the underlying factors of the total system. Ultimately, according to positivism, the events of the human world will be predicted with the same degree of probability as all other events. The only difference is that it will be necessary to wait a little longer for the results of future investigations in the special sciences to be applicable to social and cultural phenomena than to fields like psychology or biology. Besides science, there is art. In so far as metaphysics is not out and out nonsense, it belongs to poetry. Knowledge is the exclusive province of science. The question as to what man is shall be answered by the course of daily life and by the physiological sciences and, to some extent, by psychology, which is reducible to them. The distinction between what an entity is and what it appears to be is altogether meaningless. Because of the fact that postwar metaphysics paved the way intellectually for the authoritarian system of government in Germany, it is not surprising that the neopositivist mode of thought attracts wide circles opposed to fascism. In its most flourishing period, positivism did not limit its attack to metaphysical ideas about the beyond, but criticized organicist theories of state and society as well. Early in its history it criticized the fetishistic concept of the state together with the illusory concept of God. This clarification is entered on the credit side of modern positivism. One of the most significant documents of the Enlightenment states that the Romans worshipped their Republic as some kind of entity differentiated from all the individual citizens who comprised it. They all spoke of it in that way, and it is in consequence of this idea that they demanded that every citizen sacrifice his interests, his happiness, and his life to this conception, although the peace and well-being of this Republic were nothing other than the peace of all the individual citizens.4 This document further assets that the idea of God was looked upon in a similar way. It was a phantasm that hindered the development of man. Today the chief interests of scientivism no longer center about the struggle against such socially significant ideas. The question of the present-day aims

M. Fréret, Lettre de Thrasibule à Leucippe (London, n.d.), p. 23.

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of these theorists is usually answered with the statement that their work consists in removing the obstacles that bar the advance of mathematics and the natural sciences. In spite of this, the younger generation, searching for intellectual weapons against the totalitarian frenzy, attaches itself to the glorious past of this philosophy, especially in the universities, where it has established itself as the most thoroughgoing antimetaphysical school. And yet, this philosophy in its present form is as securely bound as metaphysics to the established order. Though its relation to the existence of the authoritarian state may not seem obvious at first, nevertheless, it can be discovered easily. Neoromantic metaphysics and radical positivism alike have their roots in the present sad state of the middle class. Having given up all hope of improving its condition through its own activity, the middle class, dreading a sweeping change in the social system, has thrown itself into the arms of the economic leaders of the bourgeoisie. The essence of the latest school of positivism is its union of empiricism with modern mathematical logic. Bertrand Russell stated at the International Congress for Scientific Philosophy in 1935: In science, this combination has existed since the time of Galileo; but in philosophy, until our time, those who were influenced by mathematical method were anti-empirical, and the empiricists had little knowledge of mathematics. Modern science arose from the marriage of mathematics and empiricism; three centuries later, the same union is giving birth to a second child, scientific philosophy, which is perhaps destined to as great a career. For it alone can provide the intellectual temper in which it is possible to find a cure for the diseases of the modern world.5 Russell’s statement certainly exhibits great self-assurance. The movement of which he speaks has styled itself logical empiricism. It presents the sharp outlines of a school within which, as within the phenomenological school of Husserl, there already exist several distinct subgroups. Several noted scientists, working in various fields, have shown sympathy to this movement. Since it is not our intention to describe its history, but to point out the defects in its mode of thinking and its connection with this history of the bourgeoisie, we shall not dwell on the shades of difference among its adherents. Logical empiricism has this in common with the older empiricism: both hold that in the final analysis all knowledge about objects derives from facts of sense experience. Thus, Carnap thinks that all concepts “are reducible to root concepts relating to given data, the immediate content of

Bertrand Russell, “The Congress of Scientific Philosophy,” Actes du Congrès International de Philosophie Scientifique (Paris, 1936), No. 1, p. 11.

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experiences.”6 As to the truth of theories, or, rather, their probability, the sciences make their appeal to observation and experience as the highest court. On the whole, the work of knowledge in all fields terminates with the successful prediction of the occurrence of sense data. A certain distinction does exist, however, between traditional empiricism and its modern successors on this point. The former defended the claim of the individual that society was organized in his behalf. Science, too, had to justify itself to the individual, and it did so by assuring him that it asserted only what everyone could see and hear. The individual was shown that physics and all the other sciences were nothing but the condensed expression, the purified form of his own everyday experience, in other words, that they were not different from the devices he used in practical life, except that they were more systematic, permitting him to orient himself to reality with greater speed. The doctrine of man, though it was a restricted form of doctrine, therefore made up the content of this philosophy. It demonstrated that science begins with sense experiences and always has to refer back to them. Locke sought in his “historical, plain method” to give an “account of the ways whereby our understandings come to attain those notions of things we have; and . . . set down any measures of the certainty of our knowledge, or the grounds of those persuasions which are to be found amongst men, so various, different, and wholly contradictory . . .”7 Hume defined his task as the endeavor “to explain the principles of human nature.” This, he declared, was the only philosophical foundation upon which the sciences “can stand with any security.”8 Although, in keeping with their liberal conception of society, Locke and Hume understood this definition of science as a human product in a purely individualistic sense and sought to grasp the genesis of knowledge in terms of a psychologistic epistemology, nevertheless their philosophy contains at least this dynamic element––the relation to a knowing subject. Modern empiricism disregards this relation altogether, even in its theory of the origin of concepts and judgments. Physics, as a definitely circumscribed intellectual technique, always deals with the formulated judgments of observers and not directly with observations. It follows that the criterion of experience is not the sense impression, as with Locke and Hume, but the judgment formulated about the impression. The exclusive task of science is to establish a system from which such propositions can be deduced as can be confirmed by the judgments of observers, by “protocol sentences.” A descriptive symbol is regarded as acceptable if by means of definitions or newly established principles it is reducible to symbols which occur in Rudolf Carnap, “Die alte und die neue Logik,” Erkenntnis, I (Leipzig, 1930/31), 24. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by A. C. Fraser (Oxford, 1894), Introduction, Sec. 2, p. 27. 8 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1928), p. xx. 6 7

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protocol sentences.9 Science and consequently scientific philosophy have therefore to deal with the given world only in the form of sentences about it. The scientist is concerned with the world only insofar as it is framed in language. He reckons solely with what has been duly recorded in a protocol. The analysis of the process whereby experience is translated into a protocol belongs to the domain of empirical psychology, which may record the behavior of a subject in the same way that physics records the behavior of bodies. Psychology, too, does not deal directly with perceptions. The material manipulated is not the observation of the psychologist himself, but the facts certified by a great number of observers, that is, facts formulated in judgments. Neither the inexpressible nor the unexpressed may play a role in thinking; they may not even be inferred. The way in which the various stages of empiricism conceive the objects of knowledge may indeed be evidence of an increasing shallowness of bourgeois thought, a growing aversion to seeing the human bottom of nonhuman things. In any event, the principle that our knowledge of the world is derived from our senses has persisted throughout all its stages. Inasmuch as the meaning of this principle is limited to the statement that every assertion about anything in nature or in history must refer to a corresponding experience, its oppositional force is directed solely against belief in the hereafter. Rationalism did not contradict the principle; it simply did not isolate it as the fundamental law of philosophy. The rationalist systems of the seventeenth century employed the empiricist principle in connection with their doctrine that it is less important to devote attention to any single existent as it is, than to be able to mold and construct what exists in thought and in reality. Its belief in the possibility of completely dominating nature and society determined rationalism to concentrate on the problem of intellectual penetration of the world, on the modus operandi of reason. Mathematics is a means of producing objects from principles which the subject could develop in himself. The highest insights coincide with the foundations of being; they are not derived from single experiences, nor are they fixed arbitrarily. They make up the proper nature of rational thought and every secret must yield to its constructive power. Every existent must legitimate itself in perception. If a thing is known to us only through perception, however, it remains a mere thing-in-itself. It becomes a thing for us only when we are able to make it ourselves. Such was the view of rationalism. As opposed to this, verification through perception is the alpha and omega of empiricism. It holds only to what is, to the guarantee of facts. “The world is everything that is the case . . . The world divides into facts,”10 Cf. Rudolf Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, tr. Amethe Smeaton (New York and London, 1937), p. 319. 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922), p. 21. 9

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is the view expressed in the chief work of modern empiricism. With respect to the future, the characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science. Empiricism, it is true, untiringly avows its willingness to set aside any conviction if new evidence should prove it false. “No rule of the physical language is definitive” and “the test applies, at bottom, not to a single hypothesis but to the whole system of physics as a system of hypotheses . . .”11 Nevertheless, empiricism limits this test to neutral, objective, nonnormative viewpoints, that is to say, to viewpoints that are, after all, isolate. One can either change physical laws that come into conflict with new observations or refuse to acknowledge the new evidence. There is no element of necessity in this, however; the consideration of expediency, which makes the decision, escapes theoretical determination.12 Empiricism denies that thought can evaluate observations and the manner in which science combines them. It assigns supreme intellectual authority to the accredited science, the given structure and methods of which are reconciled to existing conditions. In the eyes of the empiricist, science is no more than a system for the arrangement and rearrangement of facts, and it matters not what facts are selected from the infinite number that present themselves. He proceeds as if the selection, description, acceptance, and synthesis of facts in this society have neither emphasis nor direction. Science is thus treated like a set of containers which are continually filled higher and kept in good condition by constant repair. This process, which was previously identified with the activity of the understanding, is unconnected with any activity which could react on it and thereby invest it with direction and meaning. Everything designated by idealism as idea and end and, by materialism, as social practice and conscious historical activity, is related to science essentially as objects of observations and not as constitutive interests and directive forces, insofar as empiricism concedes them to be conditions of knowledge at all Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language, p. 318. Logical empiricism is at one with the currently dominant theory of knowledge in maintaining that the resolution of the conflict between fact and theory cannot itself be theoretically formulated. “Here is where genius comes into its own,” is the explanation offered by Hermann Weyl, Philosophie der Naturwissenschaft, in Handbuch der Philosophie, II (Munich–Berlin, 1927), p. 113.

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(Otto Neurath).13 There is no mode of thought adapted to the methods and results of science and entwined with definite interests which may criticize the conceptual forms and structural pattern of science, although it is dependent on them. No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest. In exceptional cases, when the empiricist does employ such concepts, he restricts them to a purely classificatory function is if they were zoological genera. For this very reason, the structure of knowledge and consequently of reality––as far as the latter can be known––is as rigid for him as it is for any dogmatist. The empirical and rationalist modes of thought are more closely related in this respect than their adherents would presume. Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant. In principle, the whole world has its place in a fixed system which is not definitive at any one time and “it is absurd to speak of a single and comprehensive system of science.”14 Yet the statement that the correct form of all knowledge is identical with physics, that physics is the great “unity of science” in terms of which everything must be stated, posits certain forms as constant. Such an assertion constitutes a judgment a priori. The empiricist further states that the meaning of all concepts of science is determined by physical operations. He fails to see that the concept of the corporeal, in the sense peculiar to its use in physics, involves a very special subjective interest, involves, indeed, the whole of social practice.15 The naïve harmonistic belief which underlies Cf. especially: “Soziologie im Physikalismus,” Erkenntnis, II (1931), pp. 423–28; and Empirische Soziologie (Vienna, 1931), pp. 128–147. 14 Otto Neurath, “L’Encyclopédie comme ‘modèle,’” Revue de synthese, XII (1936), p. 188. 15 The philosophical consequences of regarding corporeal things in their pure state (that is, completely abstracted from subjectivity and from human praxis) as concrete realities have been discussed by Edmund Husserl in his recent The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936; tr. by David Carr; Evanston: North-western University Press, 1970). The book came to my attention only after the present essay had been completed. Even though this most recent publication of the last genuine theoretician of knowledge is not concerned specifically with the “physicalist movement” (“Vienna Circle,” “logical empiricism”) but with physicalism generally, the hypostatizations to which it calls attention are what has led to this newest form of physicalism. All the factors we have been discussing––uncritical objectivism, 13

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his ideal conception of the unity of science and, in the last analysis, the entire system of modern empiricism, belongs to the passing world of liberalism. One can come to an understanding with everybody on every subject. According to the empiricists this is a “fortunate coincidence” which one need not analyze to determine its significance and bearing. One simply hypostatizes it as a “perfectly general structural property of experience.”16 Ernst Mach paved the way for the view that subjective factors could, in principle, be eliminated. He admitted them only as the influence of the “nerves of our body” upon our perceptions.17 Natural science, he stated, compensates for this subjective influence by using a great number of observers instead of a single subject to study events. In this manner it is possible to eliminate accidental differences introduced by individual nervous systems and to purify physical events of all subjective admixtures. In this process the K L M . . . K’ L’ M’ . . . [the different observers and their respective nervous systems] are treated like physical instruments, each with its peculiarities, its special constants, and so forth, from which the results, as finally indicated, have to be set free . . . thus from this point onwards we have obtained a safe basis for the whole field of scientific research.18 The idea of radically eliminating the subject not only from physics, but also from the process of cognition generally by declaring individual differences themselves to be mere series of facts is itself a principle of research that stands in need of crateful restriction. The belief that this principle is essentially applicable at every moment of history leads, of necessity, to an unhistorical and uncritical conception of knowledge and to the hypostatis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science. It results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settled by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has the absolutizing of special science, the many affinities (at least from our contemporary viewpoint) between empiricism and rationalism, the neutralization of Hume’s skepticism in his followers—are all noted in Husserl’s analysis and an attempt is made to explain them. Despite the great difference between Husserl’s outlook and the theory we are proposing here, his book with its extremely abstract discussion of problems has more to contribute to contemporary historical tasks than does pragmatism for all its vaunted relevance or the writing and thinking, supposedly addressed to the “man in the street,” of many young intellectuals who are in fact ashamed of their role. 16 Rudolf Carnap, The Unity of Science (London, 1934), p. 65. 17 Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, tr. from the first German edition by C. M. Williams (Chicago and London, 1914), p. 36. 18 Mach, op. cit., p. 344.

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even more general character than a law of nature. It becomes, in some degree, an eternal fact, and thus falls directly in line with the principles of rationalism and transcendentalism. The determined value of a physical magnitude in any concrete case is independent . . . of the experimenter . . . A difference of opinion between two observers concerning the length of a rod, the temperature of a body, or the frequency of an oscillation, is never regarded in physics as a subjective and therefore unresolvable disagreement; on the contrary, attempts will always be made to produce agreement on the basis of a common experiment. Physicists believe that . . . when such agreement is not found in practice, technical difficulties (imperfection of instruments, lack of time, etc.) are the cause . . . Physical determinations are valid inter-subjectively.19 The same holds true for all other languages used in science––biology, psychology, and the social sciences––all “can be reduced to the physical language.”20 Thus, “the whole of Science becomes Physics.”21 Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some of its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationalism uses existing objects as well as the active inner strivings and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism with its confusion of the concept of novelty with inadequate predictability. Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans22 in the sense of a causative agent of decisions and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them. Empiricism rejects the notion of the subject in toto. The conception of development or tendency, too, presents little difficulty for it. Development or tendency, it states, merely means the probable behavior of objects, predictable on the strength of observed regularities of recurrence. The known modes of behavior of each object in a definite environment or situation are the partial tendencies of that situation; the probable event is the resultant of all partial tendencies. Behaviorist psychology seeks to formulate a doctrine of man Carnap, The Unity of Science, p. 64f. Carnap, op. cit., p. 66. 21 Carnap, op. cit., p. 97. 22 Leibniz, Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, ed. by Ernst Cassirer (Leipzig, 1904–1906), II p. 299. 19 20

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by the exclusive use of the concepts and methods of the sciences that deal with inorganic matter. Historical tendencies, one might think in conformity with behaviorist views, seem to be distinguished from physical tendencies in that human volitions are involved in the former. But behaviorism declares that the human will is just like the other regularities in nature. William James had suggested that every voluntary act is a movement conditioned by prior thought. The child discovers from observation that he can execute a specific movement or act if he thinks about it beforehand. Specific ideas and thoughts stand in the same relation to definite movements and acts as two neighboring metal knobs with opposite electrical charges stand to the spark. There is no qualitative leap between motive and cause; both are merely conditions regularly followed by definite events. A is followed by B. A head thinks of an action and it is carried out; a brick falls on that head and the head is broken. Both are cases of the same kind of objective law. Whenever an adult person thinks of an act and does not execute it, his failure to do so rests only on the fact that other thoughts or circumstances are present and interfere with the action.23 Otherwise, according to this theory, we would always be compelled to do what we think of doing. We must view every volition as the resultant of various regularities of human behavior which enter a given situation. Regularity is the term for repeatedly observed effects. Given A, the occurrence of B is probably if in the past it has frequently succeeded A. The occurrence of the probable sometimes depends on human factors, however; but behaviorism passes over this fact in laying down its categories, declaring that it belongs to another branch of science. The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connections in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freedom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort to make B follow A. Such confusion also occurs if effort or action is reified as merely a state or event and is never grasped as the specific structure of the subject-object relation. In the beginning positivism associated the process of determining laws and of deducing events from general conceptions and propositions (which it regarded as the only valid form of determining occurrences) with the explicit view that A, from the outset, was a constituent part of the fixed relation AB or AC or AD, and that all one had to do was to wait and see what happened. It admitted, however, that what a situation actually is might depend entirely on what men and their science make out of it, for example, whether they drag mankind to its doom or bring about its real

Bertrand Russell, Philosophy (New York, 1927), p. 223f.

