Revised Collection: The Materialist as Polemicist (1933-1939)
Horkheimer's essays on Oswald Spengler, Henri Bergson, Theodor Haecker, Karl Jaspers, and Siegfried Marck. + Postscript: Adorno on Jean Wahl.
Part of the series on Horkheimer’s 1930s Essais Matérialistes.
[Revised ‘Introduction,’ added letters to ‘Appendix I,’ and added Postscript—3/25/25]
Collection: The Materialist as Polemicist (1933-1938). Table of Contents.
Translator’s Note.
Translator’s Introduction.
I. Review: Oswald Spengler’s Jahre der Entscheidung [The Hour of Decision] (1933)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Spengler’s Philosophy of History. (1935)
II. Review: Henri Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion] (1933)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Bergson’s Principal Fault (1934)
Fragment—Horkheimer, Re: Irrationalist Philosophy and War (undated, ca. mid-30s)
Interlude: Between History and Theology (1935)
Letter—Adorno, Re: Theology for Atheists. (1935)
Letter—Adorno, Re: Fighters and Martyrs; Theory in Hell.
III. On Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte [The Christian and History] (1936)
Interlude: Meditations on Metaphysical Sadness (1936/37)
Letter—Benjamin, Re: The Sadness of the Materialist (1936)
Letter—Adorno, Re: Justice to the Theological Motive (1937)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Injustice to the Theological Motive (1937)
Letter—Landauer, Re: The Future of an Illusion as Present (1937)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: The Natural Subject of Reason. (1937)
IV. Remarks on Jaspers’ Nietzsche (1937)
Translator’s note: The Spießbürger
Remarks on Jaspers’ Nietzsche
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Nietzsche’s Critical Psychology (1936)
V. The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration (1938)
Appendix I: Dialectics of Decline (1937-1939)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Exiting the Paris Exhibition (1937)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: “Against Hitler” (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Absolute Concentration and the Absent Grounds for War (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: “Chamberlain Wept” (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Anti-Semitism and the Illusion of Happiness (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Decomposition in Decline (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, re: Theory and The Horrors of “In Deutschland, nichts Neues” (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Semblance of Hope in the Time of Confusion (1938)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Method and Style in The Critique of Fascism (1939)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Atrocity as Social Principle (1939)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Theory Before the War (1939)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Dialectics of War and Peace (1939)
Appendix II: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critique of Religious Socialism (1931)
[Horkheimer, Re: The Religious-Socialist Problematic]
[Adorno, Re: The Religious-Socialist Solution]
Postscript—Adorno avec Wahl
Review: Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes and Walter Lowrie’s The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard. (1939)
Adorno’s Letter to Jean Wahl, 4/30/1939
Translator’s Note.
The following collection consists of original translations of five previously untranslated polemics written by Max Horkheimer over the ‘first phase’ of the ISR’s exile, between the Nazi’s seizure of ISR assets in 1933 and the end of the ZfS in 1939 as the Nazis prepared for the invasion and occupation of France.
Max Horkheimer, “Besprechungen: Jahre der Entscheidung,” ZfS Vol. 2, No. 3 (1933), 421–424.
Max Horkheimer, “Besprechung: Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion.” In: ZfS Vol. 2, No. 1 (1933), 104-106.
Max Horkheimer, “Zu Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte,” ZfS Vol. 5, No. 3 (1936), 372-383.
Max Horkheimer, “Bemerkungen zu Jaspers’ ‘Nietzsche.’” In: ZfS Vol. 6, No. 2 (1937), 407-414.
Max Horkheimer, “Der Philosophie der absoluten Konzentration.” ZfS Vol. 7, No. 3 (1938), 376-387.
A postscript has been added (3/25/25) with two original translations: first, of Adorno’s critical double review of Jean Wahl’s Études on (and Walter Lowrie’s edition of the Journals of) Søren Kierkegaard, which appeared in the final issue of the ZfS; second, of Adorno’s defense of the review in response to an objection from Wahl himself:
Theodor W. Adorno, “[Besprechungen. Wahl, Jean. Études Kierkegaardiennes.; Lowrie, Walter. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard.]” in: ZfS, Vol. 8, No. 1/2 (1939), 232-235.
Adorno to Jean Wahl, 4/30/1939. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1927-1969. Band II: 1938-1944. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp, 2004), 450-452.
Translator’s Introduction.
