What are the implications of Horkheimer’s delayed insertion in the debate? Can remembering his intervention help counter the still powerful grip of the negative characterization of the exhibition as little more than an exercise in “photographic ideology”? Does his enthusiasm for the exhibition in the specific context of a postwar Germany struggling to move beyond its recent Nazi past and deal with its divided present translate into a more general legitimation of its cultural import and political effect, which can be useful today? Or does the more general attitude of the Frankfurt School toward humanism—which Horkheimer expressed in an essay called “The Concept of Man” just a year before his introduction to the exhibition—suggest a less comfortable fit between his position and that of those seeking to rescue entirely The Family of Man from the charge of photographic ideology?7
The occasion for Horkheimer’s talk—the exhibition’s opening on October 25, 1958, at Frankfurt’s Amerika-Haus, an institution funded by the American government—was hardly auspicious for the full display of his critical skills. Having recently returned to Germany to reestablish the Institut für Sozialforschung, with support enabled by his mutual trust with the enlightened US high commissioner for Germany, John H. McCloy, Horkheimer understood his public mission as a reeducator of Germans, especially youth, in the democratic values he had learned in exile.8 Although in private he maintained many of the darkly pessimistic sentiments and intransigent radicalism he and Theodor W. Adorno had expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment—a work, it should be noted, that remained out of print and absent from public discussion until pirated editions began to be circulated in the 1960s—in public, he was determined to play a constructive role in weaning Germany from the pathologies that had led to the Third Reich.9 In the context of the Cold War, where Horkheimer increasingly came to discern similarities between Stalinism and Nazism, it was clear that he had no hesitation about siding with the West, despite its many defects.10 Horkheimer in fact sought to retain his naturalized American citizenship even as he returned to Europe to live out the remainder of his life. For all his dismay with the culture industry he had witnessed firsthand in exile, he did not hesitate to consider himself an ambassador of the liberal democratic values, however imperfect their actual implementation, he had also absorbed during his sojourn in America.
Horkheimer began his introduction to the exhibition by stressing what he saw as its implicit philosophical point d’appui, which he argued tied together American and European, most notably German idealist, thought. Here, though, his touchstone was not Hegel, and certainly not Marx, but rather Immanuel Kant, who shared with American philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey a strong belief that the individual human being should be treated only as an end and never as a means. If there were a difference between the two traditions, it lay in the additional American assumption, derived from the immigration of people from many different backgrounds, “that there are close ties of kinship between all members of the human race, that there is a brotherhood of mankind.”11 This was a lesson that only an elite of educated Europeans had learned, because of the poison of national enmities.
To make his point, Horkheimer cited the hopeful words of Francis Lieber, whom he identified simply as “a German professor who emigrated to America in the last century”12 to the effect that nationalism might someday be replaced by a single global community. “The Family of Man,” he then argued, “illustrates this way of thinking; indeed it is representative of all the forces that are now counteracting the severe cultural shocks and regressive movements that have occurred in Europe in recent years. In this context it is eminently constructive.”13 Once again turning to Kant to spin out his argument, he evoked the philosopher’s celebrated essay of 1784, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,”14 claiming it provided a model not of the world as it was, but as it might be: “Humanity for Kant was not an entity, a living instance of which had to be found, indeed, not even a form with a content, but a posit that, in connection with other philosophical ideas, underlies much of the historical work of individuals and peoples.”15 An “idea,” we should understand, meant in Kant’s special vocabulary a purely theoretical concept to which no corresponding object could be given in sense experience and for which no synthetic a priori judgment, no cognitive claim, might therefore apply. By invoking it, Horkheimer was making clear what he saw as the regulative, counterfactual, even utopian quality of the notion of a unified humankind. As had Kant, he hoped that it might serve as a telos of human practice rather than a description of what was destined to occur.
However, because it spoke in the vaguest terms about humanity, Horkheimer went on, Kant’s model was far too abstract. Steichen’s exhibition happily provided a corrective to Kant’s abstract notion, and it did so by drawing on photography’s power to represent concrete differences rather than generic identities, the real motley variety of the world rather than a single model of human essence. But, because of the way in which the exhibition had been organized, he said, it transcended the irreconcilability or incommensurability of those differences. On the level of everyday life, it seemed to suggest, people in all cultures faced the same challenges and sought the same solutions. Without intention, the curators “were obeying, possibly without being fully aware of it, an inner logic of the whole, of the way these pictures interact and address one another, which gives them in their entirety a meaningfulness that is difficult to ignore.”16 By showing similarities and the interrelatedness of apparent opposites, the exhibition “tells us that individual human beings within a group and one community of people in relation to another should support each other rather than torment each other and work together to the best of their ability to bring about a world constitution based on reason with which everyone can be satisfied.” Thus, the philosophical and visual ideals are ultimately the same, even though the abstract idea of what Kant would have called “perpetual peace” could not actually be shown as such.
That admirable desideratum was anticipated instead through the way in which the exhibition enabled emotional identification with people of different backgrounds. Mimetic empathy was a path, Horkheimer observed, to the love that binds people together. In that effort, photographs—in fact, images in general—were needed to supplement the abstractions of theoretical concepts:
Even Plato’s Eros force, uplifting the spirit to eternal ideas, needed the knowledge of ephemeral things in order to achieve infinite knowledge, which, for him, is the meaning of all human existence. That is why thought needs the image, that is why the image can lead us to people and things, that is why the image has the valuable and not infrequently also dangerous power that thought alone cannot exert.17
Unlike cinema, photographs allow you to linger with details, discover the unexpected, and disclose the unfamiliar. “Indeed, this is what the exhibition has in common with real artists: it provides us with a new way of looking at things that we will never forget, of however little practical use it may be.”18
Horkheimer finished his introduction to the exhibition by returning to the question of identification. He noted that there was an important exception to the mimetic empathy aroused by Steichen’s selection of photographs that appears in those depicting what he called, once again following Kant, “radical evil.”19 Because the exhibition thwarts such identification in at least two cases—he does not specify the images or spell out exactly how they do so—it “insists on the consciousness of the freedom and the responsibility of the individual.