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awakening. According to modern empiricism such a choice is of no significance in the appraisal of the present world. The existing state of thing is a fact of the same kind as the desire to change it, that is, if this desire resides not only in a few men, but is present in suitable form in the common consciousness. The state of things following the present order would be a new fact. Comprehensive terms like “beginning” or “end of mankind” are neither convenient nor otherwise justifiable abbreviations since, even after long discussion, it would be difficult to lay down definitions to which everybody could subscribe. It may be added that this disagreement will prevail as long as mankind has no more solid foundation than the present order. It is, of course, true that every event is resolvable into facts––and facts, varying in widely different ways according to the situation, play a decisive part in any proof. Nevertheless, it seems to us rather out of place to form a new school of empiricism on this circumstance alone. It looks too much like a promise that knowledge will keep to the narrow path of certainties and not deal with historical controversies at all or only in some indefinite future. “The view that thought is a means of knowing more about the world than may be directly observed . . . seems to us entirely mysterious,” is the conviction expressed in a work of the Vienna circle.24 This principle is particularly significant in a world whose magnificent exterior radiates complete unity and order while panic and distress prevail beneath. Autocrats, cruel colonial governors, and sadistic prison wardens have always wished for visitors with this positivistic mentality. If science as a whole follows the lead of empiricism and the intellect renounces its insistent and confident probing of the tangled brush of observations in order to unearth more about the world than even our well-meaning daily press, it will be participating passively in the maintenance of universal injustice. In reply, empiricism might raise the question: Would the intellect be confident that it knows the underlying truth if it did not have observations of its own to set against the countless observations of the day? In countering experience, the intellect must itself appeal to experience, for its concepts are not inborn or inspired. The answer is that it is precisely because facts are referred to when other facts are being exposed or abolished, and because facts, as it were, are involved in everything on every hand, that constructive thought which evaluates facts and discriminates between surface and pith is of such supreme importance in every decision. The term empiricism is either entirely meaningless today or it constitutes the abandonment of reason in the proper sense of the word. The role of empiricism throughout the world may be illustrated by many examples. The following incident, dealing with the son of Carl Vogt, the critic of Marx, is taken from an article by F. de Spengler: Hans Hahn, “Logik, Mathematik und Naturerkennen,” Einheitswissenschaft, ed. by Otto Neurath et al., Heft 2 (Vienna, 1933), p. 9.

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In his fine book devoted to the memory of his father, he recalls with smug amusement a remark of Professor Schiff to the members of an antivivisectionist society who wished to inspect the university laboratories. He told them that, although the animals were by no means asleep, the visitors would not hear a single sound. A simple transection of their vocal cords had deprived the animals of the ability to give voice to their suffering!25 The pleasure which the younger Vogt derived from the gullibility of those good people is a perfect example of the pleasure to be derived from naïve empiricism in a world in which everything is attuned to deception. Just as it is possible to foretell the actions of individuals, by methods of procedure identical with the prediction of physical processes, it is also possible to make predictions concerning social groups. The empiricist theory of society is “social behaviorism.” States, nations, age groups, and religious communities are all complexes composed of single elements, the individuals. Such composite groups exhibit certain relationships conforming to specific laws; they have a definite physiognomy . . . Scientific study has shown . . . that division into “social classes” which plays an increasing role in political life, can be represented sociologically. An “anthropology of the unpropertied classes” produces biologically noteworthy material.26 To be sure, the theory of society is not so amenable to experimentation as physics. At bottom, however, the “aggregates” cited are composed of “single living beings, man and other animals. Behaviorism studies their behavior under the influence of stimuli as a department of biology (see Pavlov and others).”27 Sociology, we are told, is comparable to a biology that has only a single animal at its disposal for study and therefore would have to deduce laws governing the movements of legs from those governing the movements of arms and laws governing a six-year-old animal from those governing a four-year-old animal. In such cases, too, experience about change has shown that the relevant laws change according to definite rules.28 The empiricists feel certain that in following this method significant changes . . . are not known beforehand. Comparisons of the total complexes do not allow us to predict revolutions unless they are Le Gutenberg, Organe de la Federation Suisse des Typographes, August 28, 1936. Otto Neurath, Empirische Soziologie, p. 105. 27 Neurath, op. cit., p. 67. 28 Neurath, op. cit., p. 68. 25 26

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common occurrences. It is necessary to wait for the occurrence of the new phenomenon before we can discover the new laws relating to it.29 Of course, we need not wait with folded arms. Whoever needs logs must either wait for the wood chopper or do the chopping himself. Besides, sociological insight into present relationships is, as a rule, gained most easily by those who are closest to the social structures of our day. In physics, too, familiarity with technical practice stimulates research. This is even more true of sociology. The scientist is an element like any other element.30 Thus, individual and social tendencies are not exceptions to the empiricist’s apparatus of concepts. They, too, are formulations of observations. Familiarity with social practice is a stimulant to the sociologist. Yet, the subject himself is not involved. It makes no difference whether the “significant changes” are awaited actively or passively; even when they are active, science treats human beings as mere facts and objects. The scientist is objective to the point of concerning himself as a mere element. This objectivity has its theoretical consequences. Since society is itself regarded as nothing more than the aggregate of all individuals, the difference between subject and object, knowledge and the content of knowledge, theory and practice, even on the social plane, is not treated as something that is incessantly shifting, constantly being rearranged in the course of history, but as non-existent, as an empty phrase. The problem of this shifting critical relationship between consciousness and being has always stood in the center of both idealist and materialist philosophies. In empiricism it has resolved itself as it were, of its own accord. There are nothing but facts, and the entire conceptual apparatus of science serves to determine and predict them. When the relation of consciousness to the objective world does come under consideration it is in turn treated as a collection of facts, such as habits conditioned physiologically or in a similar way. Any other mode of consideration is meaningless. Under present-day methods of production, science is more interested in the results of abstraction than in the theoretical reconstruction of the whole; animals, human beings, and society are one and all regarded as aggregates of things and events. The process which brought these abstractions into being in the course of social praxis does not enter the consciousness of science. Empiricism always treats thought on the level it has reached at any one time. If it is reminded of the genesis of these abstractions, it refers the problem to psychology or sociology, or places it in the care of some other discipline. Its assertions always tend to point out that all that can be ascertained are facts and nothing but facts. When we analyze our volitional acts, Neurath, op. cit., p. 106. Neurath, op. cit., p. 131.

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we find desires, feelings, ideas, and movements which are interconnected. It would be nonsensical to speak of a subject or of a reality that could not be given, but lay before or behind individual facts and their interrelations. If we speak of the subject alone, without going any further, we must view it as an isolated object, a set of physical events like every other set. How would it otherwise be possible to reach an agreement in a world of misunderstandings? The real subject disappears behind this or any other linguistic fixation which may or may not be to the point. We are not to speak of the subject, nor, if we follow the logical empiricists, of any reality independent of consciousness. This school believes that it has disposed of all problems by such dubious purifications of language. The conception that science establishes and classifies given data with a view to predicting future facts and that such a function exhausts the tasks of science, isolates knowledge and fails to remedy that isolation. The consequence is a ghostlike and distorted picture of the world. The empiricists, however, fail to see that this is the case. According to them, when scientists take part in activity they transform themselves from scientists into acting beings, that is, they become elements, data, facts; as soon as they reflect on their activity, however, they are retransformed into scientists. The trained specialist qua scientist looks upon himself as a chain of judgments and inferences; qua member of society, he regards himself as a mere object. The same holds for everyone. The individual is divided into innumerable functions, the interconnections of which are unknown. In society a man is pater familias under one aspect, business man under another, thinker under a third; to be more precise, he is not a human being at all, but all these aspects and many more in an inevitable succession. Knowledge consists of facts, action consists of facts; the constituents of knowledge, the perceptions, notions, facts, cannot be brought into a cognitive relation to any different thing, such as a subject. Logically, this unrestrained isolation of science rests on the hypostasis of the abstract concept of datum or fact. From Descartes on, only that which every individual could recognize as existing was to be accepted as such. Empiricism, however, by eliminating the subject has eliminated the critically discriminating facts, and has therefore obliterated all distinction between the concept of the datum and that of anything else, so that datum, fact, and object merely seem to possess determinate meaning. The special sciences are to deal with particulars and discretes. As distinct from them, philosophy is to deal exclusively with the nebulous sphere of the universal, with facts as such, with mere propositions, with language apart from content, with pure form. Reason cannot decide over these branches of knowledge or the connection between them, any more than it can over the other elements of social reproduction. Its function is restricted to the discrete fields of social research and branches of science, that is to say, it exists only in the form of understanding. In view of this restriction, philosophy has no other course

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than to take the meaningless universality of given facts for the whole world. Empiricism falsely considers this universality to be particular and determinate, and the only thing that can be believed. In the older forms of empiricism, this equating of the world and mere data, this leveling down of all praxis was connected with either religious or skeptical ideas, and therefore had merely a problematical character. Berkeley was unable to understand that the existing order is a product of the life process of society in which the individual is an active participant. The alienation of the product of social labor from the isolated individual also appeared as a hypostatization of facts. The problem of the origin of these facts raised insuperable difficulties and Berkeley fled to a religious belief that God gives the facts to the individual. Hume, on the other hand, expressed despair of ever solving the problem of the origin of facts. With these two philosophers, the absolute isolation of knowledge remained an open question, as is apparent from their skepticism. At times this result plunged Hume into “melancholia.” The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? And on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.31 He felt that the elimination of constructive thinking, the obliteration of the opposition between subject and object, theory and practice, thinking and willing, to which his philosophy, the philosophy of the rising bourgeoisie, led, had a disturbing, negative aspect. This feeling is no longer shared by his followers; one would look in vain for any sign of sorrow on their part over the impotence of reason. Modern empiricism is silent on this point, that is, unless it unsuspectingly adopts a Hegelian term and declares that “the mystical” enters with the problems of life. One may separate science from all other spheres of social life; one may regard science as comprising the determination and prediction of facts. It should be known, however, at least since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, that the most immediate experiences, sensations, and perceptions, as given to us, appear to be ultimate only to the most limited understanding and that actually they are derivative and dependent. Hegel wrote in his criticism

Hume, op. cit., p. 268f.

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of the philosophy of E. Schulze, a criticism which anticipates the whole of logical empiricism: Neither early skepticism nor materialism, nor even the most ordinary common sense, unless it has fallen to the level of bestiality, has ever made itself guilty of the barbarism of assigning incontrovertible certainty and truth to the facts of consciousness. Such barbarism has heretofore been unheard of in the history of philosophy. According to this newest skepticism our physics and astronomy and analytic thought defy all reasonable doubt. Hence, this skepticism even lacks the noble side of the old classical skepticism which set itself against limited and finite knowledge.32 The development of idealistic philosophy in Germany, from its beginning with Leibniz to the present, has been able to confirm the insight that the world of perception is not merely a copy nor something fixed and substantial, but, to an equal measure a product of human activity. Kant proved that the world of our individual and scientific consciousness is not given to us by God and unquestioningly accepted by us, but is partially the result of the workings of our understanding. He further showed, in the chapter on the schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding, that empirical perceptions which enter the consciousness have already been shaped and sifted by productive human faculties. The Neo-Kantians have preserved this legacy by differentiating and broadening it. In this manner, thanks mainly to the advances made in ethnology and psychology, it became possible to demonstrate the constitutive importance of language in the formulation of sensuous data. Signification does not arise after the object is completed; it is the progress of the sign and the increasingly sharp “distinction” of the contents of consciousness resulting therefrom that produces the more clearly defined outlines of the world as a totality of “objects” and “qualities” of “changes” and “activities,” of “persons” and “things,” of spatial and temporal relations.33 The given is not only expressed by speech but fashioned by it; it is mediated in many ways. In accordance with its philosophical presuppositions, Neo-Kantianism has understood the activity which produces and organizes the facts to be an intellectual process. Although Cassirer recognizes that the world of perception is conditioned by man, he nevertheless declares that language, the conditioning factor, is “a vehicle in that vast

Hegel, “Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie,’ Sämtliche Werke, I (Jubiläumsausgabe; Stuttgart, 1927), p. 253. 33 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin, 1923), I, 233. 32

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process of ‘struggle’ between the self and the world in which the boundaries of the two are first definitely demarcated.”34 But even this view is too narrow. In order to place man’s present consciousness of facts in the right context, it is not sufficient to trace the abstract principle of the ego in its historical interconnections. The opposition of the ego and the world, in its definite form, belongs to a transitory historical epoch, The conception of the ego as a monadically isolated substance is an abstraction, in idea as well as in fact. The disciples of classical idealism conceived the conditionality of perception idealistically, and made use chiefly of transcendental, that is, intellectual factors, in order to balance the one-sided doctrine that knowledge consists in accumulating facts. In so doing they showed better judgment than those who would equate knowledge of facts with knowledge of reality. The name empiricism itself betrays the lack of any such judgment. The facts of science and science itself are but segments of the life process of society, and in order to understand the significance of facts or of science generally one must possess the key to the historical situation, the right social theory. Empiricism, especially in its latest form which has gone so far as to abandon the criterion of personal observation and which intends, in all strictness, to rely exclusively on the logical perfection of the system and on protocol sentences, can easily come to disaster. We can illustrate this point readily. Let us suppose that in a definite country at a definite time the science of man, economics, history, psychology, and sociology are completely attuned to the principles of empiricism. Its people make careful observations; they possess a highly perfected logistic system of symbols, and in a number of cases they arrive at very acute predictions. The daily occurrences in economic and political life are faithfully recorded and even market fluctuations are accurately calculated in advance, although only at short range. The reflexes and reactions of the human being, from infancy to old age, have been carefully observed and all emotions have been related to measurable physiological processes. It is possible to make correct predictions regarding the conduct of the majority of the inhabitants of that country; for instance, as to their observance of stringent regulations, their frugality during a wartime food shortage, their passivity in the face of the persecution and extermination of their best friends, their manifestations of joy at public festivals and at the favorable outcome of the election of a brutal and deceitful bureaucracy, and so forth. The social sciences may have achieved all this and more in their effort to match the achievements of physics, the empirical science par excellence. The “facts of pure sense experience,” the supporting protocol sentences, pour in upon scientists in the same abundance as the spontaneous

Cassirer, op. cit., I, p. 232.

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demonstrations of approval pour in upon that worthless government which would doubtless know how to use the meticulous classification, collation, and coordination of this science as an instrument of its all-embracing mechanism of control. And yet, the picture of the world and of man produced by these scientific devices might be vastly different from the truth actually attainable at that very time. Because they are harnessed to an economic machine which destroys every inner freedom, because their intellectual development is retarded by cunning methods of education and propaganda and they are driven out of their wits by horror and fear, the inhabitants of that country might very well be subject to distorted impressions, commit acts hostile to their real interests, and produce nothing but deceptions and lies in every feeling, every expression, and every judgment. In all their acts and utterances, they might be possessed, in the strict sense of that word. Their country would then resemble both an insane asylum and a prison, and its smoothly working scientific research would not be aware of it. Their science could improve physical theories, play a prominent part in food and war chemistry as well as in astronomy, and reach unheard of heights in the creation of means for the derangement and self-annihilation of the human race. It would, however, entirely miss the decisive point. It would not notice that it had long become its own opposite. Although some of its departments might have reached the highest eminence, science itself would have turned into barbarous ignorance and shallowness. Empiricism, however, would have to exalt that science which imperturbably continues to discover, label, classify, and predict facts. After all, where else should one learn what science is if not from science itself, from the men engaged in it? And these men are perfectly agreed on the fact that everything is in order. Empiricism could easily come to such a fate without having the slightest conception of how to avoid it. Should those resolute groups who are no longer able to bear life under that oppressive order emerge victorious in their struggle––a struggle which the impassive “fact-finding” mechanism of science does not see––the whole scene would be changed in one stroke. Science would be surprised, but, according to empiricism, no shadow could thereby fall upon its reputation. Science would then admit that the former consciousness and behavior of the people were false, that it had been an enforced conformity, a product of a situation that had enslaved them. After a few years, human development would be free and science would duly note the fact that the past epoch had been marked by intellectual confusion and the warping of human powers under extreme pressure. Indeed, the masses themselves would now realize that what they had formerly said and done, and even what they had thought in secret were perverted and untrue. But how was science to have known or noticed these things at that time? The task of the scientist is to find facts, not to indulge in prophetic insights. According to the scientist,

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scientific predictions rarely deal with “significant changes” because observational material is lacking. “We must wait for the emergence of the new phenomenon before we can find the new laws that govern it.” The active groups and individuals who brought about that change, however, would stand in a different relation to theory. They did not move in an unbroken succession from scientists into men of action and back again into scientists. Their fight against the status quo combined the true unity of theory and practice. Fastening their eyes on a better life they were able to see through the deceit of the established order. Their specific action was contained in their very mode of perception, just as the praxis of the faulty society was embedded in its misguided science. Even in sense perception they remained conscious and active agents. None of the trumpery recorded in protocols had escaped their penetrating attention. They saw through it all. Dialectic, too, notes empirical material with the greatest care. The accumulation of solitary facts can be most incisive if dialectic thought manipulates them. Within dialectical theory such individual facts always appear in a definite connection which enters into every concept and which seeks to reflect reality in its totality. In empiricist methodology, on the other hand, concept and judgment are isolated and self-subsistent; they are single building stones which can be put together, interchanged, and partially remodelled. This treatment destroys meaning in all but those exceptional cases in which trivial, obvious statements, or statements that involve neither social nor historical problems, occur. When thought has to produce a picture of living things in which the functions of the single parts and the whole become clear only at the close of the intellectual process, empiricism fails completely. Dialectical thought integrates the empirical constituents into structures of experience which are important not only for the limited purposes served by science, but also for the historical interests with which dialectic thought is connected. As opposed to customary practice, the individual who is conscious of himself does not focus his attention merely upon the possibility of definite predictions and practical results, the universal requirements of natural science. When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformations of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking. The meaning of theory for the consciously acting individual is quite different from its meaning for the empirical scientist. For the latter, theoretical forms are conventions to be taken over from prevailing scientific

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practice. Where, however, thought reaches beyond the given composition of social life, the theoretical pattern is not given a priori, but is a construct of empirical elements which consciously reflects reality as seen from the standpoint of the far-reaching interests of the individual. The processes of construction and presentation connected with his inquiries are proper elements of knowledge. In physics, according to the empiricist, a body is a “string of events, connected together by certain causal connections, and having enough unity to deserve a single name.”35 The use of such names is, then, a “convenient shorthand,” and very little disagreement exists as to precisely what is connected by it. A glance at our human world, however, indicates that the views regarding causal relations, unity, and convenience of expression do not fit together as neatly as they do in physics. The autonomously acting individual discerns unity and interdependence where the servile consciousness perceives only disparity, and conversely. Yet, where the former encounters unity in his struggle, for instance, in the above mentioned system of oppression and exploitation––this “string of events” is seen not as a “shorthand” and a fiction, but as a bitter reality. In the dialectical theory, the fact that subjective interest in the unfolding of society as a whole changes continuously in history is not regarded as a sign of error, but as an inherent factor of knowledge. All basic conceptions of the dialectical theory of society, such as society, class, economy, value, knowledge, and culture are part and parcel of a theoretical context dominated throughout by subjective interests. The tendencies and counter-tendencies out of which the historical world is constituted represent developments which can not be grasped without the will for a more human existence, a will which the subject must experience, or rather produce, within himself. The empiricist would not even admit those tendencies and counter-tendencies as Ballungen,36 through which he usually connects the concepts of “vulgar” language with his formulas. The organization and constitution of man, which after the sweeping transformation in our imaginary country, even the empiricists recognized to be man’s true form of organization (although he must scorn this mode of expression), determined the consciousness of the participating groups even during the struggle leading to that transformation. These groups did not have to assert a single fact which was not empirically provable, provided that they were guided by the right interest. Rational knowledge does not controvert the tested findings of science; unlike empiricist philosophy, however, it refuses to terminate with them. Empiricist philosophy could very well offer the reminder that the freedom realized in our imaginary country actually exists only in our fancy. Russell, Philosophy, p. 119. Empirical matter-of-factness has penetrated even into the French language. In order to do justice to Ballungen, the translator had to enrich his mother tongue with the word “grégats.” Cf. Neurath, “L’Encyclopédie,” p. 190.