The basic idea of this collection is that the “double front” against which early critical theory defines itself in the 1930s is not, in the first or last instance, the philosophical front against metaphysics and positivism,1 but the political front against romantic, fascist reaction and rationalistic, liberal apologetic under ‘late capitalism.’ Following Horkheimer’s 1941 “Preface” to the penultimate issue of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science [SPSS] (~1939-1941), the ISR’s short-lived English-language successor to the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung [ZfS] (~1932-1939), we can provisionally define ‘late capitalism’ as the fulfillment of the project of classical liberalism in authoritarian fascism, of the ideal of free market competition in the consolidation of monopoly.2 ‘Late capitalism’ designates the condition of the world in which Marx has been proven right:
Fascism feels itself the son, nay the savior, of the world that bore it. That world collapsed, as Marx had prophesied, because after it had reached a certain point in its development, it was unable to fulfill human needs. […] National Socialism attempts to maintain and strengthen the hegemony of privileged groups by abolishing economic liberties for the rest of society.3
To the extent that critical theory is defined by contrast to metaphysics and positivism, this is due to its reflexive appropriation of the ‘late capitalist’ historical problematic it shares with both, in opposition to their efforts to establish non-historical grounds, philosophical or scientific, for their respective theoretical standpoints.4 Early critical theorists confront metaphysicians and positivists not as combatants on the perennial Kampfplatz of philosophy but as participants in a shared field of social struggles which condition the entire process of theoretical and scientific production. In the introductory lecture to his 1926 course, Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart, Horkheimer writes:
The Kampfplatz of philosophy [is] a part—and by no means the least important—of the actual social battlefront [sozialen Schlachtfeldes], upon which it [is] not merely illusorily, but actually, dangerous to make one’s appearance. […] [Mere] biographical information is, as a rule, just as abstract and idealistic as the history of ideas itself, in which the lives of philosophers are treated in large measure as independent and detached from the actual relationships with which one is concerned, such as those between thoughts, the notion of a real history of ideas is entirely untrue. Of course, the theories of any one philosopher are in no way independent in terms of content from theories they discovered about the same objects of inquiry, and which they followed. But such connections constitute only a minuscule part, often perhaps the least significant, of the relationships which must be considered in order to understand their thought. The philosopher lives in the actual world. Their philosophizing is part of their confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with the actual world, as it has been formed in their given situation; moreover, philosophy itself fulfills an objective function, one which is in large part entirely independent of the philosopher. To lift ideas out of actual history and act as if one could adopt any propositions from one or other philosophy, however recent of an epoch they were written in, is inadmissible.5
The early critical theorists practiced a kind of ‘spiritual physiognomy’: interpretation as portraiture, each portrait the depiction of the conflicting social forces which animate the subject’s works from within, conflicts formed by the author’s continuous confrontation with their social context.6 The procedure reverses traditional physiognomy, which, for Horkheimer, is not just pseudo-science but a paradigm of reification. In a letter to Felix Weil in 1937, Horkheimer objects to Weil’s decision, made in desperation, to consult a graphologist about the erratic behavior of a romantic partner. Horkheimer’s response is a virtual rewriting of Hegel’s critique of physiognomy and phrenology in the Phenomenology of Spirit (§§309-346): the inference of certain character features from certain styles and strokes in handwriting, in graphology, or from certain facial features, in physiognomy, proves to be a confirmation of the prejudice of the graphologist or physiognomist; the arbitrary selection of certain observable features to serve as ‘symbols’ for certain non-observable character traits, as well as the wide variety of arbitrary ‘correlations’ between the former and the latter, derives a semblance of regularity from the fact that the graphologist and physiognomist have elevated common-sense platitudes, filtered through idiosyncrasies, into ‘scientific’ principles; the development of the subject of analysis is denied a priori; the social-psychological process through which the subject of analysis was formed becomes unintelligible as they are reduced to a partial impression of a temporary product of the same—caput mortuum; the trust in the ‘expertise’ of the graphologist and physiognomist as a guide to human relationships robs us in advance of the experience, let alone consciousness, of a kind of relationship in which our characters would be at stake in each renegotiation of a life in common.7
Graphology and physiognomy don’t just misunderstand human character, but mutilate it. They belong to the total social process which, Horkheimer says, judges individuals by those “external characteristics, which are connected to the bad side of current society,” at the expense of those “human traits that connect [them] to the future.”8 In “The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration” (1938), Horkheimer distinguishes the attitude critical theory takes towards human beings from Siegfried Marck’s ‘Neo-humanism’ by formulating the following task: “Philosophical anthropology must become a denunciatory physiognomy.” Denunciatory physiognomy denounces the society which seeks the advice of the physiognomist. The portraits of the spiritual, or denunciatory, physiognomist are only as optimistic as they are unforgiving. As Adorno and Horkheimer write in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947):
Stupidity is a scar. […] Every partial stupidity in a human being marks a spot where the awakening play of muscles has been inhibited instead of fostered. […] [T]he intellectual gradations within the human species, indeed, the blind spots within the same individual, mark the points where hope has come to a halt and in their ossification bear witness to what holds all living things in thrall.9
Neither misanthropic towards human potential nor philanthropic towards inhuman actuality, spiritual physiognomy offers negative images of betrayed humanity in the caricatures we’ve made of it—ourselves.
