Horkheimer brought to their deliberations a growing identification with socialism without any particular party affiliation, combined with a strong commitment to academic studies, which manifested itself in a successful philosophical apprenticeship first with Edmund Husserl in Freiburg and then Hans Cornelius in Frankfurt. Although not as wealthy as Hermann Weil, Horkheimer’s father, Moritz, was a successful factory owner from Stuttgart and a liberal assimilated Jew who patriotically supported the German war effort. His mother was entirely devoted to domestic pursuits, the most avid of which, by all reports, was providing her only son with unconditional love. Trained to succeed his father at the factory, the young Horkheimer was, however, motivated more by aesthetic yearnings than commercial ones. Although growing increasingly alienated from his parents’ values, he never broke with them personally, even when they disapproved of his love for the “unsuitable” woman he eventually married and objected to his academic career. Through the lifelong friendship he began at the age of sixteen in 1911 with Pollock, also the son of an assimilated Jewish industrialist, Horkheimer seems to have found a microcosmic foretaste of the egalitarian community of like-minded souls for which he clearly yearned.25 Although a sympathetic observer of the political turmoil after the war, he merely watched the events unfolding in Munich with the group around radical bohemian photographer Germaine Krull rather than participating directly in them. Nor was he swept up in the quest for religious authenticity that would inspire future Institute colleagues like Leo Löwenthal and Erich Fromm, who were for a while part of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus directed by Franz Rosenzweig.
During the Institute’s first few years, when Carl Grünberg served as director and its focus was on the history of the labor movement, Horkheimer was occupied primarily with his university studies, working with mentors like Cornelius and Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb. However, he resisted becoming absorbed into the world of academic careerism, which Fritz Ringer would later call the realm of German mandarins in decline.26 As Adorno recollected about his first encounter with Horkheimer in Gelb’s seminar, he was “not affected by the professional deformity of the academic, who all-too-easily confuses the occupation with scholarly things with reality.”27 In addition to his more scholarly writings, he wrote a steady stream of aphoristic ruminations that only appeared pseudonymously in 1934 under the ambiguous title Dämmerung, which means both “dawn” and “twilight.” Wrestling with a number of issues—the relationship between theoretical and practical reason, the materialist underpinnings of philosophy, the complex interaction of theory and empirical research, the contribution psychoanalysis might make to social theory—Horkheimer came to the conclusion that only interdisciplinary work guided by a common goal might provide answers to questions that traditional scholarship and conventional politics had failed to address. When the opportunity came to replace Grünberg as Institute director following his debilitating stroke in 1928, Horkheimer was ready to launch an ambitious program whose outlines he spelled out in the inaugural address he gave in 1931 on “The Current Condition of Social Philosophy and the Task of an Institute of Social Research.”28 Two years earlier, Weil had succeeded in convincing the minister of education to transfer Grünberg’s chair in political science, originally endowed by his father, to one in social philosophy. Horkheimer, author of a newly published Habilitationschrift titled The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History, was selected to fill it and assumed the directorship in January 1931.
From this very sketchy portrait of Horkheimer, whose acceptance of the directorship might be considered more properly the origin of the Frankfurt School than of the Institute of Social Research, it is clear that the institutional founding of Critical Theory was as scattered, uneven and diffuse as its theoretical point d’appui. Financially, it was dependent on the inadvertent largess of the class whose hegemony it sought to undermine. Politically, it kept its distance from the parties or movements that might provide the historical agency to realize its hopes. Academically, it was only obliquely integrated into a university system whose advocacy of scholarly neutrality and disinterested research it could not embrace. Personally, its leadership was unsettled and uncertain, at least initially. Even its name—the bland “Institute of Social Research”—covered over its deeper agenda expressed in an earlier candidate, “Institute for Marxism,” which had been rejected as too provocative.29
Although for some unfriendly commentators, such as Brecht, these anomalies smacked of hypocrisy and self-deception, it might be more useful to see them as enacting the very uneasiness with seeking a firm theoretical ground that also eluded Critical Theory. In fact, over time, the very need for an explicit foundation from which critique might be launched lost its exigency. Instead, the search for origins as ground from which thinking might securely begin became itself an explicit target of Critical Theory. In his consideration of phenomenology, Adorno condemned the quest for an “ur” moment from which all else followed. “The concept of the absolutely first,” he wrote in his book on Husserl, “must itself come under critique.”30 Whether it be the concept of Being or the priority of the Subject, philosophies that sought a first principle—prima philosophia or Ursprungsphilosophien—were guilty of privileging one moment in a totality of relations that could only be entered in medias res. Dialectics, even negative ones, understood that nothing was ever immediate and logically prior to the mediation of the whole.
The search for foundations and origins, the Frankfurt School came to argue, is not only problematic from a purely theoretical point of view; it is also politically suspect. As Adorno made clear in Minima Moralia, particularly in the aphorism “Gold Assay” and later in Jargon of Authenticity, there was a sinister link between prioritizing the assertion of origins and the fascist cult of blood and soil.31 The search for authenticity and genuineness contains the “notion of the supremacy of the original over the derived. This notion, however, is always linked with social legitimation. All ruling strata claim to be the oldest settlers, autochthonous.”32 Here the angry voice of the exile, expelled from any connection to his original home, can be heard, but there were earlier sources for Critical Theory’s distrust of foundationalist claims, both historical and philosophical.
Although the evidence for it is largely conjectural and indirect, a hitherto underappreciated stimulus to resist first philosophies and immanentist holism may paradoxically have been the idealism of Schelling, who was particularly aware of the function of an Ungrund or Abgrund in resisting totalizing rationalism.33 For those who identify Critical Theory as a variant of Hegelian Marxism or who know the Frankfurt School’s critique of Schelling only from Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, such a suggestion will seem implausible. In that 1941 work, Schelling was identified, along with Auguste Comte, as the exemplar of a “positive philosophy” that sought to undermine the critical impulse in Hegel’s “negative philosophy.” Despite their differences, Marcuse charged, “there is a common tendency in both philosophies to counter the sway of apriorism and to restore the authority of experience,”34 which meant a rejection of metaphysical rationalism. From Marcuse’s essentially Hegelian Marxist point of view, the political implications of both kinds of “positive philosophy” were affirmative, even reactionary, as evidenced by the inspiration Schelling provided to conservative theorists like Friedrich Joseph Stahl. Understood as an episodic defender of intuition against reason, nature against history and art against politics, Schelling seems an unlikely inspiration for Horkheimer and his colleagues.
But the younger Schelling, the one who collaborated with Hegel on the posthumously discovered fragment “The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism”35 and resisted Fichte’s excessive reliance on the constitutive subject (on which he had himself once relied), was a very different story. Although he initially embraced the challenge laid down by Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Solomon Maimon to generate a meta-critical, phenomenological foundation for systematic philosophy that would surpass the limits of Kant’s cautious transcendentalism, Schelling, who gave up publishing his work after 1812, came to understand how difficult squaring that circle would be.36 As remarked by no less a commentator than Jürgen Habermas, who had written his dissertation