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Mention has already been made of the crucial point which empirical science fails to note, namely, the common interest and the idea of a truly human existence. Empiricism declares that such ideas arise from the confusion of personal desires, moral beliefs, and sentiments with science; it regards the strict separation of values from science to be one of the most important achievements of modern thought. Empiricism further contends that other aims may be set alongside the will to freedom and that it is not the task of science to decide which of these is right. It would hold that before those who were engaged in the struggle had attained their goal, the interest that shaped their ideas and their whole theory was not different from other desires and was in no way superior to them. The conception of a theory governed throughout by an interest, this argument concludes, is incompatible with objective science. Economists and other social scientists as late as the middle of the nineteenth century built their theories and systems on the prospect of a favorable evolution of the human race. Pure scientists of recent decades, however, would not take such considerations into account. Shutting all conscious social impulses out of their minds, they let themselves be guided in their work only by their unconscious impulses. They receive their problems, and learn the direction in which their solutions and “predictions” are examined to point from the status of their science and from the condition of the academic or public temper. These latter-day apologists for freedom from value judgments (Wertfreiheit) glorify the fact that thought has a subordinate role, that it has fallen to the level of a handmaiden to the prevailing objectives of industrial society with its extremely dubious future. The ruling powers can use thought that has renounced every determinative function. And the scientists, whose disparaging interpretation of values expresses just such a renunciation, help them along. They promise to conform by ignoring the direction in which the single steps of theoretical reflections lead and by maintaining that such indifference is equivalent to scientific rigor. Their position is comparable to that of the citizens of a tyrannical state who maintain that silent endurance of their yoke is faithfulness and loyalty to their rulers.37 Relativism, in the sense of an indifference on the part of science towards values and ends, is nowadays represented as the general characteristic of a liberal outlook. This is a misconception. The “tolerance” of the Enlightenment was certainly not neutral. It meant siding with the bourgeoisie against feudalism, with deism against the Church, with the demand that convicts be given useful work as against the practice of torturing them, etc. Modern relativism is actually the ideological capitulation of liberalism to the new autocratic systems. It is the admission of its own impotence, the transition to an authoritarian philosophy, which here as well as in other directions constitutes the natural consequence of relativism: “SuperRelativism.” “We recognize the demands of relativism,” declares Neurath (“L’Encyclopédie,” p. 189). With disarming simplicity, the positivists blend relativism with democracy and pacifism, asserting that these have “a natural affinity with the basic assumptions of relativism”

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Intellectual rigor is as important for those who view conditions from the standpoint of conscious interest as it is for those who seek to eliminate interest from their considerations. Nor is a single word needed to prove that there is a type of uncompromising partisanship which clarifies the historical situation. On the other hand, strict adherence to what happens to be given though it may have been the source of achievements in special departments of science, tends to prevent insight into human and social matters. When dialectical thought, anticipating the annihilation of the human race in wars and endless barbarism, takes it upon itself to speak of a general interest, to separate what is relevant from what is not, and to construct its ideas in this light, it does not always find unwavering support for its statements. Its difficulties are all the greater because the mass of people is still blind and ready to disavow any one who thinks or acts in its behalf. Empiricists often remark that there is no essential difference between physics and social theory, except that the latter has not yet advanced as far as the former. It is true that the same spirit of harmony does not prevail among social theorists as among physicists. It does not follow, however, that the formation of concepts in social theory has to be deferred indefinitely and that categories, such as the common interest, the fettering of human capacities, happiness, and growth, have nothing to do with science at all. There are very basic reasons for the fact that social theory is accompanied by hesitation and doubt. In physics, the selection of material and concepts can be undertaken calmly. But in social science, the same activity requires conscious decision, for otherwise everything remains in a state of sham objectivity. Certain contemporary sociological schools are in just such a state. It is because the empiricist conception of truth is unrelated to any subjective interest or desire for a rational society that it does not possess the uncertainty which such an interest must involve. It degrades knowledge to the level of a bourgeois profession the members of which help to register, systematize, and reproduce the experience of the common man. When nine-tenths of the people agree that they see spectres in broad (H. Kelsen, “Wissenschaft und Demokratie,” a feuilleton in The Neue Züricher Zeitung, No. 321, February 23, 1937). Mussolini has grasped the situation with more acumen. He has always prided himself on having maintained a relativistic attitude in contrast to socialism and all other political doctrines. His movement never had a straightforward program. As the situation demanded, it called itself aristocratic or democratic, revolutionary or reactionary, proletarian or antiproletarian, pacifistic or antipacifistic. This, according to Mussolini, bears out its claim “to stem directly from the most up-to-date trend of the European mind,” namely from the relativistic trend of philosophy. “From the circumstance that one ideology is as good as the next, that is, that all are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create his own ideology and to get the most out of it with all the energy at his disposal.” (Mussolini, “Relativismo e fascismo,” Diuturna, Milan, 1924, pp. 374–377). Relativism, which is without philosophical justification, is an element of a social dynamic which moves toward authoritarian forms, Indifference to the idea in theory is the precursor of cynicism in practical life.

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daylight, and brand innocent social groups as devils and demons, when they exalt desperados to the office of gods, in other words, when a hopeless state of confusion prevails, a state which usually precedes the disintegration of a society, it becomes clear that the empiricist conception of knowledge is fundamentally incapable of checking the spread of such “experiences” and of criticizing “common knowledge.” When the thoughtless crowd is mad, thoughtless philosophy cannot be sane. Besides, the empiricists have never been completely immune from spiritism.38 And this is the philosophical school that takes arms against metaphysics. It has been mentioned more than once in the preceding pages that modern and traditional empiricism are distinct. The new school of empiricism has frequently insisted that it goes beyond the traditional type. . . . logical knowledge is not derivable from experience alone, and the empiricist’s philosophy can therefore not be accepted in its entirety, in spite of its excellence in many matters which lie outside logic.39 The propositions of formal logic and mathematics cannot, then, be derived from empirical data. Since logical empiricism acknowledges that these formal sciences constitute its particular field of interest, without insisting, as did John Stuart Mill, on reducing them to the data of experience, it regards itself as a school of its own. This new kind of thought, which is distinguished from the mere establishment of facts, is quite discreet in face of the existing order of things. True to its origin, traditional logic has always attempted to comprise the most universal qualities of being within fundamental principles; modern logic, on the other hand, declares that it comprises nothing, that it is wholly devoid of content. Its sentences are not supposed to reveal anything at all about reality. Rather, the entire system of logic as well as of mathematics (which is a part of logic according to Whitehead and Russell) is merely an extensively differentiated system of sentences about concepts, judgments, and syllogisms of the kind used in science and everyday life. According to Russell, the function of logic is to investigate these logical elements and, further, to lay down a foundational system for the various forms of judgment. This logic is called formal because symbolic elements are manipulated without regard to their relation to reality, that is to say, without regard to the question of truth or falsity. The writing in the field hardly makes clear how form is to be determined apart from subject matter. As a rule the procedure is as follows: Several examples are cited in which it is usually quite clear that different facts or entities are denoted; it is then stated that what remains the same in all Cf. Friedrich Engels, “Dialektik und Natur,” Marx-Engels Archiv, II (1927), 207–216; Horkheimer, “Materialism and Metaphysics,” pp. 10–46 of this volume. 39 Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (Chicago and London, 1929), p. 40. 38

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examples in spite of these differences is the form, while that which changes is the content. On the other hand, propositions are cited in which there is no question regarding the fact that the object denoted is one and the same; in this case that which varies is designated as the form. After he has given examples of various propositions relating to Socrates in which the subject, Socrates, remains the same, Russell says: Take (say) the series of propositions, “Socrates drank the hemlock,” “Coleridge drank the hemlock,” “Coleridge drank opium,” “Coleridge ate opium.” The form remains unchanged throughout this series, but all the constituents are altered. Thus form is not another constituent, but is the way the constituents are put together.40 Through its analysis of the formal elements of science, then, logic affords the possibility of discovering conceptual obscurities and apparent contradictions, of bringing to light alternatives that went unnoticed before, and of replacing complex theoretical constructions by simpler ones, of setting diverse forms of expression in harmony with one another in different branches of science, or in the same branch, and of creating greater uniformity. Like mathematics, it uses symbols for all formal elements and even attempts to use them for all operations. Logic deals algebraically with statements expressed symbolically, particularly in the syllogism, thus preventing many misunderstandings and promoting clarity. With great pride logic says of itself that it nowhere increases the store of material of knowledge in the sense in which the special sciences in their present form do. Its aim is to assist the sciences in formulating their results and in reaching mutual agreement. Its program, so to speak, consists in “rationalizing” scientific research. According to Carnap, “There is no philosophy as a theory or a system of special propositions alongside of those of science.”41 It would, therefore, be a mistake to assume that the addition of logic in any way changes the general character of empiricism. The interpretation of logic as a system of linguistic forms devoid of content soon proves to be questionable, however, and it is quickly abandoned in the struggle with metaphysics. The separation of form and content cannot be carried out. The idea that it is possible to do so without resort to extralogical considerations turns out to be an illusion. It seems plausible in theoretical physics, in which the separation originates, because the “immediately given,” understood as an isolated perception, plays a minor role in comparison with the complicated process of formulating and reformulating laws. In the social world, however, it is no accident that this bifurcation can only be supported by the most inane examples. For, Russell, op. cit., p. 45f. Carnap, “Die alte und die neue Logik,” p. 26.

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in social sciences, the connection with material judgments and decisions is demonstrated from the very beginning. Every expression of the language has a definite meaning. A judgment is a compound symbol and every individual symbol in it is correlated either with a definite or indefinite entity. Judgments may, therefore, be dealt with in the same manner as any other definite thing; one may take out and replace elements, substitute Coleridge for Socrates, and so on.42 In order not to destroy the character of the judgment and replace it with meaningless constructions, it is necessary to observe certain rules in substituting symbols. The elaboration of such a system of rules was prompted primarily by logical difficulties encountered within mathematics and now forms a specially cultivated department of modern logic. The process of determining, however, whether or not a combination of symbols is to be called intersignificant, that is to say, the process of distinguishing between a meaningless statement and a combination of meaningless sounds, cannot be separated from a concrete decision on a material problem. The notion prevails that the logician need merely go to his colleagues in other departments of science or, perhaps, to journalists and business men to collect established facts from which he can then abstract the concept of form in the quiet of his study. This fallacious idea reduces logic to a type of thought that is strictly confined to the accredited classificatory systems of science and only explores relations between fixed conceptions. The type of thinking by which fixed conceptions are incorporated into constructions in which they assume specific meanings is not accessible to the formal logician. When judging human matters, he is restricted to trivial elements and relationships. In science as well as in everyday life he finds, apart from mathematical formulae, countless sentences the meanings of which are unmistakable even when torn from their context. The conceptions contained in these sentences can clearly be traced to “root conceptions.” These, in turn, may be traced to experiences which can be repeated in this society by any one at any time. The experiences concerned deal with qualities and structures that are more or less undisputed. The statement, “Anthropods are animals having articulated bodies, jointed limbs and a chitinous shell,” unquestionably has meaning as a zoological statement; the meaning of other sentences, such as “Humboldt travelled in America,” or “Tommy has a cold in the head,” involves no problems. We run into difficulties, however, as soon as we assert that a court decision is just or unjust, that a man has a high or low intellectual level; or if we make the statement that one form of consciousness precedes another one, that a commodity is the unity of use value and exchange value, or if we declare that the real is rational or irrational. The validity of these judgments cannot be ascertained

Cf. Rudolf Carnap, Abriss der Logistik (Vienna, 1929), p. 3ff.

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by recourse to statistical surveys, whether among common folk or scholars. Here, experience, the “given,” is not something immediate, common to all, and independent of theory, but is mediated by the whole configuration of knowledge in which these sentences occur, even though the reality to which this configuration refers exists independently of consciousness. The precise relation of this theoretical whole to man and to the given world cannot be determined definitely. Just as everyday language and the language of the classificatory systems represent specific historical unities, intellectual productions, although they may agree with those systems in many general features, have their own peculiar structure and history. The manner in which the given is mediated by thought, the manner in which connections between the objects are brought to light, differentiated, and transformed, the linguistic structure in which the interaction of thought and experience is expressed, is the mode of presentation or the style. It is an insurmountable obstacle to formal logic. The development of natural science, too, influences perception. The theory of relativity, for instance, is an important factor in transforming the structure of experience, if experience includes the world of perception of everyday life as well. Within its own province, however, that is, in physics, the structure of scientific experience, insofar as it is conceived of as isolated from thought, will not be changed by the theory of relativity; it will remain a body of “atomic” observations. This state is inherent in physics as an isolated branch of science, and it is not injurious in the least to the significance of its theories; it is detrimental only to empiricist logic which views such new achievements at a safe distance from individual existence and social praxis, and then proceeds to designate certain elements of those achievements as prototypes of knowledge. Modern logic disregards this relationship altogether. Its achievements have reference purely to practical rationality, to a kind of thinking typical of the reproduction of life in its given form. Its entire structure and all the laws formulated by it are devoted to this end.43 Modern logic should, however, beware of assuming a critical attitude toward conceptions which do not serve this end. It declares that it defines the principles resulting from the comparison and systematic correlation of familiar ideas as the form of thought. The one objectionable item in all this is its questionable use of the term “thought.” There is no reason to restrict the designation “thought” to those instances from among which this logic culls its examples. If there were, the assertion that the propositions of logic are tautologies would have some justification. We designate a certain complex of phenomena as thought. If we are confronted then with a thought construction of peculiar structure and singular design we would, in accordance with the methods Cf. Max Horkheimer, “Zum Problem der Wahrheit,” Kritische Theorie, I (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 265ff.

