The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
contained in religion, he was later to argue,25 has a chimerical quality. The image of complete justice “can never be realized in history because even when a better society replaces the present disorder and is developed, past misery would not be made good and the suffering of surrounding nature not transcended.”26 As a result, philosophy as he understood it always expresses an unavoidable note of sadness, but without succumbing to resignation.
Yet although Horkheimer attacked Hegel’s identity theory, he felt that nineteenth-century criticism of a similar nature had been carried too far. In rejecting the ontological claims Hegel had made for his philosophy of Absolute Spirit, the positivists had robbed the intellect of any right to judge what was actual as true or false.* Their overly empirical bias led to the apotheosis of facts in a way that was equally one-sided. From the first, Horkheimer consistently rejected the Hobson’s choice of metaphysical systematizing or antinomian empiricism. Instead, he argued for the possibility of a dialectical social science that would avoid an identity theory and yet preserve the right of the observer to go beyond the givens of his experience. It was in large measure this refusal to succumb to the temptations of either alternative that gave Critical Theory its cutting edge.
Horkheimer’s hostility to metaphysics was partly a reaction to the sclerosis of Marxism produced by its transformation into a body of received truths. But beyond this, it reflected the influence of his readings in non-Hegelian and non-Marxist philosophy. Schopenhauer’s extreme skepticism about the possibility of reconciling reason with the world of will certainly had its effect. More important still was the impact of three late nineteenth-century thinkers, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson, all of whom had emphasized the relation of thought to human life.
To Horkheimer,27 the Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) they helped create had expressed a legitimate protest against the growing rigidity of abstract rationalism, and the concomitant standardization of individual existence that characterized life under advanced capitalism. It had pointed an accusing finger at the gap between the promises of bourgeois ideology and the reality of everyday life in bourgeois society. The development of the philosophy of life, he argued, corresponded to a fundamental change in capitalism itself. The earlier optimistic belief of certain classical idealists in the unity of reason and reality had corresponded to the individual entrepreneur’s acceptance of harmony between his own activities and the functioning of the economy as a whole. The erosion of that conviction corresponded to the growth of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century, in which the individual’s role was more overwhelmed by the totality than harmonized with it.28 Lebensphilosophie was basically a cry of outrage against this change. Because of this critical element, Horkheimer was careful to distinguish the “irrationalism”29 of the philosophers of life from that of their twentieth-century vulgarizers.
In the 1930’s, he argued, attacks on reason were designed to reconcile men to the irrationality of the prevailing order.30 The so-called tragic outlook on life was really a veiled justification for the acceptance of unnecessary misery. Leben and Dienst (service) had come to be synonymous. What was once critical had now become ideological. This was also true of the attack on science, which, in the hands of the first generation of Lebensphilosophen, had been a justified corrective to the pretensions of seientism, but which by the 1930’s had degenerated into an indiscriminate attack on the validity of scientific thought as such. “The philosophic dismissal of science,” he wrote in 1937, “is a comfort in private life, in society a lie.”31
In seeing the irrationalism of the thirties basically as an ideology of passivity,32 Horkheimer neglected its dynamic and destructive sides, which the Nazis were able to exploit. This was a blind spot in his analysis. But in another way he enriched the discussion of its historical development. In distinguishing between different types of irrationalism, Horkheimer broke with the tradition of hostility towards Lebensphilosophie maintained by almost all Marxist thinkers, including the later Lukács.33 In addition to approving of its antisystematic impulse, Horkheimer gave qualified praise to the emphasis on the individual in the work of both Dilthey and Nietzsche. Like them, he believed in the importance of individual psychology for an understanding of history.34 While their work in this area was less subtle than the psychoanalysis he hoped to integrate with Critical Theory, he considered it far more useful than the bankrupt utilitarianism that informed liberalism and orthodox Marxism.
What became clear, however, in Horkheimer’s discussion of Dilthey’s methodology35 was his rejection of a purely psychological approach to historical explanation. Dilthey’s notion of a Verstehende Geisteswissenschaft (a social science based on its own methods of understanding and reexperiencing, rather than on those of the natural sciences) did, to be sure, contain a recognition of the meaningfulness of historical structures, which Horkheimer could share. What he rejected was the assumption that this meaning could be intuitively grasped by the historian reexperiencing his subject matter in his own mind. Underlying this notion, he argued, was a Hegelian-like belief in the identity of subject and object. The data of the inner life were not enough to mirror the significant structure of the past, because that past had not always been made consciously by men. Indeed, it was generally made “behind the backs and against the wills” of individuals, as Marx had pointed out. That this need not always be the case was another matter. In fact, Vico was one of Horkheimer’s early intellectual heroes;36 and it was Vico who had first argued that men might understand history better than nature because men made history, whereas God made nature. This, however, was a goal, not a reality. If anything, Horkheimer noted pessimistically, the trend in modern life was away from the conscious determination of historical events rather than towards it. History, therefore, could not simply be “understood,” as he claimed Dilthey had hoped, but had to be “explained” instead. Horkheimer did, however, hold out some hope for the attainment of the social conditions that would make Dilthey’s methodological vision viable.
Horkheimer’s admiration for Nietzsche was equally mixed. In 1935 he argued that Nietzsche was a genuine bourgeois philosopher, as demonstrated by his overemphasis on individualism and his blindness to social questions.37 Still, Horkheimer was quick to defend Nietzsche against those who sought to reconcile him with the irrationalists of the 1930’s. In a long review of Karl Jaspers’s study of Nietzsche38 he castigated the author for trying to “domesticate” Nietzsche for völkisch (populist nationalist) and religious consumption. What he valued most in Nietzsche’s work was its uncompromisingly critical quality. On the question of certain knowledge, for example, he applauded Nietzsche’s statement that a “great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.”39
Horkheimer also was impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of the masochistic quality of traditional Western morality. He had been the first to note, Horkheimer approvingly commented,40 how misery could be transformed into a social norm, as in the case of asceticism, and how that norm had permeated Western culture through the “slave morality” of Christian ethics.41 When it came to the more questionable aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, Horkheimer tended to mitigate their inadequacies. The naive glorification of the “superman” he explained away by calling it the price of isolation. Nietzsche’s hostility to the goal of a classless society he excused on the grounds that its only champions in Nietzsche’s day were the Social Democrats, whose mentality was as pedestrian and uninspired as Nietzsche had claimed. In fact, Horkheimer argued, Nietzsche had been perceptive in refusing to romanticize the working classes, who were even in his time beginning to be diverted from their revolutionary role by the developing mass culture. Where Nietzsche had failed, however, was in his ahistorical belief that democratization inevitably meant the dilution of true culture. He was also deficient in misunderstanding the historical nature of labor, which he absolutized as immutable in order to justify his elitist conclusions. In short, Horkheimer contended that Nietzsche, who had done so much to reveal the historical roots of bourgeois morality, had himself fallen prey to ahistorical thinking.
Towards the third great exponent of Lebensphilosophie and one of the Institut’s actual sponsors in Paris, Henri Bergson, Horkheimer was somewhat more critical.42 Although recognizing the trenchant arguments in Bergson’s critique of abstract rationalism, he questioned the metaphysical yearnings he detected