The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
as the positivists believed, which were the substratum of a social theory. Instead, there was a constant interplay of particular and universal, of “moment”* and totality. As Lukács had written in History and Class Consciousness:
To leave empirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood as objects of a totality, i.e., as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change. Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the empirical world, and as such it is not something (subjective) foisted onto the objects from outside, it is no value-judgment or “ought” opposed to their “is.” It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure.54
Moreover, the relationship between the totality and its moments was reciprocal. Vulgar Marxists had been mistaken in seeking a reductionist derivation of superstructural, cultural phenomena from their substructural, socio-economic base. Culture, Horkheimer and his colleagues argued, was never epiphenomenal, although it was never fully autonomous. Its relationship to the material substructure of society was multidimensional. All cultural phenomena must be seen as mediated through the social totality, not merely as the reflection of class interests. This meant that they also expressed the contradictions of the whole, including those forces that negated the status quo. Nothing, or at least almost nothing, was solely ideological.55
In so arguing, it might be added, Horkheimer was closer to Marx himself than the self-styled Marxists who claimed to be orthodox. When discussing the bourgeois state, for example, Marx had not interpreted it solely as the “executive committee of the ruling class,” but also as an adumbration, albeit distorted, of the reconciliation of social contradictions that the triumph of the proletariat was to bring about.56 Engels, likewise, when discussing Realism in literature, had shown an appreciation for the progressive elements in ostensibly reactionary writers like Balzac, because of their ability to portray the concrete totality with all its contradictions. The Institut’s extensive work on aesthetic and cultural matters was rooted in the same assumption.
In stressing the totality, Horkheimer correspondingly criticized other social theorists for concentrating on one facet of reality to the exclusion of the others. This led to one of the methodological fallacies the Frankfurt School most frequently attacked: fetishization. More orthodox Marxists within the Institut, such as the economist Henryk Grossmann, were always criticized for their overemphasis on the material substructure of society. The composition of the Institut, with its deliberate diversification of fields, reflected the importance Critical Theory placed on the totality of dialectical mediations, which had to be grasped in the process of analyzing society.
Horkheimer’s stress on dialectics also extended to his understanding of logic. Although rejecting the extravagant ontological claims Hegel had made for his logical categories, he agreed with the need for a substantive, rather than merely formal, logic. In Dämmerung Horkheimer wrote: “Logic is not independent of content. In face of the reality that what is inexpensive for the favored part of humanity remains unattainable for the others, nonpartisan logic would be as nonpartisan as a book of laws that is the same for all.”57 Formalism, characteristic of bourgeois law (the ideal of the Rechtsstaat, which meant 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