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of the old natural science, have to reformulate our concept of thought, for instance, take it as a species of some wider genus. In a case of this very kind, however, the logical empiricist would invoke his option to reject disturbing protocol sentences. His process is to select certain ideas beforehand and designate them as alone true and genuine as against all other ideas, many of which have played and still play an important part in human history. In this way his logic drops the role of tautology and demonstrates the partiality of its position, a partiality altogether contrary to the principles of empiricism. It becomes apparent that the two elements of logical empiricism are only superficially connected. Notwithstanding some innovations––for example, the theory of types, the value of which, despite the great amount of ingenuity expended upon them, is doubtful––symbolic logic is identical with formal logic on essential points. Consequently, what is open to objection in the one is equally objectionable in the other. “Form” is an abstraction derived from a material of conceptions, judgments, and other theoretical constructions restricted in respect to kind and extent. If one logical doctrine claims to be logic as such, it therewith abandons formalism, for its statements then acquire material meaning and lead to far-reaching philosophical consequences. Characteristically, however, modern logic does not know this, and its ignorance is what distinguishes it from the material logic of Aristotle and Hegel which it so bitterly attacks. On the other hand, if any type of logic refrains from claiming universality (the claim is, however, historically associated with the very name of logic), by explicitly prohibiting its propositions from being given a normative cast, or, worse yet, by denying that any critical conclusions may be drawn from them, it loses the philosophical, and especially the antimetaphysical character which it took on in empiricism. In any case, logic is in conflict with empiricism; in fact, logic and mathematics have always constituted unsolved difficulties for empirical systems. The attempts of John Stuart Mill and Ernst Mach to deduce logical propositions from dubious psychological data were manifest failures. Hume had the wisdom not to attempt such deduction of mathematical and related propositions. For this very reason, however, the evident relations of ideas exist side by side with empirical facts in his works in such a way that their interrelations do not become clear. For Berkeley, mathematics was a plague next only to materialism, as the Analyst and other writings demonstrate. He openly and unwaveringly opposed his empiricism to the developments of modern science and declared himself for the Bible and good common sense, without the benefit of modern mathematics. In fact, he seriously endangered the beginnings of modern mathematics. The rigid separation of sensuous and rational knowledge, inherent in all empiricism, asserted itself in a familiar way in Berkeley’s philosophical career––he passed from empiricism to Platonism. Readers of Locke’s Essay, after being instructed in empiricism in the first thee books, have always been amazed at the

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surprising turn taken in the fourth. Morality and mathematics are represented as independent of experience, yet valid for it. The basic works of the earlier empiricist doctrine contain the same contradiction between the empirical conception of science and the rational elements to be found in it as is contained in the more modern variety which brings together the two extremes of this contradiction in the very name it assumes. When modern formalistic logic encounters theoretical constructs which, as a whole, or in their separate parts, do not fit into its conception of thought, it does not call the universality of its own principles into question, but challenges the refractory object, whatever its constitution or qualities may be. The followers of this system say that it is wrong to regard thinking as a “means of knowing something that must have unconditional validity at all times and in all parts of the world.”44 They constantly refuse to accord any “executive power” to thinking. At the same time, however, they demand that all thinking should conform to empirical criteria. As has been shown, this philosophical position by virtue of its very nature can not possess a single legitimate weapon to combat any form of mass delusion once the latter has attracted sufficient followers. Belief in witchcraft was combated in its day by means of a strictly rationalist philosophy. In the presence of a large number of protocol sentences bearing on the existence of witches, the empiricists would not even have been able to fall back on improbability. Empiricists regard Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel as the champion crackbrains of the world, and their philosophies as a scientific vacuum for no weightier reasons than that their ideas do not fit into the system of logistics and that their relation to the “root concepts” and “primitive experiences” of empiricism is problematical. The superficiality and presumption with which the new empiricists pass judgment on the products of intellectual activity parallel an attitude to culture which now and then finds practical expression in nationalistic uprisings and the bonfires associated with them, though such demonstrations may in fact offend the empiricists personally. Russell came across Hegel’s Logic and discovered that logic and metaphysics are identified in this system. His explanation follows: Hegel believed that, by means of a priori reasoning, it could be shown that the world must have various important and interesting characteristics, since any world without these characteristics would be impossible and self-contradictory. Thus what he calls “logic” is an investigation of the nature of the universe, in so far as this can be inferred merely from the principle that the universe must be logically self-consistent. I do not

Hahn, “Logik, Mathematik und Naturerkennen,” p. 9.

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myself believe that from this principle alone anything of importance can be inferred as regards the existing universe. But, however that may be, I should not regard Hegel’s reasoning, even if it were valid, as properly belonging to logic . . . Furthermore, Russell holds that Hegel’s logic is nothing other than traditional logic which Hegel “uncritically . . . assumed throughout his reasoning.”45 Russell has a very acute insight into the mental caste of the typical philosopher: The paradoxes apparently proved by his [the non-empiricist’s] logic are really the paradoxes of mysticism, and are the goal which he feels his logic must reach if it is to be in accordance with insight. It is in this way that logic has been pursued by those of the great philosophers who were mystics––notably Plato, Spinoza, and Hegel. But since they usually took for granted the supposed insight of the mystic emotion, their logical doctrines were presented with certain dryness . . . And he continues in this vein. He cannot forgive these philosophers because “they remained––to borrow a useful word from Mr. Santayana––‘malicious’ in regard to the world of science and common sense.”46 The book from which these passages are quoted and the more recent writings of Russell strike a popular note. The writings of the Vienna circle, on the other hand, make the same judgments in a strict and uncompromising manner. Carnap remarks: When subjected to the relentless scrutiny of modern logic, all philosophy in the traditional sense of the word, whether it follows Plato, Thomas, Kant, Schelling, or Hegel, or seeks to build up a new “metaphysics of being” or a geisteswissenschaftliche Philosophie proves not merely to be false in content but to be logically untenable, that is, proves to be nonsense.47 In contrast to other philosophers who are granted only a disparaging word because they do not subscribe to logical empiricism, Kant has been distinguished by a thorough refutation at the hands of Reichenbach. Very little was left of Kant after Reichenbach had finished with him. His Critique of Pure Reason was remarkable “in its effect.” It was intended to explode

Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 40–41. Russell, op. cit., pp. 48–49. 47 Carnap, “Die alte und die neue Logik,” p. 13. 45 46

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Leibnizean logic. “Today we logicians are fully aware that this critique has long been confuted by incontrovertible facts.”48 Among the conceptions which empiricism does not comprehend but attacks nonetheless, is the thesis that truth is not an isolated judgment, but in every case a whole of knowledge. As a rule, the mathematical logicians do not attack Hegel on this point but direct their attention to his English disciple, Bradley. The following passage is a good example of the grounds on which they criticize him: The truths discovered by the special sciences are not related to one another in such a way that if taken singly they are only relative, that is to say, that each is only one aspect of truth and must be supplemented by all other aspects in order to become really true. Such a conviction, held by many a philosopher, such as Bradley, seriously offends against logic. (The blunder consists, for instance, in their belief that they are entitled to say, “It is not quite true that it is cold but it is partially true,” instead of simply, “It is rather cold.”) In fact, however, every sentence that has been arrived at without error is by itself completely true; it is a part of the whole truth and not merely an approximation to, or only one aspect of it. (Should it contain a mistake, however, it is simply false and consequently not an aspect of the truth.)49 These statements lack definiteness on the most vital point, namely, when they refer to errors. The naïve misapprehension of the mathematical logicians is especially evident in their conception that every judgment in any line of thought must be of the same nature as the one which expresses the relatively simple fact that it is cold. They hold that any theory, or for that matter any intellectual whole, is a compound of single judgments the truth of which could be determined individually and independently of the whole, just as in the case of the temperature. In many very important instances, at least, it is imperative to know the whole, the context, before any valid decision can be made. The insight gained may then be expressed in a simple sentence as, for example, in Hegel’s formulation that the true is the whole. In order to comprehend such an insight, however, it is not enough as in the judgment, “it is rather cold,” to appeal to the average level of education or to assume a normal metabolism. The thought as expressed in a general philosophical formulation characterizes a consciousness which has actually passed through a series of reflections leading up to that thought. What it then knows is, if one insists, just as “empirical” as a simple perception. The difference lies in the fact that thought is more actively involved in the Heinrich Scholz, “Die klassische deutsche Philosophie und die neue Logik,” Actes du Congrès International de Philosophie Scientifique, Part VIII (Paris, 1936), 2. 49 Moritz Schlick, “Philosophie und Naturwissenschaft,” Erkenntnis, IV (1938), 381. 48

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achievement than in the statement, “It is rather cold.” This idea is expressed by Hegel in the assertion “that the absolute is to be understood as result.” Hegel’s conception holds not only for absolute knowledge, the problems of which are not so easily dismissed as the empiricists think, but also for most theories which aim beyond the present order. Dialectical logic has reference to thought involved in the interpretation of living reality, to thought in process, and not merely to static expression. This logic is not a “physics of language” but material knowledge itself, considered under the aspect of its presentation. Schlick and Russell accomplish little when they marshal such sentences as “It is rather cold,” and “Tommy has a cold in the head,”50 against Bradley’s philosophy. Their oft-repeated demand that philosophers should overcome their “instinctive aversion”51 and study logistics must be countered with the reminder that before refuting dialectics one ought at least to know its rudiments. The standpoint, “which is to shake previous philosophy to its foundations,”52 cannot be found in the primitive misconceptions exhibited by the modern empiricists. This is all the more true because not only logistic but every other theory lacks the ability to overthrow the old philosophy, no matter how thorough its acquaintance with the traditions combated. Idealistic philosophy or metaphysics cannot be “shaken to its foundation” by mere theoretical rejection. Nor can it be negated simply by “turning one’s back on philosophy and, with head averted, mumbling a few angry and banal phrases about it.”53 Harmony and significant existence, which metaphysics wrongly designates as true reality as against the contradictions of the phenomenal world, are not meaningless. Powerful economic forces welcome a philosophy that professes not to know what to make of thee conceptions and for that reason prefers to stick to facts; a philosophy that resolves not to make any essential distinction between the conspiracy of brutal despots against all human aspiration to happiness and freedom, on the one hand, and the struggles to defeat these tyrants on the other; a philosophy that reduces the two to the abstract concept of the “given” and even glorifies such conduct as objectivity. These forces expect the scientist to provide the technical means for perpetuating the established order and, particularly, for maintaining a war economy which has long converted peace into its opposite. The large section of the middle class which has been pushed into the background by the free play of economic forces must either side with these powerful economic groups or remain silent and withhold any opinion on vital issues. Cf. Bertrand Russell, Philosophy, pp. 250–3. Carnap, op. cit., p. 13. 52 Ibid. 53 Karl Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx und Friedrick Engels, ed. by F. Mehring (Stuttgart, 1920), I, 390. 50 51

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Thought relinquishes its claim to exercise criticism or to set tasks. Its purely recording and calculatory functions become detached from its spontaneity. Decisions and praxis are held to be something opposed to thought––they are “value judgments,” private caprices, and uncontrollable feelings. The intellect is declared to be connected only externally, if at all, with the conscious interest and the course it may follow. With the Idea there is no connection whatsoever. Thought and will, the parts of the mental process, are severed conceptually. Logically, there can be no objection to the latter procedure. What is very strongly objectionable from the standpoint of logic, however, is the attempt to set these abstractions up as rigid departments into which reason must be divided so that the function of thought would be mere calculation, while choice or decision would be the exclusive province of the will. The objections would apply even if some exponents of this misguided rigor conceded that the will may “make use of” the findings of thought. In view of the fact that the ruling economic powers use science as well as the whole of society for their special ends, this ideology, this identification of thought with the special sciences, must lead to the perpetuation of the status quo. With their increasing impotence in Europe during the last decades the middle class groups mentioned above, whose consciousness is best outlined by this philosophy, have come to regard the established order as the natural one. Face with the intensification of this order in the authoritarian states, they accept the purity advocated by logical empiricism as the given theoretical attitude. (Because its barbarous attitude to language causes it to miss the actual meanings inherent in words, logical empiricism must fail to see the deeper connection between the glorification of the isolated quality of purity [Sauberkeit] and the need for a purge [Saüberung] to which authoritarian states make the most appalling concessions. Its error is the reverse of that made by a certain school of metaphysics which transforms philosophy into hermeneutics and seeks to track down ultimate things by tracing the original meaning of words. The modern empiricists believe it possible, given an accurate knowledge of customary usage, “faithfully” to translate a living language into an artificial one by following certain rules previously agreed upon. Thus it would be possible to translate any existing language into one made to order, for instance, into “physical language” without losing anything in the transfer. They hold that concepts like man or capitalism––provided they are not on the Index Verborum Prohibitorum––could just as well be rendered by “larifari” or “ruarua”; in fact, it would be preferable to choose such “neutral” expressions because once correctly defined, neutral expressions would prevent misunderstanding.) The confounding of calculatory with rational thinking as such solidifies the monadological isolation of the individual engendered by the present form of economy. The following illusions will throw light on this fallacy. Let us assume a prison with several hundred men incarcerated for life. The

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prison consists of only one large hall. The necessities of life are supplied from outside. There is not enough food and the number of cots provided is too small for the number of prisoners. Some of the men have been allowed to have musical instruments, others sing and shout from time to time, and an almost continuous uproar prevails as a result. The intelligent prisoner will have to be on the alert to preserve his welfare. He will have to observe his fellow prisoners and study their behavior in all particulars in order to get his share when the food arrives. He will have to figure out when there will be least noise and when he will have the greatest chance to find a vacant cot, then carefully weigh these factors to determine when it would be best to sleep. He will have to engage in psychology and sociology, in fact, in every empirical science which can be of use to him. Factions may be formed, fights develop, and compromises be arranged. Individuals will join or break away from one or the other of these factions according to their strength or interests. In the end, they may submit to the strongest and most brutal individuals, simply because they cannot organize and plan their actions by themselves. Their characteristic intellectual traits will be shrewdness, empirical rationality, and calculation; but, however brilliantly these faculties may develop, they represent only a special kind of thinking. In respect to human affairs, calculation is a poor expedient. We may conceive forms in which the mental powers of individuals do not have merely adaptive functions designed to meet the continually changing situations resulting from their chaotic behavior, but actually define and order their life. For the inwardly isolated prisoner the daily scramble for food, the belligerent attitude of the others, the din alternating with relative quiet are all inescapable natural forces conditioning his life. He has no choice but to submit to these facts in the most rational manner possible. They are realities, just as the prison walls and the quantity of food delivered to the prison. Where, however, man confronts circumstances which do depend on him and yet eyes them as alien and unalterable his thought is bound to be feeble and abstract. Where today there is nothing but dependence, there could instead be constructive resolve on so wide a scale that even the character of intellectual behavior would be altered. Calculative thought, mere “head” thinking (“Verstandes”-Denken), corresponds to a type of human being who is still in a stage of relative impotence, who is still passive with regard to vital issues, despite all his industrious traits. As a result the functions of management and regulation increasingly become the exclusive privilege of the most powerful. In our bifurcated world, they take on the character of adaptation and artifice far more than that of rationality. Since the development of a higher spontaneity hinges on the creation of a rational community, it is impossible for the individual simply to decree it. As may be noted in the example of the prison, the prerequisite of this goal is that the individual abandon the mere recording and prediction of facts, that is,

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mere calculation; that he learn to look behind the facts; that he distinguish the superficial from the essential without minimizing the importance of either; that he formulate conceptions that are not simple classifications of the given; and that he continually orient all his experiences to definite goals without falsifying them; in short, that he learn to think dialectically. Modern empiricism joined with logistic is a logic of monads. The criticism brought against it because of its “solipsism” is fully justified.54 Logical empiricism was designated at the outset of this study as an attempt to bring unity and harmony into the inconsistencies of the modern consciousness. While neoromantic philosophers strove to attain this end by disparaging science, the latest branch of positivism seeks to carry it out by hypostatizing the special sciences. The two philosophical movements have a common future. Neither apprehends reality in conscious connection with a definite historical activity, as a body of tendencies, but takes it in the immediate form in which it presents itself. The prometaphysical view absolves the given world by referring it to a significant being that exists independent of historical change. Scientivism rejects all metaphysical categories. It feels “sufficient vitality in itself to affirm the world in its present form . . .” This means that it sees physics as “a science full of vital problems, full of inner movement, and tremendous effort to find the answer to the questions posed by the mind in its quest for knowledge.”55 Scientivism romanticizes the special sciences when it declares that physical theories furnish proof “that man grows with knowledge and carries in

The solipsistic character of modern empiricism has not been treated in this study. It has, however, been the subject of repeated attack since the early years of this century. Since the publication of the early polemics against empirio-criticism, nothing has changed in the positivist doctrine and method except that it exercises greater caution in its formulations. It now claims not to deny consciousness and physical states, but merely to maintain that all psychological concepts may be traced back to physical ones, which, of course, leads to the same thing. Logical empiricists are apparently unable to see that at times it is the inner states which are significant rather than outer effects. They affirm that it makes no difference in knowledge whether or not consciousness is attributed to man. Carnap ridicules as metaphysical flummery the sate of Empedocles that the attraction and repulsion of matter are to be understood as love and hate (“Logic,” Factors Determining Human Behavior, Harvard Tercentenary Publications [Cambridge, Mass.], 1937, p. 110). It is his opinion that this statement means nothing at all. What holds for matter holds equally for man. In the case of the body, too, it is declared to be nonsense to conceive that it is moved by love, and hate, pleasure and pain. According to the terminology proper to the school, such a logical verdict does not arise from solipsism or nihilism, but from a methodological prescript: the claim that man has a consciousness is not false, but meaningless. Nihilism is, however, present in its assertion that not only are you nothing, but I am nothing. This philosophy corresponds fairly accurately to the feeling characteristic of the followers of an authoritarian leader. 55 Hans Reichenbach, “Die philosophische Bedeutung der modernen Physik,” Erkenntnis, I (1930/31), 70–71. 54

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himself possibilities of thought forms which he could not even imagine on a previous level.”56 While it is true that metaphysics is wrong to feed mankind on hopes by offering it a being that cannot be verified with the means of science, it is also true that science becomes naively metaphysical when it takes itself to be the knowledge and the theory and even goes so far as to disparage philosophy, that is, every critical attitude toward science. It is true that any position which is manifestly irreconcilable with definite scientific views must be considered false. Even constructive thought must get much of its material from the special sciences, from physics, geography, psychology, etc. When it considers a certain problem, constructive thought brings together conceptions of various disciplines regardless of conventional borderlines. Unlike absolute metaphysical intuition, however, it does not thereby disregard or set aside their contents, but weaves them into the right pattern for the given situation. This positive connection with science does not mean that the language of science is the true and proper form of knowledge. The portions of reality covered by the special sciences are restricted both as to range and treatment in comparison to the level of knowledge attainable today. Just as it is inadmissible to run counter to the tested results of science, it is naive and bigoted to think and speak only in the language of science. Under present circumstances a language that is panic-stricken enough to say that nothing is disclosed to it and even to declare that “the nothing nothings” (Nichts selbst nichtet) does not, despite its kinship with the unleashed brute forces of the present day, appear more senseless than the self-assured precisionism which discovers a prediction even in the judgment that a man died under horrible torture. This precisionism, like recent metaphysical language, does not take account of the qualitative leap in history and, like the forlorn pessimism of pre-authoritarian metaphysics, fails to call the existing order into question because it maintains its faith in linear progress. The sectarian spirit of such a harmonistic belief in progress is present, too, among those schools that continue to employ living language with the superior reservation that what they “really” intend is physics although they work with “crude” implements for the sake of convenience. Science and its interpretation are two different things. One of Mach’s disciples declares, “Subjects and objects are clusters or bundles of elements; they are composed of consecutively appearing groups of simultaneously appearing elements.”57 This statement has not been proved by physics, of course, but it is, nevertheless, part of a unified general outlook to which its disciples adhere as strictly as the modern European and American followers of Buddhism or Christian Science observe their specific cant and Reichenbach, op. cit., p. 71. Friedrich Adler, Ernst Machs überwindung des mechanischen Materialismus (Vienna, 1918), p. 88. 56 57

