under the banner of a false totalism. This fear would go so far that Adorno could write, in a frequently quoted phrase from Minima Moralia, that “the whole is the untrue.”47 But in the 1930’s Horkheimer and his colleagues were still concerned with the overemphasis on individuality, which they detected in bourgeois thinkers from Kant to the philosophers of life.
Horkheimer also questioned the moral imperative that Kant had postulated. Although agreeing that a moral impulse apart from egoistic self-interest did in fact exist, he argued that its expression had changed since Kant’s time. Whereas in the early nineteenth century it had manifested itself as duty, it now appeared as either pity or political concern. Pity, Horkheimer argued, was produced by the recognition that man had ceased being a free subject and was reduced instead to an object of forces beyond his control48 This Kant had not experienced himself, because his time provided greater individual freedom, at least for the entrepreneur. Political action as the expression of morality was also spurned by Kant, who overemphasized the importance of the individual conscience and tended to reify the status quo. In the twentieth century, however, politics had become the proper realm of moral action because, for the first time in history, “mankind’s means have grown great enough to present the realization [of justice] as an immediate historical task. The struggle for its fulfillment characterizes our epoch of transition.”49 Both early bourgeois thinkers like Kant and later ones like the Lebensphilosophen had failed to appreciate the necessity for political praxis to realize their moral visions.
Horkheimer’s second major objection to Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson was, as noted above, that they were really hidden idealists. In contrast, Horkheimer proposed a materialist theory of society, but one that was very clearly distinguished from the putative materialism of orthodox Marxism. In one of his most important essays in the Zeitschrift, “Materialism and Metaphysics,”50 he set out to rescue materialism from those who saw it simply as an antonym of spiritualism and a denial of nonmaterial existence. True materialism, he argued, did not mean a new type of monistic metaphysics based on the ontological primacy of matter. Here nineteenth-century mechanical materialists like Vogt and Haeckel had been wrong, as were Marxists who made a fetish of the supposedly “objective” material world. Equally erroneous was the assumption of the eternal primacy of the economic substructure of society. Both substructure and superstructure interacted at all times, although it was true that under capitalism the economic base had a crucial role in this process. What had to be understood, however, was that this condition was only historical and would change with time. In fact, it was one of the characteristics of twentieth-century society that politics was beginning to assert an autonomy beyond anything Marx had predicted. Both Leninist and fascist practice demonstrated the change.
Horkheimer also disliked the tendency of vulgar Marxists to elevate materialism to a theory of knowledge, which claimed absolute certainty the way idealism had in the past. In fact, to argue that a materialist epistemology could exhaustively explain reality was to encourage the urge to dominate the world, which Fichtean idealism had most vividly displayed. This was borne out by the fact that monistic materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative, dominating attitude towards nature.51 The theme of man’s domination of nature, it might be added parenthetically, was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.
Despite the impossibility of attaining absolute knowledge, Horkheimer held that materialism must not succumb to relativistic resignation. In fact, the monistic materialist epistemology of vulgar Marxism had been too passive. Echoing Marx’s critique of Feuerbach almost a century before,52 Horkheimer stressed the active element in cognition, which idealism had correctly affirmed. The objects of perception, he argued, are themselves the product of man’s actions, although the relationship tends to be masked by reification. Indeed, nature itself has a historical element, in the dual sense that man conceives of it differently at different times and that he actively works to change it. True materialism, Horkheimer contended, is thus dialectical, involving an ongoing process of interaction between subject and object. Here Horkheimer returned once again to the Hegelian roots of Marxism, which had been obscured in the intervening century. Like Marx, but unlike many self-proclaimed Marxists, he refused to make a fetish of dialectics as an objective process outside man’s control. Nor did he see it as a methodological construct imposed like a Weberian ideal type, or a social scientific model, on a chaotic, manifold reality. Dialectics probed the “force-field,” to use an expression of Adorno’s,53 between consciousness and being, subject and object. It did not, indeed could not, pretend to have discovered ontological first principles. It rejected the extremes of nominalism and realism and remained willing to operate in a perpetual state of suspended judgment.
Hence the crucial importance of mediation (Vermittlung) for a correct theory of society. No facet of social reality could be understood by the observer as final or complete in itself. There were no social “facts,” as the positivists believed, which were the substratum of a social theory. Instead, there was a constant interplay of particular and universal, of “moment”* and totality. As Lukács had written in History and Class Consciousness:
To leave empirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood as objects of a totality, i.e., as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change. Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the empirical world, and as such it is not something (subjective) foisted onto the objects from outside, it is no value-judgment or “ought” opposed to their “is.” It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure.54
Moreover, the relationship between the totality and its moments was reciprocal. Vulgar Marxists had been mistaken in seeking a reductionist derivation of superstructural, cultural phenomena from their substructural, socio-economic base. Culture, Horkheimer and his colleagues argued, was never epiphenomenal, although it was never fully autonomous. Its relationship to the material substructure of society was multidimensional. All cultural phenomena must be seen as mediated through the social totality, not merely as the reflection of class interests. This meant that they also expressed the contradictions of the whole, including those forces that negated the status quo. Nothing, or at least almost nothing, was solely ideological.55
In so arguing, it might be added, Horkheimer was closer to Marx himself than the self-styled Marxists who claimed to be orthodox. When discussing the bourgeois state, for example, Marx had not interpreted it solely as the “executive committee of the ruling class,” but also as an adumbration, albeit distorted, of the reconciliation of social contradictions that the triumph of the proletariat was to bring about.56 Engels, likewise, when discussing Realism in literature, had shown an appreciation for the progressive elements in ostensibly reactionary writers like Balzac, because of their ability to portray the concrete totality with all its contradictions. The Institut’s extensive work on aesthetic and cultural matters was rooted in the same assumption.
In stressing the totality, Horkheimer correspondingly criticized other social theorists for concentrating on one facet of reality to the exclusion of the others. This led to one of the methodological fallacies the Frankfurt School most frequently attacked: fetishization. More orthodox Marxists within the Institut, such as the economist Henryk Grossmann, were always criticized for their overemphasis on the material substructure of society. The composition of the Institut, with its deliberate diversification of fields, reflected the importance Critical Theory placed on the totality of dialectical mediations, which had to be grasped in the process of analyzing society.
Horkheimer’s stress on dialectics also extended to his understanding of logic. Although rejecting the extravagant ontological claims Hegel had made for his logical categories, he agreed with the need for a substantive, rather than merely formal, logic. In Dämmerung Horkheimer wrote: “Logic is not independent of content. In face of the reality that what is inexpensive for the favored part of humanity remains unattainable for the others, nonpartisan logic would be as nonpartisan as a book of laws that is the same for all.”57
