In an article devoted primarily to Bergson’s metaphysics of time, which Bergson himself called “a serious deepening of my works” and “philosophically very penetrating,”44 Horkheimer supported Bergson’s distinction between “experienced” time and the abstract time of the natural scientists. But, he quickly added in qualification, Bergson had been mistaken in trying to write a metaphysics of temporality. In so doing he had been led to an idea of time as durée (duration), which was almost as abstract and empty as that of the natural sciences. To see reality as an uninterruptible flow was to ignore the reality of suffering, aging, and death. It was to absolutize the present and thus unwittingly repeat the mistakes of the positivists. True experience, Horkheimer argued, resisted such homogenization. The task of the historian was to preserve the memory of suffering and to foster the demand for qualitative historical change.
In all of Horkheimer’s writings on the Lebensphilosophen, three major criticisms were repeatedly made. By examining these in some detail, we can better understand the foundations of Critical Theory. First, although the philosophers of life had been correct in trying to rescue the individual from the threats of modern society, they had gone too far in emphasizing subjectivity and inwardness. In doing so, they had minimized the importance of action in the historical world. Second, with an occasional exception such as Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism, they tended to neglect the material dimension of reality. Third and perhaps most important, in criticizing the degeneration of bourgeois rationalism into its abstract and formal aspects, they sometimes overstated their case and seemed to be rejecting reason itself. This ultimately led to the outright mindless irrationalism of their twentieth-century vulgarizers.
As might be expected, Horkheimer’s interest in the question of bourgeois individualism led him back to a consideration of Kant and the origins of Innerlichkeit (inwardness).45 Among the dualistic elements in Kant’s philosophy, he noted,46 was the gap between duty and interest. Individual morality, discovered by practical reason, was internalized and divorced from public ethics. Here Hegel’s Sittlichkeit (ethics), with its emphasis on bridging the public-private opposition, was superior to Kant’s Moralität (morality). Despite this, Kant’s view was closer to a correct reflection of conditions in the early nineteenth century; for to assume that a harmony could exist at that time between personal morality and public ethics, or between self-interest and a universal moral code, was to ignore the real irrationality of the external order. Where Kant had been wrong, however, was in considering these contradictions immutable. By absolutizing the distinction between the individual and society, he had made a natural condition out of what was merely historically valid, thereby unwittingly affirming the status quo. This was also a failing of the Lebensphilosophen. In later years, however, Horkheimer and the other members of the Frankfurt School came to believe that the real danger lay not with those who overemphasized subjectivity and individuality, but rather with those who sought to eliminate them entirely under the banner of a false totalism. This fear would go so far that Adorno could write, in a frequently quoted phrase from Minima Moralia, that “the whole is the untrue.”47 But in the 1930’s Horkheimer and his colleagues were still concerned with the overemphasis on individuality, which they detected in bourgeois thinkers from Kant to the philosophers of life.
Horkheimer also questioned the moral imperative that Kant had postulated. Although agreeing that a moral impulse apart from egoistic self-interest did in fact exist, he argued that its expression had changed since Kant’s time. Whereas in the early nineteenth century it had manifested itself as duty, it now appeared as either pity or political concern. Pity, Horkheimer argued, was produced by the recognition that man had ceased being a free subject and was reduced instead to an object of forces beyond his control48 This Kant had not experienced himself, because his time provided greater individual freedom, at least for the entrepreneur. Political action as the expression of morality was also spurned by Kant, who overemphasized the importance of the individual conscience and tended to reify the status quo. In the twentieth century, however, politics had become the proper realm of moral action because, for the first time in history, “mankind’s means have grown great enough to present the realization [of justice] as an immediate historical task. The struggle for its fulfillment characterizes our epoch of transition.”49 Both early bourgeois thinkers like Kant and later ones like the Lebensphilosophen had failed to appreciate the necessity for political praxis to realize their moral visions.
Horkheimer’s second major objection to Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson was, as noted above, that they were really hidden idealists. In contrast, Horkheimer proposed a materialist theory of society, but one that was very clearly distinguished from the putative materialism of orthodox Marxism. In one of his most important essays in the Zeitschrift, “Materialism and Metaphysics,”50 he set out to rescue materialism from those who saw it simply as an antonym of spiritualism and a denial of nonmaterial existence. True materialism, he argued, did not mean a new type of monistic metaphysics based on the ontological primacy of matter. Here nineteenth-century mechanical materialists like Vogt and Haeckel had been wrong, as were Marxists who made a fetish of the supposedly “objective” material world. Equally erroneous was the assumption of the eternal primacy of the economic substructure of society. Both substructure and superstructure interacted at all times, although it was true that under capitalism the economic base had a crucial role in this process. What had to be understood, however, was that this condition was only historical and would change with time. In fact, it was one of the characteristics of twentieth-century society that politics was beginning to assert an autonomy beyond anything Marx had predicted. Both Leninist and fascist practice demonstrated the change.
Horkheimer also disliked the tendency of vulgar Marxists to elevate materialism to a theory of knowledge, which claimed absolute certainty the way idealism had in the past. In fact, to argue that a materialist epistemology could exhaustively explain reality was to encourage the urge to dominate the world, which Fichtean idealism had most vividly displayed. This was borne out by the fact that monistic materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative, dominating attitude towards nature.51 The theme of man’s domination of nature, it might be added parenthetically, was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.
Despite the impossibility of attaining absolute knowledge, Horkheimer held that materialism must not succumb to relativistic resignation. In fact, the monistic materialist epistemology of vulgar Marxism had been too passive. Echoing Marx’s critique of Feuerbach almost a century before,52 Horkheimer stressed the active element in cognition, which idealism had correctly affirmed. The objects of perception, he argued, are themselves the product of man’s actions, although the relationship tends to be masked by reification. Indeed, nature itself has a historical element, in the dual sense that man conceives of it differently at different times and that he actively works to change it. True materialism, Horkheimer contended, is thus dialectical, involving an ongoing process of interaction between subject and object. Here Horkheimer returned once again to the Hegelian roots of Marxism, which had been obscured in the intervening century. Like Marx, but unlike many self-proclaimed Marxists, he refused to make a fetish of dialectics as an objective process outside man’s control. Nor did he see it as a methodological construct imposed like a Weberian ideal type, or a social scientific model, on a chaotic, manifold reality. Dialectics probed the “force-field,” to use an expression of Adorno’s,53 between consciousness and being, subject and object. It did not, indeed could not, pretend to have discovered ontological first principles. It rejected the extremes of nominalism and realism and remained willing to operate in a perpetual state of suspended judgment.
Hence the crucial importance of mediation (Vermittlung) for a correct theory of society. No facet of social reality