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ritual. The compilation of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum containing all words which some noted specialist has pronounced useless, and the formulation of a unitary language and a unitary science, even if their specific usefulness were conceded, do not in any case belong to a science that desires the respect of philosophical thought. If we are to credit the opinion of this school, however, all this has nothing to do with the case. They claim that fruitful discussion can begin only when the limited problems of logistics, the logical syntax of speech, or the calculation of probabilities are the subjects. It must also be pointed out that this apologetic for restrictedness, highly dubious as it is at the present time, does not belong to science proper, but to the attitude of a philosophic sect which has found its peace in a finite, self-enclosed world view. Nonetheless, its vision of the world, like most religions, permits its adherents to take the most divergent attitudes with respect to historical problems. Ernst Mach was himself a progressive and many members of his school embraced liberal ideas. In terms of the teaching of the school, however, this circumstance is sheer accident; the empiricist doctrine offers no remedy for political or spiritual superstitions. The intellectual honesty of individual personalities and the acute mental vision of certain of their scientific achievements does not make their philosophies any better. Mathematical logicians may have brought calculatory thinking to the level of development of modern industry and technique and may have cleared away a great many antiquated notions; but their own interpretations of what they are doing can, nevertheless, become outworn in the same way that a factory which is thoroughly rationalized and equipped in the most up-to-date fashion may contribute to general disorder and may perpetuate an outmoded system of social chaos. The appeal to the exclusive warranty of facts has been extensively treated in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in which it was properly classified as one form of contemporary consciousness. It has been dealt with above and need merely to be noted here.58 The process of embracing some doctrine or other for the purpose of restoring one’s inner peace as though the events of objective history had nothing to do with the degree of a man’s inner calm, always comes down to a retreat into illusory harmony, a processes of insulation from the world; the result is the same whether the contents of the soothing doctrine are scientific or metaphysical. Considered in themselves, the problems that are preserved in metaphysics (though in a perverted form), as well as the results of scientific inquiry bear elements of cultural growth. While it is true that mankind has benefited from empiricism because the latter put forward the demand that statements must be legitimated by the intellect, it must also be borne

Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, tr. by J. B. Baillai (London, 1910), I.

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in mind that a great many of the writings of the metaphysicians contain a more profound insight into reality than can be found in the works of special sciences, no matter how well the latter are adapted to the needs of the present. True, metaphysics and science cannot be regarded as two similar branches of knowledge. Bergson, who thought they could, was wrong. Science is largely a critique of metaphysics. Logical positivism, however, stigmatizes as metaphysics all thought which attempts to clarify these relations and all theories that take critical account of the special sciences. It is true that the responsibility for prevailing conditions is shared by metaphysicians because they have glorified those conditions and have evolved an absurd mode of speech; in the new scientivism, however, man becomes completely dumb and only science speaks out. Owing to their median position in society the positivists see their enemies on both sides. They are opposed to thought, whether it tend forward with reason, or backward with metaphysics. The defense of science against theology by means of epistemological and logical argument was a progressive movement in the seventeenth century. Philosophers made themselves champions of one aspect of the new mode of social life. In our time, however, when this social form has long changed its meaning for mankind, it would be evidence of a most naïve interpretation of the historical situation to hold that the only legitimate intellectual pursuit is to cultivate the special knowledge that belongs to that social form and its mode of production and that everything that oversteps these limits is, on principle, theology or some other transcendental belief, crass reaction and absurdity, to insist, in other words, that the force of the antithesis has not been shifted and that the issue is still science versus metaphysics, and metaphysics versus science. The knowledge brought to light by science is used to perpetuate the social mechanism; on the other hand, it is also mobilized for its overthrow. The contradictory patterns into which it thus enters have long dominated the intellectual atmosphere. Science and metaphysics have been brought together unwittingly. The thought or theory that is committed to a happier future, and not to the existing world and its indicated forms of experience, must nevertheless arise from this existing world. This kind of thought has naturally become rare in the present period of defeat and deflation; its rarity is identical with the disillusionment prevailing everywhere. In spite of this important fact the empiricists, even the most progressive among them, will recognize only one hostile force against which they direct their struggle. Hopelessly confusing the fronts, they stigmatize everyone as metaphysician or poet, no matter whether he turns things into their opposites or calls a spade a spade. A philosophy that confuses logic with logistic and reason with physics must of necessity misjudge the poet. The poet’s aim need not always be poetry, it may be truth. It can easily happen

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that poetry, keeping meticulously within its limits, as positivism expects knowledge to do, will be struck dumb at the horror of this age, just as science is. Metaphysics may well be proud of the newest attack against it; it has been identified with thought.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Philosophy and Critical Theory” Herbert Marcuse

“Philosophy and Critical Theory” appeared in Volume VI, Number 3 of Zeitschrift fur Sozial-forschung in 1937, along with Horkheimer’s “Postscript” to “Traditional and Critical Theory.” (“Traditional and Critical Theory,” which Marcuse cites, was published in Number 2.) The term “philosophy” applies to Hegel, as well as to what Marcuse considers to be idealism more generally, but the overt reference here is to Kant. Kant had it that as empirical entities we are, at a minimum, constrained by a transcendentally imposed rubric of causal necessitation, which applies to all phenomenal objects. (We may be further constrained by socio-political relations of domination.) However, in virtue of being what Kant called “noumenal” or “transcendental” selves, and not just empirical ones, we are able to enact moral law, in addition to being subject to causal law. Moral law is nothing other than the very idea of pure practical reason, according to Kant. Insofar as we act out of duty rather than inclination, in accordance with the concept of pure practical reason, we act autonomously, or freely. It follows that from a Kantian perspective it is possible to be free regardless of one’s external circumstances. The question given by the title of the article, then, is what is the relationship between critical theory and this account of things? On the one hand, says Marcuse, critical theory is not a flat-out rejection of “philosophy.” First, Kant’s assessment is correct, socio-historically. The empirical realm is not presently governed by reason, and empirical subjects are not presently free. Therefore, to the extent that “philosophers” set reason over and above empirical reality, they preserve something of reason’s critical function. Rationality so placed really does provide a counter-factual anchor, vis-à-vis existing conditions. According it such a role is something that critical theory shares with “philosophy,” along with a concern for freedom. (Note that reason cannot perform a properly critical function in the context of

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logical positivism or of pragmatism because the proponents of such views identify reason with the “bad facticity” of the present. This is the point that Horkheimer makes so emphatically in “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” but also in “Traditional and Critical Theory” and in “Means and Ends.”) In this respect, “philosophy” is not mere ideology -- though it is that too. Rather, it is a kind of conceptual safe-box, an abstract repository for the real but asyet unrealized human potential for collective rational self-determination, the potential that grounds the claim that we are capable of materially embodied freedom, even if we haven’t achieved it yet. Further, even as ideology, i.e. as the false idea that autonomy is necessarily transcendental rather than empirical, “philosophy” indirectly highlights the coercive and non-rational character of our current circumstances. On the other hand, while “philosophy” is a form of critical reasoning, its adherents have “made peace with man’s determination by economic conditions,” as Marcuse puts it, precisely in virtue of relegating autonomy to the realm of the transcendental. Unlike critical theory, “philosophy” thereby accommodates the very “false materialism of bourgeois practice” in relation to which it is also a protest. For the critical theorist, by contrast, if freedom and rational self-determination do not obtain concretely, they do not obtain at all. There is no parallel non-material arena in which they do. This said, the Kantian has not simply made a philosophical error. The ontological bifurcation of transcendental idealism is false, but the separation of empirical and transcendental freedom is a real feature of history. As such, Kantian dualism is not a problem with a philosophical solution. Marcuse adds that freedom, for idealists, turns out to be “the freedom of interminable, arduous labor” (this because reason is assigned a task that it cannot complete, given how it is conceived by idealists), rather than “the freedom of pleasurable possession with which the Aristotelian God moved in his own happiness.” Critical theory thus differs from “philosophy” in that its proponents treat freedom and rationality as socio-historical potentialities of the material world (given the powers of human beings for self-conscious collective activity), the actualization of which is not a foregone conclusion, rather than as necessary features of a non-material world. Critical theory differs from the sociology of knowledge and from economism, too. Unlike sociologists of knowledge, critical theorists do not simply reduce transcendental idealism (or any other form of philosophy) to the subject position of the bourgeoisie. Marcuse writes, “When critical theory comes to terms with philosophy, it is interested in the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems. It presupposes that they really contain truth. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths of previous philosophy.” Unlike economistic thinkers, critical theorists regard sociological determination by economic forces as a historically specific phenomenon, an essential feature of capitalism only.

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Both announce “obstinacy” to be the epistemic virtue of the critical theorist, and both invoke the term “fantasy” or “phantasy” to describe the operation involved in thinking beyond the given. One difference between the two formulations, if only of emphasis, is that Marcuse deepens Horkheimer’s talk of tracking dynamic socio-historical processes (which one might be tempted to think of as merely being attentive to change) to include pointed reference to the “tendencies” of sociological phenomena, and the as-yet thwarted “potentialities” of human beings. Such language makes it clear that critical theory is a philosophy of social science that ought to be of interest to contemporary analytic philosophers who defend the existence of real causal powers, as well as to proponents of Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” and to critical realists. Marcuse’s positive account of critical theory is similar to Horkheimer’s. Both see critical theory as an attempt to grasp the contours of an attainable future in the dynamics of the present. And both think that such an effort can help to bring about the existence of the future in question. Neither thinks that there can be a blueprint for a future characterized by genuine selfdetermination; indeed, it is in that nature of the case that there cannot be. Both announce “obstinacy” to be the epistemic virtue of the critical theorist, and both invoke the term “fantasy” or “phantasy” to describe the operation involved in thinking beyond the given. One difference between the two formulations, if only of emphasis, is that Marcuse deepens Horkheimer’s talk of tracking dynamic socio-historical processes (which one might be tempted to think of as merely being attentive to change) to include pointed reference to the “tendencies” of sociological phenomena, and to the as-yet thwarted “potentialities” of human beings. Such langugae makes it clear that critical theory is a philosophy of social science that ought to be of interest to those who defend the existence of real causal powers, as well as to proponents of Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach.”

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“Philosophy and Critical Theory” From the beginning the critical theory of society was constantly involved in philosophical as well as social issues and controversies. At the time of its origin, in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century, philosophy was the most advanced form of consciousness, and by comparison real conditions in Germany were backward. Criticism of the established order there began as a critique of that consciousness, because otherwise it would have confronted its object at an earlier and less advanced historical stage than that which had already attained reality in countries outside Germany. Once critical theory had recognized the responsibility of economic conditions for the totality of the established world and comprehended the social framework in which reality was organized, philosophy became superfluous as an independent scientific discipline dealing with the structure of reality. Furthermore, problems bearing on the potentialities of man and of reason could now be approached from the standpoint of economics Philosophy thus appears within the economic concepts of materialist theory, each of which is more than an economic concept of the sort employed by the academic discipline of economics. It is more due to the theory’s claim to explain the totality of man and his world in terms of his social being. Yet it would be false on that account to reduce these concepts to philosophical ones. To the contrary, the philosophical contents relevant to the theory are to be educed from the economic structure. They refer to conditions that, when forgotten, threaten the theory as a whole. In the conviction of its founders the critical theory of society is essentially linked with materialism. This does not mean that it thereby sets itself up as a philosophical system in opposition to other philosophical systems. The theory of society is an economic, not a philosophical, system. There are two basic elements linking materialism to correct social theory: concern with human happiness, and the conviction that it can be attained only through a transformation of the material conditions of existence. The actual course of the transformation and the fundamental measures to be taken in order to arrive at a rational organization of society are prescribed by analysis of economic and political conditions in the given historical situation. The subsequent construction of the new society cannot be the object of theory, for it is to occur as the free creation of the liberated individuals. When reason has been realized as the rational organization of mankind, philosophy is left without an object. For philosophy, to the extent that it has been, up to the present, more than an occupation or a discipline within the given division of labor, has drawn its life from reason’s not yet being reality. Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny. Philosophy

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wanted to discover the ultimate and most general grounds of Being. Under the name of reason it conceived the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled. Connected with this idea was the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but must rather be brought to reason. Reason represents the highest potentiality of man and of existence; the two belong together. For when reason is accorded the status of substance, this means that at its highest level, as authentic reality, the world no longer stands opposed to the rational thought of men as mere material objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit). Rather, it is now comprehended by thought and defined as a concept (Begriff). That is, the external, antithetical character of material objectivity is overcome in a process through which the identity of subject and object is established as the rational, conceptual structure that is common to both. In its structure the world is considered accessible to reason, dependent on it, and dominated by it. In this form philosophy is idealism; it subsumes being under thought. But through this first thesis that made philosophy into rationalism and idealism it became critical philosophy as well. As the given world was bound up with rational thought and, indeed, ontologically dependent on it, all that contradicted reason or was not rational was posited as something that had to be overcome. Reason was established as a critical tribunal. In the philosophy of the bourgeois era reason took on the form of rational subjectivity. Man, the individual, was to examine and judge everything given by means of the power of his knowledge. Thus the concept of reason contains the concept of freedom as well. For such examination and judgment would be meaningless if man were not free to act in accordance with his insight and to bring what confronts him into accordance with reason. Philosophy teaches us that all properties of mind subsist only through freedom, that all are only means for freedom, and that all seek and produce only freedom. To speculative philosophy belongs the knowledge that freedom is that alone which is true of mind.1 Hegel was only drawing a conclusion from the entire philosophical tradition when he identified reason and freedom. Freedom is the “formal element” of rationality, the only form in which reason can be.2 With the concept of reason as freedom, philosophy seems to reach its limit. What remains outstanding to the realization of reason is not a philosophical task. Hegel saw the history of philosophy as having reached its definitive conclusion at this point. However, this meant for mankind not a better future but the bad present that this condition perpetuates. Kant had, of course, written essays on universal history with cosmopolitan Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosphie der Geschichte in Werke, 2nd edn (Berlin 1840–7), IX, p. 22. 2 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosphie der Geschichte in Werke, XIII, p. 34. 1

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intent, and on perpetual peace. But his transcendental philosophy aroused the belief that the realization of reason through factual transformation was unnecessary, since individuals could become rational and free within the established order. In its basic concepts this philosophy fell prey to the order of the bourgeois epoch. In a world without reason, reason is only the semblance of rationality; in a state of general unfreedom, freedom is only a semblance of being free. This semblance is generated by the internalization of idealism. Reason and freedom become tasks that the individual is to fulfill within himself, and he can do so regardless of external conditions. Freedom does not contradict necessity, but, to the contrary, necessarily presu­pposes it. Only he is free who recognizes the necessary as necessary, thereby overcoming its mere necessity and elevating it to the sphere of reason. This is equivalent to asserting that a person born crippled, who cannot be cured at the given state of medical science, overcomes this necessity when he gives reason and freedom scope within his crippled existence, i.e. if from the start he always posits his needs, goals, and actions only as the needs, goals, and actions of a cripple. Idealist rationalism canceled the given antithesis of freedom and necessity so that freedom can never trespass upon necessity. Rather, it modestly sets up house within necessity. Hegel once said that his suspension of necessity “transfigures necessity into freedom.”3 Freedom, however, can be the truth of necessity only when necessity is already true “in itself.” Idealist rationalism’s attachment to the status quo is distinguished by its particular conception of the relation of freedom and necessity. This attachment is the price it had to pay for the truth of its knowledge. It is already given in the orientation of the subject of idealist philosophy. This subject is rational only insofar as it is entirely self-sufficient. All that is “other “ is alien and external to this subject and as such primarily suspect. For something to be true, it must be certain. For it to be certain, it must be posited by the subject as its own achievement. This holds equally for the fundamentum inconcussum of Descartes and the synthetic a priori judgments of Kant. Self-sufficiency and independence of all that is other and alien is the sole guarantee of the subject’s freedom. What is not dependent on any other person or thing, what possesses itself, is free. Having excludes the other. Relating to the other in such a way that the subject really reaches and is united with it (or him) counts as loss and dependence. When Hegel ascribed to reason, as authentic reality, movement that “remains within itself,” he could invoke Aristotle. From the beginning, philosophy was sure that the highest mode of being was being-within-itself (Beisichselbstsein). This identity in the determination of authentic reality points to a deeper identity, property. Something is authentic when it is self-reliant, can preserve itself, and is not dependent on anything else. For idealism

Hegel, Enzyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, par. 158, op. cit., VI, p. 310.

