The Dialectical Imagination. Martin Jay
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Marxists had traditionally felt, in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.
In their attempt to achieve a new perspective that might make the new situation intelligible, in a framework that was still fundamentally Marxist, the members of the Frankfurt School were fortunate in having had philosophical training outside the Marxist tradition. Like other twentieth-century contributors to the revitalization of Marxism—Lukács, Gramsci, Bloch, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—they were influenced at an early stage in their careers by more subjectivist, even idealist philosophies. Horkheimer, who set the tone for all of the Institut’s work, had been interested in Schopenhauer and Kant before becoming fascinated with Hegel and Marx. His expression of interest in Schopenhauer in the 1960’s,7 contrary to what is often assumed, was thus a return to an early love, rather than an apostasy from a life-long Hegelianized Marxism. In fact the first book in philosophy Horkheimer actually read was Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,8 which Pollock gave him when they were studying French together in Brussels before the war. Both he and Lowenthal were members of the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft at Frankfurt in their student days. Horkheimer was also very much interested in Kant at that time; his first published work was an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, written for his Habilitation under Hans Cornelius in 1925.9
If Horkheimer can be said to have had a true mentor, it was Hans Cornelius. As Pollock, who also studied under Cornelius, remembers it, his “influence on Horkheimer can hardly be overestimated.”10 This seems to have been true more from a personal than a theoretical point of view. Although difficult to classify, Cornelius’s philosophical perspective was antidogmatic, opposed to Kantian idealism, and insistent on the importance of experience. His initial writings showed the influence of Avenarius and Mach, but in his later work he moved away from their empiriocriticism and closer to a kind of phenomenology.11 When Horkheimer became his student, Cornelius was at the height of his career, a “passionate teacher . . . in many ways the opposite of the current image of a German university professor,, and in strong opposition to most of his colleagues.”12
Although the young Horkheimer seems to have absorbed his teacher’s critical stance, little of the substance of Cornelius’s philosophy remained with him, especially after his interest was aroused by readings in Hegel and Marx. What does appear to have made an impact were Cornelius’s humanistic cultural concerns. Born in 1863 in Munich into a family of composers, painters, and actors, Cornelius continued to pursue aesthetic interests throughout his life. Talented both as a sculptor and a painter, he made frequent trips to Italy, where he became expert in both classical and Renaissance art. In 1908 he published a study of The Elementary Laws of Pictorial Art,13 and during the war he ran art schools in Munich.
Horkheimer was also certainly attracted by Cornelius’s progressive political tendencies. Cornelius was an avowed internationalist and had been an opponent of the German war effort. Although no Marxist, he was considered an outspoken radical by the more conservative members of the Frankfurt faculty. What also doubtless made its impact on Horkheimer was his cultural pessimism, which he combined with his progressive politics. As Pollock recalls, “Cornelius never hesitated to confess openly his convictions and his despair about present-day civilization.”14 A sample of the almost apocalyptic tone he adopted, which was of course shared by many in Weimar’s early days, can be found in the autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1923:
Men have unlearned the ability to recognize the Godly in themselves and in things: nature and art, family and state have only interest for them as sensations. Therefore their lives flow meaninglessly by, and their shared culture is inwardly empty and will collapse because it is worthy of collapse. The new religion, however, which mankind needs, will first emerge from the ruins of this culture.15
The young Horkheimer was less eager to embrace so Spenglerian a prognosis, but in time Cornelius’s appraisal of the situation increasingly became his own. In the twenties, however, he was still caught up by the revolutionary potential of the working class. Accordingly, his analysis of The Critique of Judgment showed little evidence of resignation or despair; instead, it demonstrated his conviction that praxis could overcome the contradictions of the social order, while at the same time leading to a cultural renewal. From Kant, however, he took certain convictions that he would never abandon.
Horkheimer’s reading of Kant helped increase his sensitivity to the importance of individuality, as a value never to be submerged entirely under the demands of the totality. It also heightened his appreciation of the active elements in cognition, which prevented his acceptance of the copy theory of perception advocated by more orthodox Marxists. What it did not do, however, was to convince him of the inevitability of those dualisms—phenomena and noumena, pure and practical reason, for example—that Kant had posited as insurmountable. In concluding his study, Horkheimer made it clear that although these antagonisms had not yet been overcome, he saw no necessary reason why they could not be. Kant’s fundamental duality between will and knowledge, practical and pure reason, could and must be reconciled.16 In so arguing, Horkheimer demonstrated the influence of Hegel’s critique of Kant on his own. Like Hegel, he saw cognitive knowledge and normative imperatives, the “is” and the “ought,” as ultimately inseparable.
Because of this and other similarities with Hegel on such questions as the nature of reason, the importance of dialectics, and the existence of a substantive logic, it is tempting to characterize Critical Theory as no more than a Hegelianized Marxism.17 And yet, on several fundamental issues, Horkheimer always maintained a certain distance from Hegel. Most basic was his rejection of Hegel’s metaphysical intentions and his claim to absolute truth. “I do not know,” he wrote in Dämmerung, “how far metaphysicians are correct; perhaps somewhere there is a particularly compelling metaphysical system or fragment. But I do know that metaphysicians are usually impressed only to the smallest degree by what men suffer.”18 Moreover, a system that tolerated every opposing view as part of the “total truth” had inevitably quietistic implications.19 An all-embracing system like Hegel’s might well serve as a theodicy justifying the status quo. In fact, to the extent that Marxism had been ossified into a system claiming the key to truth, it too had fallen victim to the same malady. The true object of Marxism, Horkheimer argued,20 was not the uncovering of immutable truths, but the fostering of social change.
Elsewhere, Horkheimer outlined his other objections to Hegel’s metaphysics.21 His strongest criticism was reserved for perhaps the fundamental tenet of Hegel’s thought: the assumption that all knowledge is self-knowledge of the infinite subject—in other words, that an identity exists between subject and object, mind and matter, based on the ultimate primacy of the absolute subject. “Spirit,” Horkheimer wrote, “may not recognize itself either in nature or in history, because even if the spirit is not a questionable abstraction, it would not be identical with reality.”22 In fact, there is no “thought” as such, only the specific thought of concrete men rooted in their socio-economic conditions. Nor is there “being” as such, but rather a “manifold of beings in the world.”23
In repudiating identity theory, Horkheimer was also implicitly criticizing its reappearance in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. To Lukács, the proletariat functioned both as the subject and the object of history, thus fulfilling the classical German idealist goal of uniting freedom as an objective reality and as something produced by man himself. In later years Lukács was himself to detect the metaphysical premise underlying his assumption of an identical subject-object in history: “The proletariat seen as the identical subject-object of the real history of mankind is no materialist consummation that overcomes the constructions of idealism. It is rather an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel, it is an edifice boldly erected above every possible reality and thus attempts objectively to surpass the Master himself.”24 These words were written in 1967 for a new edition of a work whose arguments Lukács had long ago seen fit to repudiate. His reasons for that self-criticism have been the source of considerable speculation and no less an amount of criticism. Yet, in pointing to the metaphysical core at the center of his argument, he was doing no more than repeating what Horkheimer had said about identity theory almost four decades before.
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