Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
The main essays in the three 1933 issues of Frankfurt School's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung don't address the new political situation in Germany very specifically, i.e., Hitler's seizure of power and the outlawing of all democratic political parties. I assume this is largely because the essays were prepared before Hitler's takeover at the end of January 1933. It's hardly that the participants in the Frankfurt School considered this a minor development, since most of them had to make immediate preparations to leave the country. The victory of fascism - of which they understood as most people did that Hitler's National Socialism (Nazism) was a variety - became one of the principle topics occupying the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School in the following years.
Journal editor Max Horkheimer contributed two essays that year on philosophical materialism, "Materialismus and Metaphysik" (1/1933) and "Materialsmus und Moral" (2/1933). In both of them, he is elaborating his own version of materialism. Horkheimer was working from his version of "historical materialism" (Marxism). But his commentary focuses on distinguishing his view of materialism from other philosophical viewpoints.
(Since I haven't done a Frankfurt School post in a few days, I suppose it's appropriate to repeat that I make no attempt in these posts to try to bridge my analysis to people who accept the insane Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh worldview that socialist=fascism=communist=Nazism=liberalism=American Democrats. These posts assume a minimal of political literacy about the 20th century on the part of the reader.)
In "Materialismus and Metaphysik", he makes an argument which is important to the general perspective of the Frankfurt School. It would be later that Horkheimer would describe that perspective as "critical theory", the label that has endured. Although the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung dealt with philosophical issues as such, their focus was on developing a sociological theory to describe the current development of contemporary economies and societies, including psychological factors that moved their publics in the political field. In this essay, he stresses the importance for a materialist theory to maintain a critical perspective, to elaborate what could be and not just analyze what is. Materialism, in his view, should focus on the possibilities for creating a more free, more just and happier condition for people, which in his outlook meant a socialist organization of society.
As he puts it in this essay, his brand of materialism recongizes that ideas lead people to act in certain ways which shape history. (Unless otherwise specified, I'll use "materialism" below to refer to Horkheimer's version of it, which only later would be called "critical theory.") People make history, but aren't driven by deterministic sociological laws. At the same time, political and social conditions create the environment in which ideas develop and sets limits to their realization. So he rejects the conventional approach of intellectual history that tacitly or explicitly assumes that history is primarily driven by the ideas of intellectual leaders. He gives the example of the German Peasant Wars of the 16th century, in which the ideas of Christianity were given a radically new meaning and orientation by the peasants revolting.
He explains that positivists argue against materialism on the ground that individual striving toward happiness motivates people's decisions rather than social laws. Horkheimer contends that while materialism accepts the pleasure/pain scenario in many ways, that humanity's striving for happiness cannot be reduced to a simple drive for accumulation of goods and property. Horkheimer argues that the positivism of Auguste Comte and Henri Bergson is a form of metaphysics, which views human perception as a process of deriving abstract concepts from isolated sense impressions, as opposed to the more holistic and dynamic and realistic materialist theory of knowledge. Because of this, positivism is "powerless before mysticism and occultism, these crude forms of superstition."
He points to the argument of John Stuart Mill, "As body is understood to be the mysterious something which excites the mind to feel, so mind is the mysterious something which feels and thinks." (From Ch. 3 of A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive, 1882.) This understanding is the basis on which positivism "fundamentally makes its peace with every kind of superstition," writes Horkheimer. Against this perspective, Horkheimer quotes with approval from a statement of Hegel in 1818:
„Das Wahre nicht zu wissen und nur das Erscheinen des Zeitlichen und Zufälligen — nur das Eitle [sic] zu erkennen, diese Eitelkeit ist es, welche sich in der Philosophie breitgemacht hat und in unseren Zeiten noch breit macht und das große Wort fuhrt“. [From Hegels Anrede an seine Zuhörer bei Eröffnung seiner Vorlesungen in Berlin am 22. Oktober 1818] Was Hegel gegen die Aufklärung einwendet, richtet sich heute vor allem gegen die freilich in der Aufklärung entstandene positivistische Philosophie.In the United States even today, we use "the Enlightenment" in ordinary conversation as almost a given stage of progress in knowledge. Because we certainly have some political and religious doctrines with signficant influence that are in some ways throwbacks to pre-Enlightenment viewpoints.
["To not know the true and to know only the appearance of the momentary and accidental - only to recognize the vain, this vanity is what has become widespread in philosophy and in our times is still spreading and plays the leading role." What Hegel argues against the Enlightenment also applies today above all to the positivist philosophy, which clearly developed in the Enlightenment.]