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this sort of being is attained when the subject has the world so that it cannot be deprived of it, that it disposes of it omnipresently, and that it appropriates it to the extent that in all otherness the subject is only with itself. However, the freedom attained by Descartes’ ego cogito, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s transcendental ego, Fichte’s subject of original activity, and Hegel’s world-spirit is not the freedom of pleasurable possession with which the Aristotelian God moved in his own happiness. It is rather the freedom of interminable, arduous labor. In the form that it assumed as authentic Being in modern philosophy, reason has to produce itself and its reality continuously in recalcitrant material. It exists only in this process. What reason is to accomplish is neither more nor less than the constitution of the world for the ego. Reason is supposed to create the universality and community in which the rational subject participates with other rational subjects. It is the basis of the possibility that, beyond the encounter of merely self-sufficient monads, a common life develops in a common world. But even this achievement does not lead beyond what already exists. It changes nothing. For the constitution of the world has always been effected prior to the actual action of the individual; thus he can never take his most authentic achievement into his own hands. The same characteristic agitation, which fears really taking what is and making something else out of it, prevails in all aspects of this rationalism. Development is proclaimed, but true development is “not a transformation, or becoming something else.”4 For at its conclusion it arrives at nothing that did not already exist “in itself” at the beginning. The absence of concrete development appeared to this philosophy as the greatest benefit. Precisely at its maturest stage, the inner statics of all its apparently so dynamic concepts become manifest. Undoubtedly all these characteristics make idealist rationalism a bourgeois philosophy. And yet, merely on account of the single concept of reason, it is more than ideology, and in devoting oneself to it one does more than struggle against ideology. The concept of ideology has meaning only when oriented to the interest of theory in the transformation of the social structure. Neither a sociological nor a philosophical but rather a political concept, it considers a doctrine in relation not to the social conditions of its truth or to an absolute truth but rather to the interests of transformation.5 Countless philosophical doctrines are mere ideology and, as illusions about socially relevant factors, readily integrate themselves into the general apparatus of domination. Idealist rationalism does not belong to this class, precisely to the extent that it is really idealistic. The conception of the domination of Being by reason is, after all, not only a postulate of idealism. With a sure instinct, the authoritarian state has fought classical idealism. Rationalism 4 5

Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosphie, op. cit., p. 41. See Max Horkheimer, “Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?” Grünbergs Archiv, XV (1930), pp. 38–9.

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saw into important features of bourgeois society: the abstract ego, abstract reason, abstract freedom. To that extent it is correct consciousness. Pure reason was conceived as reason “independent” of all experience. The empirical world appears to make reason dependent; it manifests itself to reason with the character of “foreignness” (Fremdartigkeit).6 Limiting reason to “pure” theoretical and practical achievement implies an avowal of bad facticity –– but also concern with the right of the individual, with that in him which is more than “economic man,” with what is left out of universal social exchange. Idealism tries to keep at least thought in a state of purity. It plays the peculiar double role of opposing both the true materialism of critical social theory and the false materialism of bourgeois practice. In idealism the individual protests the world by making both himself and the world free and rational in the realm of thought. This philosophy is in an essential sense individualistic. However, it comprehends the individual’s uniqueness in terms of his self-sufficiency and “property”; all attempts to use the subject, construed in this sense, as the basis for constructing an intersubjective world have a dubious character. The alter ego always could be linked to the ego only in an abstract manner: it remained a problem of pure knowledge or pure ethics. Idealism’s purity, too, is equivocal. To be sure, the highest truths of theoretical and of practical reason were to be pure and not based on facticity. But this purity could be saved only on the condition that facticity be left in impurity; the individual is surrendered to its untruth. Nevertheless, concern for the individual long kept idealism from giving its blessing to the sacrifice of the individual to the service of false collectives. Rationalism’s protest and critique remain idealistic and do not extend to the material conditions of existence. Hegel termed philosophy’s abiding in the world of thought an “essential determination.” Although philosophy reconciles antitheses in reason, it provides a “reconciliation not in reality, but in the world of ideas.”7 The materialist protest and materialist critique originated in the struggle of oppressed groups for better living conditions and remain permanently associated with the actual process of this struggle. Western philosophy had established reason as authentic reality. In the bourgeois epoch the reality of reason became the task that the free individual was to fulfill. The subject was the locus of reason and the source of the process by which objectivity was to become rational. The material conditions of life, however, allotted freedom to reason only in pure thought and pure will. But a social situation has come about in which the realization of reason no longer needs to be restricted to pure thought and will. If reason means shaping life according to men’s free decision on the basis of their Kant, Nachlass Nr. 4728 in Gesammelte Schriften, Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. (Berlin 1900–55), XVIII. 7 Hegel, Vorleungen über die Philosphie, op. cit., p. 67. 6

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knowledge, then the demand for reason henceforth means the creation of a social organization in which individuals can collectively regulate their lives in accordance with their needs. With the realization of reason in such a society, philosophy would disappear. It was the task of social theory to demonstrate this possibility and lay the foundation for a transformation of the economic structure. By so doing, it could provide theoretical leadership for those strata which, by virtue of their historical situation, were to bring about the change. The interest of philosophy, concern with man, had found its new form in the interest of critical social theory. There is no philosophy alongside and outside this theory. For the philosophical construction of reason is replaced by the creation of a rational society. The philosophical ideals of a better world and of true Being are incorporated into the practical aim of struggling mankind, where they take on a human form. What, however, if the development outlined by the theory does not occur? What if the forces that were to bring about the transformation are suppressed and appear to be defeated? Little as the theory’s truth is thereby contradicted, it nevertheless appears then in a new light which illuminates new aspects and elements of its object. The new situation gives a new import to many demands and indices of the theory, whose changed function accords it in a more intensive sense the character of “critical theory.”8 Its critique is also directed at the avoidance of its full economic and political demands by many who invoke it. This situation compels theory anew to a sharper emphasis on its concern with the potentialities of man and with the individual’s freedom, happiness, and rights contained in all of its analyses. For the theory, these are exclusively potentialities of the concrete social situation. They become relevant only as economic and political questions and as such bear on human relations in the productive process, the distribution of the product of social labor, and men’s active participation in the economic and political administration of the whole. The more elements of the theory become reality –– not only as the old order’s evolution confirms the theory’s predictions, but as the transition to the new order begins –– the more urgent becomes the question of what the theory intended as its goal. For here, unlike in philosophical systems, human freedom is no phantom or arbitrary inwardness that leaves everything in the external world as it was. Rather, freedom here means a real potentiality, a social relationship on whose realization human destiny depends. At the given stage of development, the constructive character of critical theory emerges anew. From the beginning it did more than simply register and systematize facts. Its impulse came from the force with which it spoke against the facts and confronted bad facticity with its better potentialities. Like philosophy, it opposes making reality into a See Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” Zietschrift für Sozialforschung, VI (1937), p. 245.

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criterion in the manner of complacent positivism. But unlike philosophy, it always derives its goals only from present tendencies of the social process. Therefore it has no fear of the utopia that the new order is denounced as being. When truth cannot be realized within the established social order, it always appears to the latter as mere utopia. This transcendence speaks not against, but for, its truth. The utopian element was long the only progressive element in philosophy, as in the constructions of the best state and the highest pleasure, of perfect happiness and perpetual peace. The obstinacy that comes from adhering to truth against all appearances has given way in contemporary philosophy to whimsy and uninhibited opportunism. Critical theory preserves obstinacy as a genuine quality of philosophical thought. The current situation emphasizes this quality. The reverse suffered by the progressive forces took place at a stage where the economic conditions for transformation were present. The new social situation expressed in the authoritarian state could be easily comprehended and predicted by means of the concepts worked out by the theory. It was not the failure of economic concepts that provided the impetus behind the new emphasis of the theory’s claim that the transformation of economic conditions involves the transformation of the entirety of human existence. This claim is directed rather against a distorted interpretation and application of economics that is found in both practice and theoretical discussion. The discussion leads back to the question: In what way is the theory more than economics? From the beginning the critique of political economy established the difference by criticizing the entirely of social existence. In a society whose totality was determined by economic relations to the extent that the uncontrolled economy controlled all human relations, even the noneconomic was contained in the economy. It appears that, if and when this control is removed, the rational organization of society toward which critical theory is oriented is more than a new form of economic regulation. The difference lies in the decisive factor, precisely the one that makes the society rational –– the subordination of the economy to the individuals’ needs. The transformation of society eliminates the original relation of substructure and superstructure. In a rational reality, the labor process should not determine the general existence of men; to the contrary, their needs should determine the labor process. Not that the labor process is regulated in accordance with a plan, but the interest determining the regulation becomes important: it is rational only if this interest is that of the freedom and happiness of the masses. Neglect of this element despoils the theory of one of its essential characteristics. It eradicates from the image of liberated mankind the idea of happiness that was to distinguish it from all previous mankind. Without freedom and happiness in the social relations of men, even the greatest increase of production and the abolition of private property in the means of production remain infected with the old injustice.

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Critical theory has, of course, distinguished between various phases of realization and pointed out the unfreedoms and inequalities with which the new era inevitably will be burdened. Nevertheless, the transformed social existence must be determined by its ultimate goal even at its inception. In its concept of an ultimate goal, critical theory did not intend to replace the theological hereafter with a social one –– with an ideal that appears in the new order as just another hereafter in virtue of its exclusive opposition to the beginning and its telescoping distance. By defending the endangered and victimized potentialities of man against cowardice and betrayal, critical theory is not to be supplemented by a philosophy. It only makes explicit what was always the foundation of its categories: the demand that through the abolition of previously existing material conditions of existence the totality of human relations be liberated. If critical theory, amidst today’s desperation, indicates that the reality it intends must comprise the freedom and happiness of individuals, it is only following the direction given by its economic concepts. They are constructive concepts, which comprehend not only the given reality but, simultaneously, its abolition and the new reality that is to follow. In the theoretical reconstruction of the social process, the critique of current conditions and the analysis of their tendencies necessarily include future-oriented components. The transformation toward which this process tends and the existence that liberated mankind is to create for itself determine at the outset the establishment and unfolding of the first economic categories. Theory can invoke no facts in confirmation of the theoretical elements that point toward future freedom. From the viewpoint of theory all that is already attained is given only as something threatened and in the process of disappearing; the given is a positive fact, an element of the coming society, only when it is taken into the theoretical construction as something to be transformed. This construction is neither a supplement to nor an extension of economics. It is economics itself insofar as it deals with contents that transcend the realm of established economic conditions. Unconditional adherence to its goal, which can be attained only in social struggle, lets theory continually confront the already attained with the not yet attained and newly threatened. The theory’s interest in great philosophy is part of the same context of opposition to the established order. But critical theory is not concerned with the realization of ideals brought into social struggles from outside. In these struggles it identifies on one side the cause of freedom and on the other the cause of suppression and barbarism. If the latter seems to win in reality, it might easily appear as though critical theory were holding up a philosophical idea against factual development and its scientific analysis. Traditional science was in fact more subject to the powers that be than was great philosophy. It was not in science but in philosophy that traditional theory developed concepts oriented to the potentialities of man lying beyond his factual status. At the end of the

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Critique of Pure Reason, Kant cites the three questions in which “all the interest” of human reason “coalesces”: What can I know?; What should I do?; What may I hope?9 And in the introduction to his lectures on logic, he adds a fourth question encompassing the first three: What is man?10 The answer to this question is conceived not as the description of human nature as it is actually found to be, but rather as the demonstration of what are found to be human potentialities. In the bourgeois period, philosophy distorted the meaning of both question and answers by equating human potentialities with those that are real within the established order. That is what they could be potentialities only of pure knowledge and pure will. The transformation of a given status is not, of course, the business of philosophy. The philosopher can only participate in social struggles insofar as he is not a professional philosopher. This “division of labor,” too, results from the modern separation of the mental from the material means of production, and philosophy cannot overcome it. The abstract character of philosophical work in the past and present is rooted in the social conditions of existence. Adhering to the abstractness of philosophy is more appropriate to circumstances and closer to truth than is the pseudophilosophical concreteness that condescends to social struggles. What is true in philosophical concepts was arrived at by abstracting from the concrete status of man and is true only in such abstraction. Reason, mind, morality, knowledge, and happiness are not only categories of bourgeois philosophy, but concerns of mankind. As such they must be preserved, if not derived anew. When critical theory examines the philosophical doctrines in which it was still possible to speak of man, it deals first with the camouflage and misinterpretation that characterized the discussion of man in the bourgeois period. With this intention, several fundamental concepts of philosophy have been discussed in this journal [Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung]: truth and verification, rationalism and irrationalism, the role of logic, metaphysics and positivism, and the concept of essence. These were not merely analyzed sociologically, in order to correlate philosophical dogmas with social loci. Nor were specific philosophical contents “resolved” into social facts. To the extent that philosophy is more than ideology, every such attempt must come to nought. When critical theory comes to terms with philosophy, it is interested in the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems. It presupposes that they really contain truth. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths of previous philosophy. To be sure, even the highest philosophical categories are connected with social facts, even if only with the most general fact that the struggle of man with nature has not been undertaken Kant, Werke, Ernst Cassirer, ed. (Berlin, 1911ff.), III, p. 540. Ibid., VIII, p. 344.

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by mankind as a free subject but instead has taken place only in class society. This fact comes to expression in many “ontological differences” established by philosophy Its traces can perhaps be found even in the very forms of conceptual thought: for example, in the determination of logic as essentially the logic of predication, or judgments about given objects of which predicates are variously asserted or denied. It was dialectical logic that first pointed out the shortcomings of this interpretation of judgment: the “contingency” of predication and the “externality” of the process of judgment, which let the subject of judgment appear “outside” as selfsubsistent and the predicate “inside” as though in our heads.11 Moreover, it is certainly true that many philosophical concepts are mere “foggy ideas” arising out of the domination of existence by an uncontrolled economy and, accordingly, are to be explained precisely by the material conditions of life. But in its historical forms philosophy also contains insights into human and objective conditions whose truth points beyond previous society and thus cannot be completely reduced to it. Here belong not only the contents dealt with under such concepts as reason, mind, freedom, morality, universality, and essence, but also important achievements of epistemology, psychology, and logic. Their truth content, which surmounts their social conditioning, presupposes not an eternal consciousness that transcendentally constitutes the individual consciousness of historical subjects but only those particular historical subjects whose consciousness expresses itself in critical theory. It is only with and for this consciousness that the “surpassing” content becomes visible in its real truth. The truth that it recognizes in philosophy is not reducible to existing social conditions. This would be the case only in a form of existence where consciousness is no longer separated from being, enabling the rationality of thought to proceed from the rationality of social existence. Until then truth that is more than the truth of what is can be attained and intended only in opposition to established social relations. To this negative condition, at least, it is subject. In the past, social relations concealed the meaning of truth. They formed a horizon of untruth that deprived the truth of its meaning. An example is the concept of universal consciousness, which preoccupied German Idealism. It contains the problem of the relation of the subject to the totality of society: How can universality as community (Allgemeinheit), become the subject without abolishing individuality? The understanding that more than an epistemological or metaphysical problem is at issue here can be gained and evaluated only outside the limits of bourgeois thought. The philosophical solutions met with by the problem are to be found in the history of philosophy. No sociological analysis is necessary in order to understand Kant’s theory of transcendental synthesis. It embodies an epistemological

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truth. The interpretation given to the Kantian position by critical theory12 does not affect the internal philosophical difficulty. By connecting the problem of the universality of knowledge with that of society as a universal subject, it does not purport to provide a better philosophical solution. Critical theory means to show only the specific social conditions at the root of philosophy’s inability to pose the problem in a more comprehensive way, and to indicate that any other solution lay beyond that philosophy’s boundaries. The untruth inherent in all transcendental treatment of the problem thus comes into philosophy “from outside”; hence it can be overcome only outside philosophy. “Outside” does not mean that social factors affect consciousness from without as though the latter existed independently. It refers rather to a division within the social whole. Consciousness is “externally” conditioned by social existence to the very extent that in bourgeois society the social conditions of the individual are eternal to him and, as it were, overwhelm him from without. This externality made possible the abstract freedom of the thinking subject. Consequently, only its abolition would enable abstract freedom to disappear as part of the general transformation of the relationship between social being and consciousness. If the theory’s fundamental conception of the relation of social existence to consciousness is to be followed, this “outside” must be taken into consideration. In previous history there has been no pre-established harmony between correct thought and social being. In the bourgeois period, economic conditions determine philosophical thought insofar as it is the emancipated, self-reliant individual who thinks. In reality, he counts not in the concretion of his potentialities and needs but only in abstraction from his individuality, as the bearer of labor power, i.e. of useful functions in the process of the realization of capital. Correspondingly, he appears in philosophy only as an abstract subject, abstracted from his full humanity. If he pursues the idea of man, he must think in opposition to facticity. Wishing to conceive this idea in its philosophical purity and universality, he must abstract from the present state of affairs. This abstractness, this radical withdrawal from the given, at least clears a path along which the individual in the bourgeois society can seek the truth and adhere to what is known. Beside concreteness and facticity, the thinking subject also leaves its misery “outside.” But it cannot escape from itself, for it has incorporated the monadic isolation of the bourgeois individual into its premises. The subject thinks within a horizon of untruth that bars the door to real emancipation. This horizon explains some of the characteristic features of bourgeois philosophy. One of them affects the idea of truth itself and would seem to relativize “sociologically” all its truths from the start: the coupling of truth and certainty. As such, this connection goes all the way back to ancient

See Zietschrift für Sozialforschung, VI (1937), pp. 257ff.

