he argued, empiricism as practiced by Locke and Hume contained a dynamic, even critical, element, in its insistence on the individual’s perception as the source of knowledge. The Enlightenment empiricists had used their observations to undermine the prevailing social order. Contemporary Logical Positivism, on the other hand, had lost this subversive quality, because of its belief that knowledge, although initially derived from perception, was really concerned with judgments about that perception contained in so-called “protocol sentences.”91 By restricting reality to that which could be expressed in such sentences, the unspeakable was excluded from the philosopher’s domain. But even more fundamentally, the general empiricist stress on perception ignored the active element in all cognition. Positivism of all kinds was ultimately the abdication of reflection.92 The result was the absolutizing of “facts” and the reification of the existing order.93
In addition to his distaste for their fetishism of facts, Horkheimer further objected to the Logical Positivists’ reliance on formal logic to the exclusion of a substantive alternative. To see logic as an analogue of mathematics, he held, was to reduce it to a series of tautologies with no real meaning in the historical world. To believe that all true knowledge aspired to the condition of scientific, mathematical conceptualization was a surrender to a metaphysics as bad as the one the positivists had set out to refute.94
What was perhaps worst of all in Horkheimer’s eyes was the positivists’ pretension to have disentangled facts from values. Here he detected a falling away from the original Enlightenment use of empiricism as a partisan weapon against the mystifications of superstition and tradition. A society, he argued,95 might itself be “possessed” and thus produce “facts” that were themselves “insane.” Because it had no way to evaluate this possibility, modern empiricism capitulated before the authority of the status quo, despite its intentions. The members of the Vienna Circle might be progressive in their politics, but this was in no way related to their philosophy. Their surrender to the mystique of the prevailing reality, however, was not arbitrary; rather it was an expression of the contingency of existence in a society that administered and manipulated men’s lives. As man must reestablish his ability to control his own destiny, so must reason be restored to its proper place as the arbiter of ends, not merely means. Vernunft must regain the field from which it had been driven by the triumph of Verstand.
What made Horkheimer’s stress on reason so problematical was his equally strong antimetaphysical bias. Reality had to be judged by the “tribunal of reason,” but reason was not to be taken as a transcendent ideal, existing outside history. Truth, Horkheimer and his colleagues always insisted, was not immutable. And yet, to deny the absoluteness of truth was not to succumb to relativism, epistemological, ethical, or otherwise. The dichotomy of absolutism and relativism was in fact a false one. Each period of time has its own truth, Horkheimer argued,96 although there is none above time. What is true is whatever fosters social change in the direction of a rational society. This of course once again raised the question of what was meant by reason, which Critical Theory never attempted to define explicitly. Dialectics was superb at attacking other systems’ pretensions to truth, but when it came to articulating the ground of its own assumptions and values, it fared less well. Like its implicit reliance on a negative anthropology, Critical Theory had a basically insubstantial concept of reason and truth, rooted in social conditions and yet outside them, connected with praxis yet keeping its distance from it. If Critical Theory can be said to have had a theory of truth, it appeared in its immanent critique of bourgeois society, which compared the pretensions of bourgeois ideology with the reality of its social conditions. Truth was not outside the society, but contained in its own claims. Men had an emancipatory interest in actualizing the ideology.
In rejecting all claims to absolute truth, Critical Theory had to face many of the problems that the sociology of knowledge was trying to solve at the same time. Yet Horkheimer and the others were never willing to go as far as Karl Mannheim, who coincidentally shared office space at the Institut before 1933, in “unmasking” Marxism as just one more ideology among others. By claiming that all knowledge was rooted in its social context (Seinsgebunden), Mannheim seemed to be undermining the basic Marxist distinction between true and false consciousness, to which Critical Theory adhered. As Marcuse was to write, Critical Theory “is interested in the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths, of previous philosophies.”97 Yet curiously, when Horkheimer wrote his critique of Mannheim in the pre-emigration years,98 he chose to attack him primarily for the absolutist rather than relativist implications of his sociology of knowledge. Especially unfortunate in this respect, he argued, was Mannheim’s “relationism,” which attempted to salvage objective truth by arguing that all partial truths were perspectives on the whole. By assuming that such a total truth existed in the synthesis of different viewpoints, Mannheim was following a simplified Gestaltist concept of knowledge.99 Underlying it all was a quasi-Hegelian, harmonistic belief that one could reconcile all perspectives, a belief whose implications for social change were quietistic. Unlike Marx, who had sought social transformation rather than truth, Mannheim had covertly returned to a metaphysical quest for pure knowledge.100
Moreover, Horkheimer charged, Mannheim’s concept of the “Being” that determined consciousness was highly undialectical. To Horkheimer, there was always feedback and mediation between base and superstructure.101 Mannheim, in contrast, had reverted to a kind of dualism of subject and object, which hypostatized both. There was no “objective” reality that individual consciousnesses partially reflected. To argue that there was was to ignore the part played by praxis in creating the world.
Praxis and reason were in fact the two poles of Critical Theory, as they had been for the Left Hegelians a century before. The interplay and tension between them contributed greatly to the Theory’s dialectical suggestiveness, although the primacy of reason was never in doubt. As Marcuse wrote in Reason and Revolution, speaking for the entire Frankfurt School, “Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth, not vice versa.”102 Still, the importance of self-determined activity, of “anthropogenesis,” was constantly emphasized in the Institut’s earlier writings. Here the influence of Lebensphilosophie on Horkheimer and his colleagues was crucial, although they always understood true praxis as a collective endeavor. The stress on praxis accorded well with the Frankfurt School’s rejection of Hegel’s identity theory. In the spaces created by the irreducible mediations between subject and object, particular and universa!, human freedom might be sustained. In fact, what alarmed the Frankfurt School so much in later years was the progressive liquidation of these very areas of human spontaneity in Western society.
The other antipode of Critical Theory, the Utopian reconciliation of subject and object, essence and appearance, particular and universal, had very different connotations. Vernunft implied an objective reason that was not constituted solely by the subjective acts of individual men. Although transformed from a philosophical ideal into a social one, it still bore traces of its metaphysical origins. Vulgar Marxism had allowed these tendencies to reemerge in the monistic materialism that the Institut never tired of attacking. And yet, as we have seen, even in Critical Theory there were an implicit negative metaphysics and negative anthropology—negative in the sense of refusing to define itself in any fixed way, thus adhering to Nietzsche’s dictum that a “great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.”
As thinkers in the tradition of “positive freedom” that included Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, they were caught in the basic dilemma that dogged the tradition from its inception. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out,103 the notion of positive freedom contained an inherent conflict, symbolized by the tension between the Greek political experience and the subsequent attempts of Greek philosophers to make sense of it. From the former came the identification of freedom with human acts and human speech—in short, with praxis. From the latter came its equation with that authentic being which was reason. Attempts at an integration
