It may seem surprising that a materialist thinking with a decidedly anticlerical/antireligious bent like Max Horkheimer should be defending metaphysics as he does in that quote. But in "Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik" [The latest attack on metaphysics] Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 1/1937, that's exactly what he does.
In particular, he is focusing here on philosophic claims that try to limit philosophy and science to quantitative, formally logical and narrowly empiricist views. A big part of the Frankfurt School viewpoint, which Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse would define in the following two numbers of the as "critical theory", was to argue that philosophy and science should both be understood in their social contexts and also that they should apply a genuine critical view to the facts they examine. Especially in aspects of science and philosophy that dealt with social and political issues, theory should look for the possibilities of improvements that make the lives of human being more free, more secure and more just.
Horkheimer in this essay uses the German term Wissenschaft, which means science but in which he includes philosophy as a scientific way of thinking. Rather than use "science and philosophy" in these comments, I'll use "Science" to indicate the meaning he gives to the word in this essay.
The urgent awareness of the growing power of Hitler Germany and the seemingly sinking probability of a near-term internal change of regime in Germany is very clear in this essay. Not dominant perhaps, but clearly hanging over the entire academic, philosophical analysis as an immediate example of how badly developments in capitalist society could go.
Horkheimer gives a relatively accessible example; accessibility is always relative in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung. And the example has to do with relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity:
Die Realtivitätstheorie ist ein wichtiger Faktor bei der Umstrukturierung der Erfahrung, wenn man die Vorstellungswelt des alltäglichen Lebens mit hinzurechnet. Innerhalb ihres eignen Gebiets, der Physik, bleibt freilich die Empirie, sofern man sie vom Denken isoliert, derselben Art wie auf dem früheren Stand der Forschung, nämlich ein Inbegriff "atomischer" Wahrnehmungen. Dies liegt im Wesen der Physik als isolierter Disziplin und tut der Bedeutung ihrer Theorie nicht den leisesten Abbruch – nur der empiristischen Logik, die solche Leistungen in gehörigem Abstand von individualler Existenz und gesellschaftlicher Praxis betrachtet und dann bestimmte Momente an ihren zum Prototyp der Erkenntnis macht.Horkheimer in that example was pointing to the theory of relativity as being what scientific theories actually are, a framework for describing known phenomena. But it's a framework that looks at relationships and draws logical conclusions from them. Einstein's theory is based on observations and on extensive mathematical calculations. He certainly didn’t cook them up from visions in his head or find them written on golden plates buried in the woods, although the special and general theories of relativity certainly required imagination. But he also drew inferences from what Hegelians might say lay "behind" the known facts. He described black holes, for instance, as a theoretical necessity. Only decades later were black holes confirmed to exist from far more specific observations made possibility by better measuring devices.
[The theory of relativity is an important factor in the restructuring of experience, if one adds in the world of ideas belonging to everyday life. Inside its own field, physics, of course the empiricism remains the same type as it was at the earlier level of research, so far as one isolates it from thought, namely, the incorporation of "atomistic" perceptions. That lies in the nature of physics as an isolated discipline and makes not the slightest truncation of the meaning of its meaning – only the empiricist logic that views such achievements in relative distance from individual existence and social practice and then makes particular moments in them into prototypes of perception.]
But a physicist can make calculations and record observations without immediate reference to the curve of spacetime or the existence of black holes. On the other hand, a narrow empiricism can't get much beyond compilation and classification. Up to a point, narrow empiricism can co-exist with the theory of relativity. But you can’t get to the theory of relativity from narrow empiricism.
In the postwar German Democratic Republic (DDR; Communist East Germany), the science of physics was actually significantly hindered by a philosophical controversy over the thought of Hegel. (!!!) The official Soviet line required a rejection of Hegelian thought as a lot of reactionary Prussianism, in contrast to the prewar position that recognized Hegel's significance, at least as a predecessor of Marxist thought. In opposition to Hegel's concepts of perception, the official line declared the position Lenin laid out in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) and other, earlier scientific concepts of Frederick Engels to be beyond challenge. In practice, that worked out to a narrow empiricism that would have required the rejection of both quantum physics (which includes the inter-relationship between subject and object as Hegel assumed on different grounds) and Einstein’s theory of relativity (because it assumed a finite universe, something Engels had rejected). The East German physicist Robert Havemann, who became a leading democratic dissident in the DDR, later declared that the successful physicists he knew in the Soviet Union quietly disregarded much of the official position on those questions. They had to, if they wanted to deal with the physics of atomic power and space travel.
