In his 1959 lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Adorno would continue to denounce the “mania for foundations” (Funderiungswahn) that had led Kant and other philosophers to seek firm ground for their arguments. “This is the belief,” he wrote, “that everything which exists must be derived from something else, something older or more primordial. It is a delusion built on the idealist assumption that every conceivable existent thing can be reduced to mind, or, I almost said, to Being … You should liberate yourselves from this ‘mania for foundations’ and … you should not always feel the need to begin at the very beginning.”60 In Negative Dialectics, he positively cited Ages of the World as an antidote to rationalist consciousness philosophy, noting that “urge, according to Schelling’s insight, is the mind’s preliminary form.”61 Although resisting Schelling’s privileging of intuition above reason, an inclination that Hegel had found particularly disturbing, Adorno did seek a balance between noetic and dianoetic roads to the truth. As Herbert Schnädelbach once noted, Adorno was a “noetic of the non-identical. He always stressed, above all in his remarks on formal logic, that the goal of dianoetic operations was noetic.”62 Accordingly, in his Aesthetic Theory, his debts to Schelling—who, more than any other German idealist, granted a special privilege to the work of art as able to express, indeed to perform, nonidentity in a way that purely discursive (that is, dianoetic) philosophy cannot—have not been hard to find.63
In short, the Frankfurt School’s willingness to live with the abyss—or, more correctly, at its edge—meant that it avoided the problematic reliance on an “expressive” concept of totality, which Hegelian Marxists like Lukács had defended.64 It reflected their recognition that nature could not be subsumed under the rubric of history and that the world of natural objects could not be seen as the projection of a constitutive subject. It allowed them to free critical thought from its dependence on an ur-moment of legitimating empowerment prior to the imperfect present.
Their hesitation before a Hegelian rationalist immanentism that would fold prerational ground into the totality did not, to be sure, mean that they followed Schelling in the direction that Heidegger and others wanted to take him, a direction that could end by celebrating the irrational.65 Not only Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, but also works like Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason testify to their dogged insistence on the critical potential in rationalism. Even when Habermas could jettison the emphatic, still metaphysical concept of reason that had animated the first generation of Critical Theorists, he would warn that “whenever the one is thought of as absolute negativity, as withdrawal and absence, as resistance against propositional speech in general, the ground (Grund) of rationality reveals itself as an abyss (Abgrund) of the irrational.”66 For Habermas, the reliance on a pre-propositional, world-disclosing intuition of the absolute paradoxically led to abandoning the one version of “Grund” that he could support: ground as the giving of reasons. Yet by acknowledging the limits of reason in its more emphatic sense and accepting the legitimate claims of something else—aesthetic experience, mimesis, the unconscious desires of the libido, even the hopes expressed in the idiom of religion—the Frankfurt School understood that living on the edge of the abyss would not be without its benefits.
There is, in short, an unexpected congruence—perhaps better put as a symbolic affinity—between the lack of a secure foundation in the institutional history of the Frankfurt School and its openness to the theoretical lessons of an unexpected influence like Schelling. This is not to say that either can be called the true “origin” of Critical Theory’s suspicion of origins, for to do so would be to undermine precisely the force of their resistance to a firm and stable Grund from which to support critique itself. The Institute’s “founding fathers” seem to have understood that the only viable point d’appui of critique was in the imagination of a possible future rather than a recollected past, a utopian hope rather than a past moment of originary legitimation.
To clarify this point, one might perhaps compare their practice with that of the American founding fathers as interpreted by another German émigré luminary, Hannah Arendt, in On Revolution.67 In this work, Arendt contrasts the attempt to begin ex nihilo in the French Revolution, deriving legitimacy from a Rousseauist sovereign general will, with the American Revolutionaries’ tacit reliance on prior compacts, covenants and precedents. Aligning it more with the Roman Republic, which drew its authority from the earlier founding of Troy, than with the act of creation ex nihilo by the Hebrew God, she argued that the American Revolution did not seek a monolithic foundation, a moment of decisionist legitimation before legality. Power, she argues, “was not only prior to the Revolution, it was in a sense prior to the colonization of the continent. The Mayflower compact was drawn up on the ship and signed upon landing.”68 By placing the act of legitimation in a receding train of possible founding moments, prior even to the colonial settlement out of which the new republic was fashioned, the American experience was one in which the potential for future perfection was as much grounds for critique as any past episode of actual founding.
It is, to be sure, a long way from the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock to the founding of the Institut für Sozialforschung, and perhaps an even longer journey between the Enlightenment hopes of the founding fathers and Schelling’s obscure arguments about the irrational God whose existence cannot be subordinated to his essence. But what these loose comparisons help us understand is that the Abgrund may well be less fatal to Critical Theory—and emancipatory practice—than one might suspect. It alerts us to the anarchic moment—in the sense of lacking an original ur-moment or archē—in Critical Theory, as well as its surprising similarity to Heidegger’s notion of a simultaneous origin that defies a primal ground (Gleichursprünglichkeit).69 It allows us to realize that there may be many different starting points and disparate grounds for critical reflection without searching for the one Archimedean point on which critique must be balanced. It is perhaps symbolically meaningful that the actual location of Weil’s First Marxist Work Week was not a luxurious grand hotel “equipped with every comfort” at the edge of an abyss, but rather a much more modest train station hotel, owned by a Communist named Friedrich Henne, in the small town of Geraberg bei Arnstadt near Ilmenau in Thuringia.70 From such humble origins—although not from them alone—something remarkable came into the world.
The title of this chapter cites a remarkable admission from the preface Horkheimer graciously provided for the first edition of my history of the Frankfurt School, which appeared shortly before his death in 1973. It acknowledges that the long-standing Marxist insistence on the scientific validity of its theories is insufficient to motivate the yearnings that fueled its critique of capitalist oppression. However, one construes the alternative—the precise word in Horkheimer’s German draft was “metaphysical,” which he reconsidered in vetting my translation—it raises the question once again of the implicit normative basis of Critical Theory, a question that haunts its evolving history. This chapter recounts the enabling interaction, albeit at times delicate, I had with Horkheimer while writing the dissertation that became The Dialectical Imagination. It recalls, among other things, his unease with two possible explanations for the Frankfurt School’s dogged insistence on critique: their