Horkheimer neglected its dynamic and destructive sides, which the Nazis were able to exploit. This was a blind spot in his analysis. But in another way he enriched the discussion of its historical development. In distinguishing between different types of irrationalism, Horkheimer broke with the tradition of hostility towards Lebensphilosophie maintained by almost all Marxist thinkers, including the later Lukács.33 In addition to approving of its antisystematic impulse, Horkheimer gave qualified praise to the emphasis on the individual in the work of both Dilthey and Nietzsche. Like them, he believed in the importance of individual psychology for an understanding of history.34 While their work in this area was less subtle than the psychoanalysis he hoped to integrate with Critical Theory, he considered it far more useful than the bankrupt utilitarianism that informed liberalism and orthodox Marxism.
What became clear, however, in Horkheimer’s discussion of Dilthey’s methodology35 was his rejection of a purely psychological approach to historical explanation. Dilthey’s notion of a Verstehende Geisteswissenschaft (a social science based on its own methods of understanding and reexperiencing, rather than on those of the natural sciences) did, to be sure, contain a recognition of the meaningfulness of historical structures, which Horkheimer could share. What he rejected was the assumption that this meaning could be intuitively grasped by the historian reexperiencing his subject matter in his own mind. Underlying this notion, he argued, was a Hegelian-like belief in the identity of subject and object. The data of the inner life were not enough to mirror the significant structure of the past, because that past had not always been made consciously by men. Indeed, it was generally made “behind the backs and against the wills” of individuals, as Marx had pointed out. That this need not always be the case was another matter. In fact, Vico was one of Horkheimer’s early intellectual heroes;36 and it was Vico who had first argued that men might understand history better than nature because men made history, whereas God made nature. This, however, was a goal, not a reality. If anything, Horkheimer noted pessimistically, the trend in modern life was away from the conscious determination of historical events rather than towards it. History, therefore, could not simply be “understood,” as he claimed Dilthey had hoped, but had to be “explained” instead. Horkheimer did, however, hold out some hope for the attainment of the social conditions that would make Dilthey’s methodological vision viable.
Horkheimer’s admiration for Nietzsche was equally mixed. In 1935 he argued that Nietzsche was a genuine bourgeois philosopher, as demonstrated by his overemphasis on individualism and his blindness to social questions.37 Still, Horkheimer was quick to defend Nietzsche against those who sought to reconcile him with the irrationalists of the 1930’s. In a long review of Karl Jaspers’s study of Nietzsche38 he castigated the author for trying to “domesticate” Nietzsche for völkisch (populist nationalist) and religious consumption. What he valued most in Nietzsche’s work was its uncompromisingly critical quality. On the question of certain knowledge, for example, he applauded Nietzsche’s statement that a “great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.”39
Horkheimer also was impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of the masochistic quality of traditional Western morality. He had been the first to note, Horkheimer approvingly commented,40 how misery could be transformed into a social norm, as in the case of asceticism, and how that norm had permeated Western culture through the “slave morality” of Christian ethics.41 When it came to the more questionable aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, Horkheimer tended to mitigate their inadequacies. The naive glorification of the “superman” he explained away by calling it the price of isolation. Nietzsche’s hostility to the goal of a classless society he excused on the grounds that its only champions in Nietzsche’s day were the Social Democrats, whose mentality was as pedestrian and uninspired as Nietzsche had claimed. In fact, Horkheimer argued, Nietzsche had been perceptive in refusing to romanticize the working classes, who were even in his time beginning to be diverted from their revolutionary role by the developing mass culture. Where Nietzsche had failed, however, was in his ahistorical belief that democratization inevitably meant the dilution of true culture. He was also deficient in misunderstanding the historical nature of labor, which he absolutized as immutable in order to justify his elitist conclusions. In short, Horkheimer contended that Nietzsche, who had done so much to reveal the historical roots of bourgeois morality, had himself fallen prey to ahistorical thinking.
Towards the third great exponent of Lebensphilosophie and one of the Institut’s actual sponsors in Paris, Henri Bergson, Horkheimer was somewhat more critical.42 Although recognizing the trenchant arguments in Bergson’s critique of abstract rationalism, he questioned the metaphysical yearnings he detected at its root. Bergson’s faith in intuition as the means to discover the universal life force he dismissed as an ideology. “Intuition,” he wrote, “from which Bergson hopes to find salvation in history as in cognition, has a unified object: life, energy, duration, creative development. In reality, however, mankind is split, and an intuition that seeks to penetrate through contradictions loses what is historically decisive from its sight.”43 Horkheimer’s hostility to the unmediated use of intuition as a means to break through to an underlying level of reality, it might be added, was also extended to the similar efforts of phenomenologists such as Scheler and Husserl.
In an article devoted primarily to Bergson’s metaphysics of time, which Bergson himself called “a serious deepening of my works” and “philosophically very penetrating,”44 Horkheimer supported Bergson’s distinction between “experienced” time and the abstract time of the natural scientists. But, he quickly added in qualification, Bergson had been mistaken in trying to write a metaphysics of temporality. In so doing he had been led to an idea of time as durée (duration), which was almost as abstract and empty as that of the natural sciences. To see reality as an uninterruptible flow was to ignore the reality of suffering, aging, and death. It was to absolutize the present and thus unwittingly repeat the mistakes of the positivists. True experience, Horkheimer argued, resisted such homogenization. The task of the historian was to preserve the memory of suffering and to foster the demand for qualitative historical change.
In all of Horkheimer’s writings on the Lebensphilosophen, three major criticisms were repeatedly made. By examining these in some detail, we can better understand the foundations of Critical Theory. First, although the philosophers of life had been correct in trying to rescue the individual from the threats of modern society, they had gone too far in emphasizing subjectivity and inwardness. In doing so, they had minimized the importance of action in the historical world. Second, with an occasional exception such as Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism, they tended to neglect the material dimension of reality. Third and perhaps most important, in criticizing the degeneration of bourgeois rationalism into its abstract and formal aspects, they sometimes overstated their case and seemed to be rejecting reason itself. This ultimately led to the outright mindless irrationalism of their twentieth-century vulgarizers.
As might be expected, Horkheimer’s interest in the question of bourgeois individualism led him back to a consideration of Kant and the origins of Innerlichkeit (inwardness).45 Among the dualistic elements in Kant’s philosophy, he noted,46 was the gap between duty and interest. Individual morality, discovered by practical reason, was internalized and divorced from public ethics. Here Hegel’s Sittlichkeit (ethics), with its emphasis on bridging the public-private opposition, was superior to Kant’s Moralität (morality). Despite this, Kant’s view was closer to a correct reflection of conditions in the early nineteenth century; for to assume that a harmony could exist at that time between personal morality and public ethics, or between self-interest and a universal moral code, was to ignore the real irrationality of the external order. Where Kant had been wrong, however, was in considering these contradictions immutable. By absolutizing the distinction between the individual and society, he had made a natural condition out of what was merely historically valid, thereby unwittingly affirming the status quo. This was also a failing of the Lebensphilosophen. In later years, however, Horkheimer and the other members of the Frankfurt School came to believe that the real danger lay not with those who overemphasized subjectivity and individuality,