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philosophy. But only in the modern period has it taken on the typical form that truth must prove itself as the guaranteed property of the individual, and that this proof is considered established only if the individual can continually reproduce the truth as his own achievement. The process of knowledge is never terminated, because in every act of cognition the individual must once again re-enact the “production of the world” and the categorical organization of experience. However, the process never gets any further because the restriction of “productive” cognition to the transcendental sphere makes any new form of the world impossible. The constitution of the world occurs behind the backs of the individuals: yet it is their work. The corresponding social factors are clear. The progressive aspects of this construction of the world, namely the foundation of knowledge on the autonomy of the individual and the idea of cognition as an act and task to be continually re-enacted, are made ineffective by the life process of bourgeois society. But does this sociological limitation affect the true content of the construction, the essential connection of knowledge, freedom, and practice? Bourgeois society’s domination reveals itself not only in the dependence of thought but also in the (abstract) independence of its contents. For this society determines consciousness such that the latter’s activity and contents survive in the dimension of abstract reason; abstractness saves its truth. What is true is so only to the extent that it is not the truth about social reality. And just because it is not the latter, because it transcends this reality, it can become a matter for critical theory. Sociology that is interested only in the dependent and limited nature of consciousness has nothing to do with truth. Its research, useful in many ways, falsifies the interest and the goal of critical theory. In any case, what was linked, in past knowledge, to specific social structures disappears with them. In contrast, critical theory concerns itself with preventing the loss of the truths which past knowledge labored to attain. This is not to assert the existence of eternal truths unfolding in changing historical forms of which they need only to be divested in order for their kernel of truth to be revealed. If reason, freedom, knowledge, and happiness really are transformed from abstract concepts into reality, then they will have as much and as little in common with their previous forms as the association of free men with competitive, commodity-producing society. Of course, to the identity of the basic social structure in previous history certainly corresponds an identity of certain universal truths, whose universal character is an essential component of their truth content. The struggle of authoritarian ideology against abstract universals has clearly exhibited this. That man is a rational being, that this being requires freedom, and that happiness is his highest good are all universal propositions whose progressive impetus derives precisely from their universality. Universality gives them an almost revolutionary character, for they claim

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that all, and not merely this or that particular person, should be rational, free, and happy. In a society whose reality gives the lie to all these universals, philosophy cannot make them concrete. Under such conditions, adherence to universality is more important than its philosophical destruction. Critical theory’s interest in the liberation of mankind binds it to certain ancient truths. It is at one with philosophy in maintaining that man can be more than a manipulable subject in the production process of class society. To the extent that philosophy has nevertheless made its peace with man’s determination by economic conditions, it has allied itself with repression. That is the bad materialism that underlies the edifice of idealism: the consolation that in the material world everything is in order as it is. (Even when it has not been the personal conviction of the philosopher, this consolation has arisen almost automatically as part of the mode of thought of bourgeois idealism and constitutes its ultimate affinity with its time.) The other premise of this materialism is that the mind is not to make its demands in this world, but is to orient itself toward another realm that does not conflict with the material world. The materialism of bourgeois practice can quite easily come to terms with this attitude. The bad materialism of philosophy is overcome in the materialist theory of society. The latter opposes not only the production relations that gave rise to bad materialism, but every form of production that dominates man instead of being dominated by him: this idealism underlies its materialism. Its constructive concepts, too, have a residue of abstractness as long as the reality toward which they are directed is not yet given. Here, however, abstractness results not from avoiding the status quo, but from orientation toward the future status of man. It cannot be supplanted by another, correct theory of the established order (as idealist abstractness was replaced by the critique of political economy). It cannot be succeeded by a new theory, but only by rational reality itself. The abyss between rational and present reality cannot be bridged by conceptual thought. In order to retain what is not yet present as a goal in the present, phantasy is required. The essential connection of phantasy with philosophy is evident from the function attributed to it by philosophers, especially Aristotle and Kant, under the title of “imagination.” Owing to its unique capacity to “intuit” an object though the latter be not present and to create something new out of given material of cognition, imagination denotes a considerable degree of independence from the given, of freedom amid a world of unfreedom. In surpassing what is present, it can anticipate the future. It is true that when Kant characterizes this “fundamental faculty of the human soul” as the a priori basis of all knowledge,13 this restriction to the a priori basis diverts

Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, op. cit., p. 625.

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once again from the future to what is always past. Imagination succumbs to the general degradation of phantasy. To free it for the constructing of a more beautiful and happier world remains the prerogative of children and fools. True, in phantasy one can imagine anything. But critical theory does not envision an endless horizon of possibilities. The freedom of imagination disappears to the extent that real freedom becomes a real possibility. The limits of phantasy are thus no longer universal laws of essence (as the last bourgeois theory of knowledge that took seriously the meaning of phantasy so defined them14), but technical limits in the strictest sense. They are prescribed by the level of technological development. What critical theory is engaged in is not the depiction of a future world, although the response of phantasy to such a challenge would not perhaps be quite as absurd as we are led to believe. If phantasy were set free to answer, with precise reference to already existing technical material, the fundamental philosophical questions asked by Kant, all of sociology would be terrified at the utopian character of its answers. And yet the answers that phantasy could provide would be very close to the truth, certainly closer than those yielded by the rigorous conceptual analyses of philosophical anthropology. For it would determine what man is on the basis of what he really can be tomorrow. In replying to the question, “What may I hope?”, it would point less to eternal bliss and inner freedom than to the already possible unfolding and fulfillment of needs and wants. In a situation where such a future is a real possibility, phantasy is an important instrument in the task of continually holding the goal up to view. Phantasy does not related to the other cognitive faculties as illusion to truth (which in fact, when it plumes itself on being the only truth, can perceive the truth of the future only as illusion). Without phantasy, all philosophical knowledge remains in the grip of the present or the past and severed from the future, which is the only link between philosophy and the real history of mankind. Strong emphasis on the role of phantasy seems to contradict the rigorously scientific character that critical theory has always made a criterion of its concepts. This demand for scientific objectivity has brought materialist theory into unusual accord with idealist rationalism. While the latter could pursue its concern with man only in abstraction from given facts, it attempted to undo this abstractness by associating itself with science. Science never seriously called use-value into question. In their anxiety about scientific objectivity, the Neo-Kantians are at one with Kant, as is Husserl with Descartes. How science was applied, whether its utility and product­ ivity guaranteed its higher truth or were instead signs of general inhumanity –– philosophy did not ask itself these questions. It was chiefly interested in the methodology of the sciences. The critical theory of society maintained Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik in Jahrbuch für Philosophie, X (Halle 1929), p. 219.

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primarily that the only task left for philosophy was elaborating the most general results of the sciences. It, too, took as its basis the viewpoint that science had sufficiently demonstrated its ability to serve the development of the productive forces and to open up new potentialities of a richer existence. But while the alliance between idealist philosophy and science was burdened from the beginning with sins engendered by the dependence of the sciences on established relations of domination, the critical theory of society presupposes the disengagement of science from this order. Thus the fateful fetishism of science is avoided here in principle. But this does not dispense the theory from a constant critique of scientific aims and methods which takes into account every new social situation. Scientific objectivity as such is never a sufficient guarantee of truth, especially in a situation where the truth speaks as strongly against the facts and is as well hidden behind them as today. Scientific predictability does not coincide with the futuristic mode in which the truth exists. Even the development of the productive forces and the evolution of technology know no uninterrupted progression from the old to the new society. For here, too, man himself is to determine progress: not “socialist” man, whose spiritual and moral regeneration is supposed to constitute the basis for planning the planners (a view that overlooks that “socialist” planning presupposed the disappearance of the abstract separation both of the subject from his activity and of the subject as universal from each individual subject), but the association of those men who bring about the transformation. Since what is to become of science and technology depends on them, science and technology cannot serve a priori as a conceptual model for critical theory. Critical theory is, last but not least, critical of itself and of the social forces that make up its own basis. The philosophical element in the theory is a form of protest against the new “Economism,” which would isolate the economic struggle and separate the economic from the political sphere. At an early stage, this view was countered with the criticism that the determining factors are the given situation of the entire society, the interrelationships of the various social strata, and relations of political power. The transformation of the economic structure must so reshape the organization of the entire society that, with the abolition of economic antagonisms between groups and individuals, the political sphere becomes to a great extent independent and determines the development of society. With the disappearance of the state, political relations would then become, in a hitherto unknown sense, general human relations: the organization of the administration of social wealth in the interest of liberated mankind. The materialist theory of society is originally a nineteenth-century theory. Representing its relation to rationalism as one of “inheritance,” it conceived this inheritance as it manifested itself in the nineteenth century. Much has changed since then. At that time the theory had comprehended, on the deepest level, the possibility of a coming barbarity, but the latter

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did not appear to be as imminent as the “conservative” abolition of what the nineteenth century represented: conservative of what the culture of bourgeois society, for all its poverty and injustice, had accomplished nonetheless for the development and happiness of the individual. What had already been achieved and what still remained to be done was clear enough. The entire impetus of the theory came from this interest in the individual, and it was not necessary to discuss it philosophically. The situation of inheritance has changed in the meantime. It is not a part of the nineteenth century, but authoritarian barbarity, that now separates the previous reality of reason from the form intended by the theory. More and more, the culture that was to have been abolished recedes into the past. Overlaid by an actuality in which the complete sacrifice of the individual has become a pervasive and almost unquestioned fact of life, that culture has vanished to the point where studying and comprehending it is no longer a matter of spiteful pride, but of sorrow, Critical theory must concern itself to a hitherto unknown extent with the past –– precisely insofar as it is concerned with the future. In a different form, the situation confronting the theory of society in the nineteenth century is being repeated today. Once again real conditions fall beneath the general level of history. Fettering the productive forces and keeping down the standard of life is characteristic of even the economically most developed countries. The reflection cast by the truth of the future in the philosophy of the past provides indications of facts that point beyond today’s anachronistic conditions. Thus critical theory is still linked to these truths. They appear in it as part of a process: that of bringing to consciousness potentialities that have emerged within the maturing historical situation. They are preserved in the economic and political concepts of critical theory. Originally published in German in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VI (1937).

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INDEX

Absolute 170 absolute First 170 Absolute Idea 94 absolutism 55, 61, 66 abstraction 40–1, 173, 175 activity 196, 203, 205 administration 49–50, 52 Adorno, Theodor History and Freedom 99, 165 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 99, 165 Negative Dialectics 150 Problems of Moral Philosophy 99, 165 “affluent society” 51 agathon 120 Altenberg, Peter 105 alter ego 284 America 72 American Constitutional Convention of 1787 17 Analyst 265 antagonism 106 anthropocentrism 156 appearance 118, 137, 140, 146, 239, 245 apperception 169 transcendental 168 Aquinas, Thomas 115, 120 architecture 23 Aristotle 6, 82, 115, 116, 140, 143, 144, 175, 228, 265, 266, 282, 292 art 14, 26, 33, 65 Aschelminthes 220 atomism 234 authority 3, 37 Ayer, A. J. 233

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Bacon, Francis 32, 173 Ballungen 258 barter principle 107–9, 168 beauty 24 Beethoven, Ludwig van Eroica symphony 26 behaviorism 248, 250 social 250 Being 123, 129, 131, 135–6, 140, 143, 160, 166, 168, 169, 170, 281, 283, 285 Benjamin, Walter 104 Bergson, Henri 73, 79, 275 Berkeley, Bishop 13–14, 253, 265 Analyst 265 Bible 86, 265 biology 195, 213, 216, 240, 250 Bismarck, Otto von 38, 43 Bodin, Jean 10 Bonald, Louis Gabriel Ambroise de 90 bourgeois ideology 12 bourgeois theory 118, 121, 127 bourgeois thought 203 bourgeoisie 8, 79, 132, 206, 223, 224, 236, 241, 253, 278 German 38, 42, 43, 44 Bradley, Francis Herbert 268 Brahmanism 89 breakdown 209 Brecht, Bertolt 95 Bruno, Giordano 12 Buddhism 273–4 bureaucracy 44, 48, 50, 209, 255 business 25 calculability 29 Calvinism 13

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Capital 84–5, 117, 185, 220, 229 capital 75, 117, 146, 147, 216, 221 capitalism 37, 38­–54, 56, 57, 79, 117, 215, 223, 270, 278 development 50 industrial 39, 101 liberal 44, 220 monopoly 132, 222 Western 52 capitalist rationality 41–2, 48, 53 capitalist system 194 capitalistic economy 51 capitalists 221 captivity 157 Carnap, Rudolf 241 Catholic Church 13 Catholicism 13, 58 causal laws 238 causality 166, 177 Kant’s concept of 178–80 charisma 43, 49, 50 charismatic domination 49 chorismos 159 Christian Science 273–4 Christianity 86, 88, 120, 143, 152, 232 doctrines 87 church 61 class 209, 258 ruling class 210 class conflicts 50 class organization 205 class society 292 class system 224 cogitative mediation 174 cognition 57, 70–1, 74, 94, 98, 112, 118, 124, 133, 158, 161, 162, 177, 181, 291 commodity 263 commodity economy 220 common sense 92, 94, 211, 257, 267 computers 54 Comte, Auguste 60, 73, 181, 239 conformism 217 Confucianism 89 congruent unity 131 consciousness 128, 129, 150, 153, 155, 168, 170, 171, 173, 178,

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206, 209, 263, 268, 272, 280, 290, 291 reified 156, 158 transcendental 154 conservatism, ideological 9 Constitutional Convention of 1787 17 constellation 111–13 contingency 144 contradiction 103, 107, 109 Copernicanism 192–3 creation 181 critical theory 186, 187–232, 278, 279, 280, 286, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295 society 214–15, 219, 227 critical thinking 203 Critique of Practical Reason 59 Critique of Pure Reason 150, 165, 168, 172, 177, 198, 267–68, 288 cultural conservatism 36 culture 222, 230, 258 Darwin, Charles 173 de l’Hôpital, Michel 10 de l’Isle-Adam, Villiers 95 de Maistre, Joseph 90 Deckungseinheit 131 Declaration of Independence 19 delusion, transcendental 174–6 democracy 3, 50, 54 democratic principle 18 depth psychology 57 Descartes, René 55, 58, 115, 119, 122, 123, 126, 127, 130, 132, 142, 185, 188, 204, 236, 239, 252, 282, 283, 293 Discourse on Method 227 Deus absconditus 13 Dewey, John 4, 34, 56, 72 Dialectic of Enlightenment 177 dialectics 10, 55, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 75, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102–3, 106, 109, 110, 145, 147, 158, 167, 228, 230, 231, 232, 245, 257, 258, 260, 272 historicity 140 identity 107–9

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Index logic 204, 269, 289 negative 108 Platonic 152, 175 theory 135, 136, 139 Dilthey, Wilhelm 142 Ding an sich see thing-in-itself discernment 6 Discourse on Method 227 division of labor 204, 207 doctrines, Christian 87 dogmatism 64, 66, 67, 71, 86, 87, 88 dominance 174 domination 15, 30, 32, 37, 39, 40–1, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47–54, 66, 83, 143–4, 172, 173, 294 Driesch, Hans 60 dualism 218, 278 Durkheim, Émile 162, 190 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The 150 dynamic 234 dynamis 120, 144 dynamism, economic 222–3 Eclipse of Reason 3 economic dynamism 222–3 economic forces 278 economic power 222 economic process 221 economic rationality 48 economics 38, 43, 78, 81, 82, 86, 230, 231, 255, 280, 286, 292, 294 Marxian 147 materialist 85 political 216, 228 Smith, Adam 181–2 theory 147 economism 229, 230, 231, 294 economy 45, 47, 191, 199, 200, 201, 208, 222, 223, 225, 229, 230, 232, 258, 270, 285, 289, 290 bourgeois 61, 205, 214, 198, 219 capitalist 45, 51 commodity 220 free 229 political 81, 215, 223, 229, 286, 292 war 269

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education 90, 137, 256 efficiency 40–1 ego see also I 58, 198, 204, 227, 239, 255, 283, 284 transcendental 149, 283 ego cogito 118, 121, 123, 127–8, 129, 131, 283 ego principle 173 egoity 151 eidetics 119, 131, 132, 134 eidos 119, 126 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The 150 emancipation, proletarian 207 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 25 emotions 8 empiricism 56, 190, 233, 234, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 265, 266, 268, 272, 274 logical 241, 247, 252, 261, 264, 265, 272 methodology 257 empiricists 149 classical 234 Engels, Friedrich 180, 205, 211 Enlightenment 11, 13, 219 enlightenment 36, 104, 178 enterprise 223 entrepreneurs 41 entrepreneurship 147, 222, 223 bourgeois 224 Epicurean materialism 152 Epicureans 228 Epicurus 72, 79 epistemology 121 empiricist 16 equality 21 eros 10 Erscheinungsform 137 essence 115, 116, 117, 118–48, 175, 245, 288, 289 elucidation 129 prehension 128, 129 essentia 120 essentialism 116–17 esthetic response 24

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300 Index

ethical laws 237 ethics 8, 12, 143 Christian 12 Kantian 132, 173–4 ethnology 254 exchange society 53 experience 17, 187, 264 experiment 193 experimentalism 32 exploitation 209

Geist 52 Geistesgewissenschaften 189 geography 273 Germany 22, 36, 38, 43, 60, 77, 87, 240, 254, 280 God concept 70 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 67, 72, 101, 232 gospels 87 Gotha Platform 172

factories 221 factuality 172 fantasy 210, 232, 279, 292, 293 fascism 3, 36, 232 fatalism 76 fate 153 fetish/fetishism 59, 71, 154, 240 science 294 Fichte, J. G. 79, 82, 153, 167, 172, 227, 283 Fitzhugh, George 17–18 force 83 foreignness 284 form 263, 265 form and content 145–6, 262 formal logic 207 formal rationality 37, 45, 46, 53, 54 formal reason 50 Formale und transzendentale Logik 127 formalism 234 France Catholic counterrevolution 90 positivism 73 free economy 229 free exchange 81 free market 19, 44 free will 238 freedom 24, 92, 93, 94, 117, 123, 125, 129, 179–180, 181, 182, 282, 284, 285, 286, 289, 293 Fremdartigkeit 284 French Revolution 182 French symbolists 25

