concept to which no corresponding object could be given in sense experience and for which no synthetic a priori judgment, no cognitive claim, might therefore apply. By invoking it, Horkheimer was making clear what he saw as the regulative, counterfactual, even utopian quality of the notion of a unified humankind. As had Kant, he hoped that it might serve as a telos of human practice rather than a description of what was destined to occur.
However, because it spoke in the vaguest terms about humanity, Horkheimer went on, Kant’s model was far too abstract. Steichen’s exhibition happily provided a corrective to Kant’s abstract notion, and it did so by drawing on photography’s power to represent concrete differences rather than generic identities, the real motley variety of the world rather than a single model of human essence. But, because of the way in which the exhibition had been organized, he said, it transcended the irreconcilability or incommensurability of those differences. On the level of everyday life, it seemed to suggest, people in all cultures faced the same challenges and sought the same solutions. Without intention, the curators “were obeying, possibly without being fully aware of it, an inner logic of the whole, of the way these pictures interact and address one another, which gives them in their entirety a meaningfulness that is difficult to ignore.”16 By showing similarities and the interrelatedness of apparent opposites, the exhibition “tells us that individual human beings within a group and one community of people in relation to another should support each other rather than torment each other and work together to the best of their ability to bring about a world constitution based on reason with which everyone can be satisfied.” Thus, the philosophical and visual ideals are ultimately the same, even though the abstract idea of what Kant would have called “perpetual peace” could not actually be shown as such.
That admirable desideratum was anticipated instead through the way in which the exhibition enabled emotional identification with people of different backgrounds. Mimetic empathy was a path, Horkheimer observed, to the love that binds people together. In that effort, photographs—in fact, images in general—were needed to supplement the abstractions of theoretical concepts:
Even Plato’s Eros force, uplifting the spirit to eternal ideas, needed the knowledge of ephemeral things in order to achieve infinite knowledge, which, for him, is the meaning of all human existence. That is why thought needs the image, that is why the image can lead us to people and things, that is why the image has the valuable and not infrequently also dangerous power that thought alone cannot exert.17
Unlike cinema, photographs allow you to linger with details, discover the unexpected, and disclose the unfamiliar. “Indeed, this is what the exhibition has in common with real artists: it provides us with a new way of looking at things that we will never forget, of however little practical use it may be.”18
Horkheimer finished his introduction to the exhibition by returning to the question of identification. He noted that there was an important exception to the mimetic empathy aroused by Steichen’s selection of photographs that appears in those depicting what he called, once again following Kant, “radical evil.”19 Because the exhibition thwarts such identification in at least two cases—he does not specify the images or spell out exactly how they do so—it “insists on the consciousness of the freedom and the responsibility of the individual. It sides with human beings yet at the same time does not absolve them of guilt. It inspires tolerance of weakness, but not of barbarism.”20
With these remarks, Horkheimer was clearly identifying with those who shared the exhibition’s goals and ratified its methods for achieving them. But for a student of his oeuvre, much in this introduction will seem very surprising. Unlike other critics of a scientistic version of Marxism, such as his erstwhile colleague Erich Fromm, he had always resisted the lure of a humanist alternative suggested in Marx’s 1844 Paris manuscripts.21 His evocation of Kant rather than Hegel or Marx, endorsing what Michel Foucault came to call Kant’s “empirico-transcendental doublet” of the individual and humanity,22 was in tension with what are normally taken to be the primary philosophical inspirations for Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Nor do we find any indication of his life-long fascination with Schopenhauer, whose illusionless pessimism he could still call in 1961 “the philosophic thought that is a match for reality.”23
Perhaps because of its Kantian perspective, the introduction underplays the persistent power of intermediate identifications, whether with class, gender, nation, religion, or status group, which resist, for good or for ill, abstract homogenization on the level of the whole or the isolated singular. Rather than uncritically celebrating the American cult of individuality, as he seems to in his paean to the exhibition, Horkheimer had long harbored doubts about its darker side. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Adorno had bitterly remarked that
the decay of individuality today not only teaches us to regard that category as historical but also raises doubts concerning its positive nature … In the autonomy and uniqueness of the individual, the resistance to the blind, regressive power of the irrational whole was crystallized. But that resistance was made possible only by the blindness and irrationality of the autonomous and unique individual.24
In the chapter entitled “The Rise and Decline of the Individual” in his 1947 Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer bemoaned the survival of the ideology of individual self-preservation at a time when there no longer seemed a coherent self to preserve. “The dwindling away of individual thinking and resistance, as it is brought about by the economic and cultural mechanisms of modern industrialism, will render evolution towards the humane increasingly difficult.”25
But nothing of these bleak assessments of the weaknesses of the bourgeois humanist notion of the individual remained in his introduction to The Family of Man. Additionally, Horkheimer glossed over one of Kant’s most fateful moves from “The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” which would have been inconvenient to foreground in this context: the philosopher’s unsentimental justification of social conflict or what he called “asocial sociability” as the hidden mechanism of progress toward the goal of a cosmopolitan order of federated states. Instead of stressing the functional value of social strife, even violence, as had Kant, Horkheimer short-circuited the indirect process by which the ultimate pacification of social existence might be achieved. Unlike Hegel, who stressed the role of dialectical negation expressing the “cunning of reason,” and Marx with his valorization of the class struggle, he moved quickly from the still imperfect present to a more utopian world constitution based on reason.
But perhaps most unexpected of all is Horkheimer’s valorization of the power of images, photographic or otherwise, to give concrete meaning to the abstract yearnings expressed in philosophical language.26 After his return from exile, Horkheimer came increasingly to identify with his Jewish roots, often invoking the taboo on graven images, the Bilderverbot, in Exodus 20:1–7 as a still potent reason for Critical Theory’s distrust of positive utopian fantasies.27 Adorno would also frequently cite the same source in his characterizations of a doggedly negative dialectic, refusing all higher affirmative sublations.28 They likewise invoked the Bilderverbot in the other direction, as explanation for their distrust of attempts to give realistic aesthetic form to the experience of the Holocaust.29 Although often extolling the virtues of mimetic similarity rather than conceptual subsumption as a way to avoid the domination of otherness, they were deeply suspicious of the ways in which it could slide into denigrating mimicry, a pattern they had witnessed firsthand in the Nazi mockery of Jews.30 In his introduction, however, mimesis is firmly on the side of empathetic identification alone.
The anomalous character of this text in Horkheimer’s thinking in this era is even more apparent if we compare it with another essay written at virtually the same time, his 1957 “The Concept of Man.”31 Impatient with the incessant pious chatter about the “crisis of man” in the postwar era—a phenomenon trenchantly probed by the American intellectual historian Mark Greif in his recent The Age of the Crisis