Thinkers that Horkheimer discusses as examples of the positivist, logical empiricist camp include Friedrich Adler (1879-1960); Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945); Ernst Mach (1838 –1916); Max Planck (1858-1947); Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953); Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970); the logical positivist Vienna Circle of philosophers including Hans Hahn (1879-1934), Otto Neurath (1882- 1945), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and Moritz Schlick (1882-1916); and, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). These thinkers were not all reactionaries, by any means. Friedrich Adler was a Social Democratic Member of Parliament in Austria, who had gone to prison for shooting the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Minister-President Graf Stürgkh in 1916.
Horkheimer focuses on the limitations of what he sees as the narrow empiricism of their philosophies. Points out that one trend of metaphysical thinking, the neoromantics who celebrated race and nation as vital entities overruling reason, contributed in its own way to the rise of reactionary thinking which included the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Horkheimer writes that the neoromantics sought to resolve "the contradictions of modern consciousness" and bring "unity and harmony" to it. And in their quest to do so, they sought to discredit Science as such.
Horkheimer doesn’t specify particular advocates of the neo-Romantic school. But one such pro-Nazi was Hans Heyse (1891-1976), whose book Idee und Existenz (1935) was reviewed by Karl Löwith in ZfS 1/1936. At that time, Heyse was Rector of the University of Königsburg.
The logical positivists, on the other, insisted on the value of individual branches of professional knowledge (Fachwissenschaft) as a way to achieve the same end, the discrediting of Science in the larger sense. This viewpoint "romanticizes the professional branches of knowledge". The tendency of logical positivism to minutely define what is and isn't a legitimate part of their particular branch of knowledge – a frustrating habit that I remember well from my long-ago undergraduate encounter with Wittgenstein's work – Horkheimer rather grumpily calls the vocabulary of closed worldview "to which one clings like the modern European and American Buddhists or Christian Science cling to their own special formulas and ways of speaking". He argues of logical empiricism that this kind of thinking in terms of mathematical calculation is "suited for a type of people who are still relatively powerless", i.e., a passive way of thinking.
Both neoromanticism, which he calls "pre-authoritarian metaphysics", and logical empiricism share a deep pessimism about human society, even though the one claims to base itself on an unchangeable notion of Being (existence, Sein) and the other on a narrow empiricism and formal logic. Even more grumpily, Horkheimer writes of the two viewpoints, "They are against thinking, whether it be with reason looking forward or with metaphysics looking backward." That is also his meaning in the quote that opens these comments.
Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School viewed themselves as materialist thinkers. As he says here, "Science (Wissenschaft) is largely itself criticism of metaphysics." But what they valued in metaphysics was its assumption that truth involved more than cataloguing observations. Meaning and trends lay behind observable reality and part of the task of Science was to look for those larger if hidden realities, just as observing stars and planets and comets don't eliminate the need for the theory of relativity to explain larger interconnections and relationships between observed empirical realities in physics. As he puts it, "Construction and representation are their own moments of perception in connection with research."
And he writes:
Die Verteidigung der Wissenscaft gegen die Theologie mittels erkenntsnistheoretische und logischer Argumente war fortschrittlich im siebzehhnten Jahrhundert, die Philosophen machten sich zum Anwalt eines Faktors der neuen gesellschaftlichen Lebensweise.He refers here to the development of Enlightenment ideas and modern science as both a result and a contributing cause to the transition from feudal to capitalist society. He continues in a stereotypically long German sentence:
[Defending Science against theology using perceptual-theoretical and logical arguments was progressive in the 17th century. [And in doing so] the philosophers made themselves into advocates of a factor of the new social way of life.]