Haeckel, Ernst 87 Hauff, Wilhelm 175–6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 55, 63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 79, 83, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 102, 104, 106, 108, 116, 123, 135–6, 140, 144–5, 153, 156, 158, 161, 162, 168, 169, 171, 173, 175, 198, 199, 207, 253, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 277, 281, 282, 283 absolute idealism 102 Logic 96, 97, 135, 220, 266 Phenomenology of Mind 220, 253, 274 Philosophy of Right 52 System of Philosophy 97 Hegelian 86, 111 Hegelian system 83 Hegelianism 55, 56 Heidegger, Martin 104, 167, 173 hermeneutics 270 historicity 142 history 80, 140, 255 History and Freedom 99, 165, 166 Hobbes, Thomas 27 holy egoism 229 Horkheimer, Max 91, 115, 278, 279 Hugo, Victor 90 human rights 18, 19 human studies 189 humanity 24 Hume, David 14, 58, 126, 161, 166, 179, 233, 240, 242, 253, 265 Husserl, Edmund 115, 118, 126–7, 130, 153, 158, 167, 178, 293 Formale und transzendentale Logik 127

Galileo 232 Gegenständlichkeit 281

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Index Ideen 127 Logische Untersuchungen 126, 189 Huxley, Aldous 36 I see also ego 82, 176 Idea/Ideas 30, 93, 119–120, 124, 125, 270 Absolute 94 idealism 67, 76, 79, 80, 94, 108, 125, 141, 154, 160, 161, 167, 170, 173, 175, 180, 204, 227, 281, 282–3, 284, 292 absolute 102 bourgeois 292 classical 255 German 6, 118, 227, 228, 289 theory of 7 transcendental 278 Ideen 127 identitarian thought 157, 176 identity 93, 102, 106, 109, 218, 245 dialectics 107–9 ideological conservatism 9 ideology 291 bourgeois 12 immediacy 234 imperialism 51 Index Verborum Prohibitorum 270, 274 individualism 36 individuality 36 industrial capitalism 39 industrial production 231 industrial society 26, 46, 48, 51, 54 industrialism 32 industrialization 38­–54 industry 193, 200 Institute of Social Research 91 intellect 35 intelligentsia 211, 212, 213 liberalist 213 International Congress for Scientific Philosophy 241 intuition 18 Islam 89 James, William 4, 27, 29, 30, 33, 56, 60, 72, 74, 248

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Pragmatism 27 Jaurès, Jean 212 Jevons, William Stanley 212 Judaism 89 Junkers 43 justice 21, 137 Kant, Immanuel 27–8, 55, 58, 59, 62, 63, 88, 100, 101, 102, 106, 109, 115, 124, 125, 126, 143, 149, 150, 154, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165–6, 168, 169, 173–4, 177, 181, 182, 187, 197, 198, 227, 236, 266, 267, 277, 281, 282, 283, 288, 290, 292, 293 concept of causality 178–80 Critique of Practical Reason 59 Critique of Pure Reason 150, 177, 198, 267–8, 288 critique of reason 202 ethics 132, 173–4 Metaphysics of Morals 181 Prologema 151 theory of transcendental synthesis 289 Kantian 118, 153, 157, 167, 168, 170 Keller, Gottfried 104 Kierkegaard, Søren 87, 106, 176 knowledge 258 Kraus, Karl 111 labor 107–8, 110, 117, 138–9, 147, 162, 168, 172, 173, 194, 201, 210, 285, 290 division of 204, 207, 288 process 286 scientific 200 landscape 22–3 language 16, 111, 254, 264, 273 metaphysical 273 poetic 95 law and order 11 Law of Value 56, 150, 187 laws of motion 81 Laws of Nature 3 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 179, 240, 247, 254, 283 Lenin, Vladimir 212

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302 Index

lex majoris partis 20 liberalism 14–15, 74, 199, 211, 213, 229, 246 liberalistic capitalism 44 liberty 19, 21 Liefmann, Otto 191, 212 life sciences 185 light of reason 12 Locke, John 3–4, 6, 12, 18, 242 Essay 265 theory of government 18 theory of knowledge 19 logic 78, 81, 82, 83–4, 85, 93, 94, 96, 121, 166, 213, 219, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 270, 272, 275, 288, 289 dialectical 105, 204, 269, 289 empiricist 264, 265 formal 207, 261 formalistic 266 laws 84 traditional 84, 86 transcendental 169 Logic 96, 97, 135, 220, 266 logical positivism 56, 115, 149, 233, 234 logicians, mathematical 268, 274 Logische Untersuchungen 126, 189 logistics 274 logos 2, 7, 23, 135, 143, 194, 195 Lowe, Jonathan 166 lumen naturale 12 lumen supernaturale 12 Luther, Martin 11 luxury 27 Mach, Ernst 73–4, 246, 265, 273, 274 Machiavelli, Niccolò 27 majority principle 20 Mallarmé, Stéphane 95 Marburg school 194 Marcuse, Herbert 5, 55, 56, 99–100, 277, 278, 279 “Concept of the Essence, The” 56 One Dimensional Man 116 Reason and Revolution 91 market 46, 54, 189, 238 market research 34

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Marx, Karl 75, 79, 97, 117, 150, 162, 172, 175, 205, 212, 214, 226 Capital 84–5, 117, 185, 220 Marxism 77, 149, 209 Marxist literature 77 Marxist theory 43 mass culture 25 material objectivity 142 material rationality 45, 53 materialism 67, 70, 77, 79, 85, 86, 91, 156, 227, 229, 244, 280, 284, 292, 294 Epicurean 152 materialist theory 134–5, 137, 141–2, 144, 146, 280 materiality 150, 165 mathematics 16, 68, 188, 190, 236, 241, 243, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266 higher 237 symbols 189 mathematization 40, 45, 47, 61, 78 mediation 178 cognitive 174 medicine 71 metaphysicians 12, 237, 239 metaphysics 13, 14, 26, 58, 61, 73, 78, 79, 81, 86, 88, 92, 118, 133, 143, 197, 219, 220, 233, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 262, 266, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 288 language 273 neoromantic 241 peephole 169–70 rationalist 14 Western 170 Metaphysics of Morals 181 methodology, empiricist 257 Meyer, Eduard 191 middle class 8, 27, 241, 269 Mill, John Stuart 188, 261, 265 misery 66, 77 Mises, Ludwig von 212 Miss-Verhältnis 138 monads 283 Montaigne, Michel de 10, 12 morality 266, 288

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Index Christian 89–90 morals 21 motion, laws of 81 mundus intelligibilis 30 mundus sensibilis 30 music 26 musicology 104 mysticism 75, 76 myth 174 mythology 7, 10, 13, 23, 104 Greek 9 nation 14, 132 national community 15, 229 nationalism 247 natural laws 179 natural light 12 natural privileges 231 natural sciences see science need 148 negation 48, 63, 92, 94, 95, 96, 111, 173 political 96 negative 36, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 178 dialectics 108 Negative Dialectics 150 negativism 66 Neo-Kantianism 158, 194, 254 Neo-Kantians 254, 293 neutrality 80, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich 72, 89, 153 nominalism 162–3 non-I 109 nonidentity 103, 110, 112 Nussbaum, Martha 279 O’Connor, Charles 17 object primacy 155–6, 160 transcendental 149 objective reality 77 objective reason 3, 6, 7, 10, 18, 22 objective truth 10, 12, 22, 23, 30 objectivity 142 material 142, 281 scientific 293, 294 transcendental 126 One Dimensional Man 116

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oppression 219 organism 202 Other 153, 155, 160 Ought 39 ousia 120 ownership 221 Paine, Thomas 19 Parsifal 97 passivity 196 pauperization 209, 229 phantasy see fantasy phenomenalism 157 phenomenality 157 Phenomenology of Mind 220, 253, 274 Philebus 120 Philosophy of Right 52 physical labor 35 physics 194, 197, 213, 217, 236, 242, 243, 245, 251, 255, 258, 260, 264, 272, 273 experimental 187–8 mathematical 188 theoretical 236, 262 Pirandello, Luigi 232 Planck, Max 237 “planned obsolescence” 42 Plato 6, 9, 30, 34, 83, 115, 116, 120, 124, 168, 175, 228 dialectics 175 Philebus 120 Republic 6 Sophist 120 theory of ideas 119–20, 140, 174 Platonic psychology 35 Platonism 7, 162, 265 pleasure 24 plebiscitary 54 pluralism 26 poetic language 95 poetry 95, 275–6 Poincaré, Henri 187 polis 82 political monopolies 54 political scientists 212 politics 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 21, 26, 38, 43, 143, 232, 285 imperialist 43, 44

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304 Index

positivism 5, 14, 15, 55, 74, 105, 119, 132–4, 141, 213, 219, 239, 240, 241, 248, 249, 272, 276, 286, 288 France 73 logical 115, 233, 234, 275 radical 241 social science 234 positivists 193, 239 positivity 106 possibility 145–6 potentia transcendentalis 120 poverty 66 power politics 52 pragmatists 193 pragmatics 73 Pragmatism 27 pragmatism 3, 4, 5, 28–9, 30, 31–5, 55, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79 precisionism 273 predictability 294 private enterprise 46, 48 probability 28, 29, 240 Problems of Moral Philosophy 99, 165, 166 productivity 42, 202, 216 profit 147, 209, 222 progress 80 proletariat 79, 206, 211 emancipation 207 Prologema 151 proof 72, 74, 75, 80 propaganda 256 property 4, 222, 231, 284, 286 psychology 143, 199, 240, 243, 251, 254, 255, 271, 273, 289 behaviorist 247 depth 57 empirical 243 Platonic 35 Pythagoras number theory 7 quantum theory 237 quietism 217 Radbruch, Gustav 191 ratio 7, 104, 143, 156

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rational socialism 48 rational subjectivity 118 rationalism 11, 12, 13, 102, 243, 245, 247, 266, 281, 283–4, 294 idealist 282, 283, 293 rationality 39, 48, 49, 117, 245, 271, 277, 282 capitalist 41–2, 53 economic 48 formal 37, 45, 46, 53, 54 material 4, 53 value-oriented 37 realism 82, 127, 176 reality 80, 92, 93, 94, 135, 145–6, 178, 223, 264, 282, 285–6, 287, 291, 292 objective 77 social 291 realization 93 reason 4, 5–6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 17, 22, 24, 35, 36, 39–41, 54, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 123, 124, 125, 136, 179, 199, 227, 230, 249, 252, 281, 282, 284, 288, 289, 295 critique 121 formal 50 Kantian critique of 202 light of 12 subjective 157 Reason and Revolution 91 recidivism 107 redemption 97 reduction subjective 171–2 transcendental 134 reductionism 156, 157 reflection 6 regulation 54 Reichenbach, Hans 267 Reid, Thomas 19 reification 26, 37, 48, 53, 54, 62, 139, 147, 155, 159, 160 relativism 9, 14, 16, 55, 56, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 142 bourgeois 55 subjective 59 relativity theory 264

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Index religion 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 25, 26, 62, 65, 66, 87, 88, 238, 274 philosophy of 220 sociology of 40 religious belief 3, 253 religious doctrine 11 repression 292 Republic 6 res cogitans 58 revolution, American 14 revolution, French 14 rhetoric 143 Robespierre, Maximilien de 182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19 ruling class 210 Russell, Bertrand 8, 241, 261–2, 266, 267, 269 Sachlichkeit 142 salvation 89 Scheler, Max 77, 78, 115, 118 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 110, 151, 168, 175 Schiller, F. C. S. 60 Schlick, Moritz 269 Schoenberg, Arnold 104 scholasticism 6 Scholastics 127 Schopenhauer, Arthur 153 Schulze, E. 254 science see also individual sciences; life sciences; technology 4, 10, 14, 17, 30, 31, 40, 60, 77, 78, 80, 84, 89, 92, 98, 111, 121, 136–7, 185–6, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 197, 200, 202, 208, 213, 214, 216, 219, 225, 228, 229, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 255, 256, 257, 260, 264, 265, 267, 273, 274, 275, 287, 294 division 188 empirical 271 fetishism 294 unity of 246 scientific method 94, 236 scientific predictions 257 scientific theory 134

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scientific thought bourgeois 219 scientificity 233 scientists 191, 192, 235, 252, 259 social position 208 scientivism 240, 272, 275 Seiende, das 135 self-awareness 202, 211, 218, 225 bourgeois 206 self-consciousness 160, 173 self-determination 50, 82, 117, 217, 278 self-identity 112 self-interest 14–15 self-preservation 5, 38, 211, 214 self-sufficiency 226, 284 sensation 168 servitude 66, 143–4 signification 254 slavery 17–18 Smith, Adam 228 economics 181–2 social action 196 social class 6, 220, 226, 250 social conduct 33 social contract 19 social groups 222 social injustice 229 social life 58, 72, 73, 146 social order 5 social privileges 231 social reality 187 social relations 289 social research 252 social sciences 186, 195, 222, 247, 255, 263 positivist 234 social scientists 259 social strata 211, 214 social structure 73, 117, 201, 206, 251 social theory 136, 260, 280, 284, 285 socialism 37, 38, 46, 294 rational 48 socialization 231 society 8, 25, 29, 32, 41, 47, 62, 71, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 89 bourgeois 90, 122, 195–6, 211, 214, 218, 237, 239, 284, 290,

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306 Index

291, 295, 156, 162, 172, 174, 181, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200–2, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208–9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216–17, 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 240, 245, 251, 258, 280, 293–4 class 292 commodity 239 critical theory 214–15, 219, 227 industrial 46 middle-class 27 sociologists 191 sociology 57, 190, 202, 211, 213, 217, 224, 225, 228, 250, 251, 255, 271, 291 German 189 Sociology for the South 17 sociology of religion 40 Socrates 9, 262 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 171 Sophist 120 Sophists 9 Spencer, Herbert 239 Spengler, F. de 249–50 Spinoza, Baruch 11, 12, 239 spirit 93 spiritualism 76 spleen 25 stasis 234 Stoa 232 Stoics 228 Strauss, Leo 87 stupidity 36 subject, transcendental 149, 151, 153, 154, 161, 172 subject of original activity 283 subjective reason 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 35, 36 subjective reduction 171–2 subjective relativism 59 subjective stupidity 36 subjective thought 85 subjectivism 29, 32, 156, 157 subjectivity 30, 59, 105, 149, 155, 157 rational 118, 281 transcendental 130, 198

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substance 122 substantiveness, compulsory 168–9 suffrage, universal 50 superstition 13 surplus value 209 symbolists, French 25 System of Philosophy 97 technology 52, 53, 89, 93, 200, 205, 209, 216, 221, 294 Telesio, Bernardino 12 theology 11 Christian 143 thing-in-itself 156, 159, 177 Third Antimony 180 thought 92, 93 bourgeois 203 ti en einai 120 tolerance 14 Tolstoi, Leo 87 Tönnies, Ferdinand 190 totalitarianism 231 transcendental/transcendence 127, 136–8, 146, 172–4, 198, 235, 255 transcendental apperception 168 transcendental consciousness 154 transcendental delusion 174–6 transcendental ego 149, 283 transcendental object 149 transcendental objectivity 126 transcendental reduction 134 transcendental subject 149, 151, 153, 154, 161, 172 transcendental subjectivity 130 transcendentalism 157, 247 transcendentality 161 transubstantiation 58 Troeltsch, Ernst 89 truth 10, 47, 80, 86, 103–5, 131, 135, 169, 172, 174, 225, 260, 268, 288, 289, 290, 291 material 58 United States of Ameria, Constitution 20 unity, congruent 131 universal suffrage 50 universality 292

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Index value 202, 258, 263 value judgments 94, 230, 259, 270 value-ethics 132 value-oriented rationality 37 values 139 Veblen, Thorstein 27 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 90 Volksgemeinschaft 15 Volkstum 132 von Kries, Johannes 191 Wagner, Richard Parsifal 97 war economy 269 Weber, A. 190 Weber, Max 38­–54, 191

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Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 39, 43, 44, 51 Weltanschauung 239 Wertethik 132 Wesenerfassung 128 Wesenerklärung 129 will 83, 218 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft 39, 43, 44, 51 wisdom 12 work 202, 203 work process 204 workers 225 world-spirit 285 Zeitschrift für Sozial-forschung 279

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PERMISSIONS

On the Problem of Truth by Max Horkheimer, translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey. Reprinted from Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings © 1993 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press. Subject and Object, translation © Urizen Books 1978 by E.B. Ashton; Zu Subject und Objeckt from Stichworte, Kritische Modelle 2 © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969. All rights reserved by and handled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin Negative Dialectic, translation © The Continuum International Publishing Company; Negative Dialektik © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1966. All rights reserved by and handled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin “Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber,” “The Concept of Essence,” “A Note on Dialectic”, and “Philosophy and Critical Theory” are included herein with permission of the Literary Estate of Herbert Marcuse, Peter Marcuse, Executor, whose permission is required for any further publication. Supplementary material from previously unpublished work of Herbert Marcuse, much now in the Archives of the Goethe University in Frankfurt/ Main, is being published by Routledge Publishers, England, in a six-volume series edited by Douglas Kellner, and in a German series edited by Peter-Erwin Jansen published by zu Klampen Verlag, Germany. All rights to further publication are retained by the Estate. All efforts have been made to secure the required permissions from the appropriate rights holders for the contents of this volume. We are extremely appreciative for the assistance of the scholarly community in helping put this important compilation together. If any oversights have been made, please contact us with any questions.

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