Anglo-Saxon views of Hegel, and official Soviet views after the Second World War, have often viewed him - very mistakenly - as a hardened reactionary, partly through a very sloppy understanding of Hegel's concept of truth. Hegel understood everything as being in a process of dialectical as a process of development through the struggle of contradictions. The truth of a thing is not its form at the moment, but its development as a whole. „Das Wahre ist das Ganze” (“The truth is the whole”), he once wrote.
A seed is a seed, not a tree. But it has an inner force and direction that contradicts its being as a seed. It "wants" to stop being a seed and instead be a tree. Or a bush or a flower depending on what kind of seed it is. But its existence is in the form of a process of development, in which it goes from being a seed to being the opposite of a seed, i.e., a tree. The process that is translated into English as negation is "aufheben", which in Hegel's usage includes the notions of preserved, cancelled and lifted up to a higher level. The seed is preserved in the tree but cancelled in that it is no longer a seed; it has progressed, lifted itself up to a higher stage of development. Put in the context of his truth-conception, the truth of the seed is that it is becoming a tree.
Hegel criticized the Enlightenment for its static understanding of the objects of human perception. His concept of dynamic development was no doubt heavily influenced by the emerging scientific developments in electricity, magnetism and power. Hegel believed in Reason, as the Enlightement did. He saw the Enlightenment's concept of Reason as manifesting itself in history in the form of the French Revolution, which showed the positive as well as harmful, inhuman side of the goal of the rule of Reason. Hegel and other classical German philosophers, including Friedrich Schleiermacher in his philosophy and theology, sought to ground Reason and the application of Reason to human affairs in a more comprehensive understanding of natural and human processes.
This aspect of Hegel's philosophy that both valued the application of Reason but was also conscious of its limitations was important to Horkheimer's materialist philosophy.
The unity of philosophy and science is something Horkheimer's materialism also includes. He argues that much of the scientific philosophy of the 19th century suffered from a mechanical concept of nature inherited from the Enlightenment. He also discusses this differences of his concept from the transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the naturalistic philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
In "Materialsmus und Moral" ("Materialism and Ethics"), Horkheimer discusses the ways in which ethics can be founded on the basis of materialistic philosophy. In this brief essay, he discusses the evolution of the Western philosophical concept of ethics. He argues that even St. Augustine was doubtly that social ethics could be founded purely on the basis of the Christian faith. He sees Kant's categorical imperative as the "purest expression" of the capitalist (bourgeois) outlook on ethics as founded on law. Horkheimer argues that the core ethical imperative of the capitalist age was the motion that good of society as a whole was best served by each person striving as best he can for the accumulation of wealth and property. Kant's categorial imperative served to encourage and defend that motive by establishing it in the form of natural law.
The fundamental social drawback of this approach shows itself in inability of society as a whole to plan for its needs, a failing which was very painfully obvious during the Great Depression when this essay was written.
Horkheimer stresses that his materialism does not see ethics "as mere ideology in the sense of false consciousness." He critiques the ethics of the modern capitalist age in the form of criticizing various aspects of Kant's philosophy. And he argues that Hegel adopted Kant's essential approach to ethics.
Horkheimer's materialism points to the overcoming of the capitalist sense of ethics which results in social chaos and negative consequences at the level of society as a whole. He argues that ethics as such needs to be ultimately founded on realistic psychology, not on religion or philosophical reason. But he also clearly sees this as needing to occur in the context of social justice, which addresses the severe inequality which capitalism exacerbates.
The following is from the English-language synopsis provided with the article:
Bourgeois morality already contains within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. It indicates a society in which duty and interest are no longer separate. This tendency in ethics becomes manifest, not only in Kant, but also in other great philosophers of bourgeois society. With the development of the latter the ideas of Justice, Equality, and Freedom acquire a content other than that they seem to have possessed in their genesis, and today require that change in conditions, to effect which, they were originally introduced. This dialectical process is one of the causes of the present-day philosophical uncertainty. ...Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school
The two main forms in which contemporary ethics expresses itself, are according to H[orkheimer] pity and politics, which cannot indeed, in a rational way, be connected one to the other. Both arise out of a moral sentiment, This moral impulse is active not only in practical life, but also in knowledge. Philosophical materialism denies the possibility of completely objective knowledge : men's interests find expression also in their cognition. Indeed, however sublime these interests are, they do not spring from „free" beings, as idealism maintains, but are the necessary results of historical processes.
Accordingly, materialism in no way claims for knowledge, freedom from all subjective valuations, but only that a consideration for truth, remain the dominant characteristic.
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