judicial universality without relating the law to its political origins), bourgeois morality (the categorical imperative), and bourgeois logic, had once been progressive, but it now served only to perpetuate the status quo. True logic, as well as true rationalism, must go beyond form to include substantive elements as well.
Yet precisely what these elements were was difficult to say. Substantive logic was easier to demand than explain. The agnosticism in Horkheimer’s notion of materialism also extended to his views on the possibility of a philosophical anthropology. He dismissed the efforts of his former colleague at Frankfurt, Max Scheler, to discover a constant human nature as no more than a desperate search for absolute meaning in a relativist world.58 The yearning of phenomenologists for the security of eternal essences was a source of self-delusion, a point Adorno and Marcuse were to echo in their respective critiques of Husserl and Scheler.59
Accordingly, Critical Theory denied the necessity, or even the possibility, of formulating a definitive description of “socialist man.” This distaste for anthropological speculation has been attributed by some commentators to the residual influence of scientific socialism.60 If “scientific” is understood solely as the antonym of “Utopian” socialism, this is true. But in view of the Frankfurt School’s hostility towards the reduction of philosophy to science, it seems only a partial explanation. Another possible factor, which Horkheimer himself was to stress in later years,61 was the subterranean influence of a religious theme on the materialism of the Frankfurt School. It would be an error, in fact, to treat its members as dogmatic atheists. In almost all of Horkheimer’s discussions of religion, he took a dialectical position.62 In Dämmerung, to take one example, he argued that religion ought not to be understood solely as false consciousness, because it helped preserve a hope for future justice, which bourgeois atheism denied.63 Thus, his more recent claim, that the traditional Jewish prohibition on naming or describing God and paradise was reproduced in Critical Theory’s refusal to give substance to its Utopian vision, can be given some credence. As Jürgen Habermas has noted, German idealist philosophy’s reluctance to flesh out its notions of utopia was very similar to the cabalistic stress on words rather than images.64 Adorno’s decision to choose music, the most nonrepresentational of aesthetic modes, as the primary medium through which he explored bourgeois culture and sought signs of its negation indicates the continued power of this prohibition. Of the major figures connected with the Institut, only Marcuse attempted to articulate a positive anthropology at any time in his career.65 Whether or not the Jewish taboo was actually causal or merely a post facto rationalization is difficult to establish with certainty. Whatever the reason, Critical Theory consistently resisted the temptation to describe “the realm of freedom” from the vantage point of the “realm of necessity.”
And yet, even in Horkheimer’s work there appeared a kind of negative anthropology, an implicit but still powerful presence. Although to some extent rooted in Freud, its primary origins could be found in the work of Marx. In discussing Feuerbach’s attempt to construct an explicit picture of human nature, Marx had attacked its atemporal, abstract, antihistorical premises. The only constant, he argued, was man’s ability to create himself anew. “Anthropogenesis,” to use a later commentator’s term,66 was the only human nature Marx allowed. Here Horkheimer was in agreement; the good society was one in which man was free to act as a subject rather than be acted upon as a contingent predicate.
When Marx seemed to go further in defining the categories of human self-production in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Horkheimer drew back. The central position of labor in Marx’s work and his concomitant stress on the problem of alienated labor in capitalist society played a relatively minor role in Horkheimer’s writings. In Dämmerung he wrote: “To make labor into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology. . . . Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda.”67
The same was true of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. To Benjamin, the vulgar Marxist stress on labor “recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. . . . The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound.”68 Adorno, when I spoke with him in Frankfurt in March, 1969, said that Marx wanted to turn the whole world into a giant workhouse.
Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor expressed another dimension of his materialism: the demand for human, sensual happiness. In one of his most trenchant essays, “Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation,”69 he discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture. Despite the utilitarianism of a Bentham or a Mandeville, the characteristic ideology of the early bourgeois era was Kantian.70 Seeing no unity between individual interest and public morality, Kant had posited an inevitable distinction between happiness and duty. Although he gave a certain weight to both, by the time capitalism had become sufficiently advanced, the precedence of duty to the totality over personal gratification had grown to such an extent that the latter was almost completely neglected. To compensate for the repression of genuine individual happiness, mass diversions had been devised to defuse discontent.71 Much of the Institut’s later work on the “culture industry” was designed to show how effective these palliatives were.
But even allegedly revolutionary movements, Horkheimer contended, had perpetuated the characteristic bourgeois hostility to happiness.72 The fourteenth-century Romans under Cola di Rienzi, and the Florentines in the time of Savonarola, were two clear examples of revolutionary movements that ended by opposing individual happiness in the name of some higher good. Even more strikingly, the French Revolution and especially the Terror illustrated this theme. Robespierre, like Rienzi and Savonarola, confused love for the people with ruthless repression of them. The equality brought by the Revolution, Horkheimer noted, was the negative leveling produced by the guillotine, an equality of degradation rather than dignity. In the twentieth century a similar phenomenon had appeared in fascism. The Führer or Duce expressed in the extreme the typical bourgeois combination of romantic sentimentality and utter ruthlessness. The ideology of duty and service to the totality at the cost of individual happiness attained its ultimate expression in fascist rhetoric. The revolutionary pretensions of the fascists were no more than a fraud designed to perpetuate the domination of the ruling classes.
In contrast to the bourgeois ethic of self-abnegation, Horkheimer upheld the dignity of egoism. During the Enlightenment, Helvetius and de Sade had expressed a protest, however distorted, against asceticism in the name of a higher morality. Even more forcefully, Nietzsche had exposed the connection between self-denial and resentment that is implicit in most of Western culture. Where Horkheimer differed from them was in his stress on the social component in human happiness. His egoistic individual, unlike the utilitarians’ or even Nietzsche’s, always realized his greatest gratification through communal interaction. In fact, Horkheimer constantly challenged the reification of individual and society as polar opposites, just as he denied the mutual exclusivity of subject and object in philosophy.
The Institut’s stress on personal happiness as an integral element in its materialism was further developed by Marcuse in an article he wrote for the Zeitschrift in 1938, “On Hedonism.”73 In contrast to Hegel, who “fought against eudaemonism in the interest of historical progress,”74 Marcuse defended hedonistic philosophies for preserving a “moment” of truth in their stress on happiness. Where they traditionally went wrong, however, was in their unquestioning acceptance of the competitive individual as the model of highest personal development. “The apologetic aspect of hedonism,” Marcuse wrote, is to be found “in hedonism’s abstract conception of the subjective side of happiness, in its inability to distinguish between true and false wants and interests and true and false enjoyments.”75 In upholding the notion of higher and