In unseren Tage, in denen diese geschichtliche Form ihre Bedeutung für die Menschen längst geändert hat, immer noch zu meinen, das ihr zugehörige Fachwissen und der Betrieb seiner Herstellung sei die einzig legitime intellektuelle Betätigung, und was über sie hinausgehe, sei prinzipiell Theologie oder sonst ein transzendenter Glaube, oder die krasse Reaktion und Sinnwidrigkeit, zu meinen, der entscheindende Gegensatz habe sich nicht verschoben und sei nach wie vor und in derselben Schattierung Wissenschaft contra Metaphysik und Metaphysik contra Wissenschaft zutage gefördert ist, setzt eine unendlich einfache Ansicht der historischen Situation voraus.Horkheimer saw the prime enemy of Science as the established order that seeks to distort it in service of existing social relations and prevent the limitations of the current order to be overcome in a better one. At one level, Horkheimer is referring here to the Marxist notion of the development of socialism as a higher form of society out of capitalism. But in a more immediate sense, he spoke of the overcoming of the grimmest forms of capitalism: National Socialism in Germany, Fascism in Italy, the Standestaat (clerical-fascist) regime in Austria.
[In our days, in which this social form has long since changed its meaning for humanity, to still think that the specialized knowledge to which it belongs and its establishment is the only legitimate intellectual activity, and that whatever goes beyond it is principally theology or else a transcendental faith or the crassest reaction and nonsense, to believe that the decisive contradiction has not shifted and is still now promoted as before in the same shade of science against metaphysics and metaphysics against science, assumes an incredibly simplistic view of the historical situation.]
He argues that the value-free pretensions of logical empiricism are themselves illusory:
Die zielsetzenden Mächte bedienen sich des Denkens, das auf jede bestimmende Rolle verzichtet hat. Und die Gelehrten, in deren allgemein gesunkener sozialer Geltung dieser Zustand einen genauen Ausdruck findet, bescheiden sich dabei und verspechen, sich an solche Ordnung der Dinge zu halten, indem sie den Verzicht, in den einzelnen Schritten der theoretischen Relexion auch zu wissen, wohin sie laufen soll, gehorsam als Sauberkeit, wissenschaftliche Strenge oder sonstwie hinstellen, ähnlich wie dei Bürger eines schlecten Staates ihre schweigende Duldung der Tyrannei als Treue und Loyalität.There is a thin line between of the phenomenon of “inner immigration” during the Third Recih - which refers not to people moving around but to a withdrawal into personal life and unexpressed dissent – and the kind of “silent tolerance of tyranny” that Horkheimer discusses here. A similar situation could be seen among whites in the American Deep South during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.
[The powers who establish the goals are served by the thinking that has renounced that decisive role. And the scholars, in whose generally lowered social prestige one finds a precise expression of this condition, humble themselves thereby and promise to support such an order of thing, in that they renounce in their own writings of theoretical reflection even to know toward where they should run: obedience as cleanliness, postulating scientific rigor or however, just as the citizens of a bad state represent their silent tolerance of tyranny as fidelity and loyalty.]
And Horkheimer writes of both neo-Romantic metaphysics and logical empiricism:
Das Bekenntnis, dass man damit nichts anzufangen wisse und sich an die Tatsachen halten solle, der Vorsatz der Wissenschaft, keinen wesentlichen Unterschied zu machen zwischen der Verschwörung brutaler Machthaber gegen jede menschliche Aspiration auf Glück und Freiheit und andererseits dem Kampfe dagegen, dies ganze Philosophie, die beides bloss auf den abstrakten Begriff des Gegebenen bringt und diese Haltung auch noch als Objektivität verherrlicht, ist auch den übelsten Gewalten noch willkommen.For Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, the purpose of Science is not only to provide technical mastery over nature, but also to provide thinking that allows people to understand the world and societies in which they are living. The then-contemporary existence of the Third Reich and its durability far beyond the relatively short time that the Frankfurt School thinkers including Horkheimer had tended to expect gives a particular pungency to arguments like this.
[The confession that one thereby will not start learning something new and should just stick with the facts, the intention of Science to make not distinction between the conspiracy of brutal holders of power against every human aspiration for happiness and freedom, on the one hand, and the struggles against them, on the other, this whole philosophy that brings both into the abstract concept of given conditions and glorifying this stance as objectivity – that is also welcome to the most evil forces.]
Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, max horkheimer
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