young Horkheimer was less eager to embrace so Spenglerian a prognosis, but in time Cornelius’s appraisal of the situation increasingly became his own. In the twenties, however, he was still caught up by the revolutionary potential of the working class. Accordingly, his analysis of The Critique of Judgment showed little evidence of resignation or despair; instead, it demonstrated his conviction that praxis could overcome the contradictions of the social order, while at the same time leading to a cultural renewal. From Kant, however, he took certain convictions that he would never abandon.
Horkheimer’s reading of Kant helped increase his sensitivity to the importance of individuality, as a value never to be submerged entirely under the demands of the totality. It also heightened his appreciation of the active elements in cognition, which prevented his acceptance of the copy theory of perception advocated by more orthodox Marxists. What it did not do, however, was to convince him of the inevitability of those dualisms—phenomena and noumena, pure and practical reason, for example—that Kant had posited as insurmountable. In concluding his study, Horkheimer made it clear that although these antagonisms had not yet been overcome, he saw no necessary reason why they could not be. Kant’s fundamental duality between will and knowledge, practical and pure reason, could and must be reconciled.16 In so arguing, Horkheimer demonstrated the influence of Hegel’s critique of Kant on his own. Like Hegel, he saw cognitive knowledge and normative imperatives, the “is” and the “ought,” as ultimately inseparable.
Because of this and other similarities with Hegel on such questions as the nature of reason, the importance of dialectics, and the existence of a substantive logic, it is tempting to characterize Critical Theory as no more than a Hegelianized Marxism.17 And yet, on several fundamental issues, Horkheimer always maintained a certain distance from Hegel. Most basic was his rejection of Hegel’s metaphysical intentions and his claim to absolute truth. “I do not know,” he wrote in Dämmerung, “how far metaphysicians are correct; perhaps somewhere there is a particularly compelling metaphysical system or fragment. But I do know that metaphysicians are usually impressed only to the smallest degree by what men suffer.”18 Moreover, a system that tolerated every opposing view as part of the “total truth” had inevitably quietistic implications.19 An all-embracing system like Hegel’s might well serve as a theodicy justifying the status quo. In fact, to the extent that Marxism had been ossified into a system claiming the key to truth, it too had fallen victim to the same malady. The true object of Marxism, Horkheimer argued,20 was not the uncovering of immutable truths, but the fostering of social change.
Elsewhere, Horkheimer outlined his other objections to Hegel’s metaphysics.21 His strongest criticism was reserved for perhaps the fundamental tenet of Hegel’s thought: the assumption that all knowledge is self-knowledge of the infinite subject—in other words, that an identity exists between subject and object, mind and matter, based on the ultimate primacy of the absolute subject. “Spirit,” Horkheimer wrote, “may not recognize itself either in nature or in history, because even if the spirit is not a questionable abstraction, it would not be identical with reality.”22 In fact, there is no “thought” as such, only the specific thought of concrete men rooted in their socio-economic conditions. Nor is there “being” as such, but rather a “manifold of beings in the world.”23
In repudiating identity theory, Horkheimer was also implicitly criticizing its reappearance in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. To Lukács, the proletariat functioned both as the subject and the object of history, thus fulfilling the classical German idealist goal of uniting freedom as an objective reality and as something produced by man himself. In later years Lukács was himself to detect the metaphysical premise underlying his assumption of an identical subject-object in history: “The proletariat seen as the identical subject-object of the real history of mankind is no materialist consummation that overcomes the constructions of idealism. It is rather an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel, it is an edifice boldly erected above every possible reality and thus attempts objectively to surpass the Master himself.”24 These words were written in 1967 for a new edition of a work whose arguments Lukács had long ago seen fit to repudiate. His reasons for that self-criticism have been the source of considerable speculation and no less an amount of criticism. Yet, in pointing to the metaphysical core at the center of his argument, he was doing no more than repeating what Horkheimer had said about identity theory almost four decades before.
To Horkheimer, all absolutes, all identity theories were suspect. Even the ideal of absolute justice contained in religion, he was later to argue,25 has a chimerical quality. The image of complete justice “can never be realized in history because even when a better society replaces the present disorder and is developed, past misery would not be made good and the suffering of surrounding nature not transcended.”26 As a result, philosophy as he understood it always expresses an unavoidable note of sadness, but without succumbing to resignation.
Yet although Horkheimer attacked Hegel’s identity theory, he felt that nineteenth-century criticism of a similar nature had been carried too far. In rejecting the ontological claims Hegel had made for his philosophy of Absolute Spirit, the positivists had robbed the intellect of any right to judge what was actual as true or false.* Their overly empirical bias led to the apotheosis of facts in a way that was equally one-sided. From the first, Horkheimer consistently rejected the Hobson’s choice of metaphysical systematizing or antinomian empiricism. Instead, he argued for the possibility of a dialectical social science that would avoid an identity theory and yet preserve the right of the observer to go beyond the givens of his experience. It was in large measure this refusal to succumb to the temptations of either alternative that gave Critical Theory its cutting edge.
Horkheimer’s hostility to metaphysics was partly a reaction to the sclerosis of Marxism produced by its transformation into a body of received truths. But beyond this, it reflected the influence of his readings in non-Hegelian and non-Marxist philosophy. Schopenhauer’s extreme skepticism about the possibility of reconciling reason with the world of will certainly had its effect. More important still was the impact of three late nineteenth-century thinkers, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson, all of whom had emphasized the relation of thought to human life.
To Horkheimer,27 the Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) they helped create had expressed a legitimate protest against the growing rigidity of abstract rationalism, and the concomitant standardization of individual existence that characterized life under advanced capitalism. It had pointed an accusing finger at the gap between the promises of bourgeois ideology and the reality of everyday life in bourgeois society. The development of the philosophy of life, he argued, corresponded to a fundamental change in capitalism itself. The earlier optimistic belief of certain classical idealists in the unity of reason and reality had corresponded to the individual entrepreneur’s acceptance of harmony between his own activities and the functioning of the economy as a whole. The erosion of that conviction corresponded to the growth of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century, in which the individual’s role was more overwhelmed by the totality than harmonized with it.28 Lebensphilosophie was basically a cry of outrage against this change. Because of this critical element, Horkheimer was careful to distinguish the “irrationalism”29 of the philosophers of life from that of their twentieth-century vulgarizers.
In the 1930’s, he argued, attacks on reason were designed to reconcile men to the irrationality of the prevailing order.30 The so-called tragic outlook on life was really a veiled justification for the acceptance of unnecessary misery. Leben and Dienst (service) had come to be synonymous. What was once critical had now become ideological. This was also true of the attack on science, which, in the hands of the first generation of Lebensphilosophen, had been a justified corrective to the pretensions of seientism, but which by the 1930’s had degenerated into an indiscriminate attack on the validity of scientific thought as such. “The philosophic dismissal of science,” he wrote in 1937, “is a comfort in private life, in society a lie.”31
In