The following polemics are exemplary of this approach. Each portrait in this series has a central ‘dynamic motif’ of the same conflictual social forces frozen into another individuated expression.10 The primary tension is a unity of opposites between the extremes of, on the one hand, rationalistic or liberal apologetic for capitalist social domination—the reason which rationalizes ruling irrationality through appeal to unrealized moral or political principle, through the deferential formalization of the given in scientific procedure—and, on the other, romantic or fascist reaction to the same—the unreason which rises to enforce the order and restore the meaning the former can no longer guarantee, responding to the violence of liberalism’s unfulfilled promise of universality with the violence of its fulfillment for particularity.11 The tension between metaphysics and positivism in the crisis of the sciences is a mediated derivative of the social crisis tout court: “The contemporary insecurity in sociological judgments with respect to the future is only a mirror image [Spiegelbild] of contemporary social insecurity in general.”12 In the same 1926 introductory lecture quoted above, Horkheimer continues:
Philosophy and science in general are no longer the self-conscious expression of strong social forces which are certain of their power; rather, the exact converse is true: people have become insecure, people no longer know what to make of society, they need something to hold onto and they seek it with feverish haste whenever there might be a prospect of finding one. In the past, philosophy confronted a rotten traditional ideology with new, perhaps in a certain sense naive but in any case robust and magnificent, systems. Today, there is a lack of any generally recognized Weltanschauung, sanctified by tradition, which might help protect the status quo [das Bestehende], and the preeminent dangers to which this status quo is constantly exposed motivate the relentless search for ideologically solid ground. It is precisely the fragility of the wholly ideal character of the old Good which gives rise to the continuous attempts to produce the new, and which makes it appear so desirable. Therefore, in light of the enormous philosophical and semi-philosophical production of the present, it has never been so completely dangerless to express any ideological thoughts, however unusual they may be. […] And so, among its many achievements, we cannot expect exact science to produce a valid worldview, and one must, on one’s own initiative, seek one out, further and further—that is, one must ‘philosophize.’ […] This seeking and seeking-further, this discovery, systematizing and rejecting of theories, this unbroken endeavor to cobble together a tenable scaffolding for a worldview, this—as the saying goes—search for a spiritual content and intellectual meaning of life is the hallmark of the philosophical situation of the present. So far as there is an ideal ground for this state of affairs, it consists in the fact that the enlightenment, and all of those tendencies connected with the positive development of the exact sciences, have finally managed to not only dissolve the the sacred traditional contents of thought against which enlighteners fought in their heroic period before the great French revolution, but these same enlightened tendencies have also, and ultimately, directed their destructive force against the most indispensable ideological stock. When one considers the philosophical activity of the present and the ingress of philosophy into absolutely all areas of culture down to the last detail, one notices that all of these philosophical endeavors seem to be striving in one direction: towards the founding and validating of absolutely recognized values and truths, far above disputes of opinion. The famous resurrection of metaphysics in our day; all of the various attempts to renew positive religion; the great interest in extra-European philosophical, and especially religious, products of spirit; the reawakening of the scholastic dogmatists and their forefather, Aristotle; the apologetics for concepts such as personality, totality, unity, and so on; the entirety of phenomenology with its pretension to absolute essentialities [Wesenheiten] and essential laws [Wesensgesetze] in an eternally valid form—all of these currents are fundamentally motivated by the need to rescue or erect something absolutely valid in the midst of the universal destruction of everything which was believed and revered to date. It is the consequence of the science which arose from the enlightenment that no dogma or tradition was to be assumed valid, but to subject everything to examination, to dissolve it, to analyze it, down to its smallest elements and thereby destroy it. Today, as a result of the changed situation, many would like to reverse this course in many areas of life. There is an all-over aversion to mechanistic, rational methods; there is talk of turning back towards ideas and to seek these longed-for, unassailable ideal contents either in medieval or ancient history, or in other cultures (unlike in the past, primitive peoples are no longer considered undeveloped, but much more complex and of greater value than we poor Europeans)—or, they construct ideal and admiration-worthy entities on the ground of a new vision, a new perspective, a new belief. […]13
In the interwar ‘crisis of the sciences,’ the dispute between metaphysics and positivism is a refractory expression of generalized social crisis, recapitulating liberalism’s conflict with its unrecognized double in fascism within the sciences themselves. Using the device of analogy to introduce the explanation of a cycle, Horkheimer argues: just as liberalism provokes fascist reaction against it by the unreflected barbarism within it, positivism provokes metaphysical reaction by the unreflected metaphysics within it.
In the face of the flight of contemporary science, and the philosophy linked to it, to the opposed poles of research into all-embracing statistics and completely empty abstraction, metaphysics spoke out against this defect and kept a relationship, even if a problematic one, to the questions which science left behind. Like the situation in contemporary history, where the fascist opponents of liberalism took advantage of the fact that liberalism overlooked the estrangement between the uninhibited development of the capitalist economy and the real needs of humans, contemporary metaphysics grew stronger in the face of the failings of positivistic science and philosophy; it is their true heir, just as fascism is the legitimate heir of liberalism.14
Metaphysics, “dominated by the craving to bring an eternal meaning into a life which offers no way out,” turns to “philosophical practices such as the direct intellectual or intuitive apprehension of truth, and finally [to] blind submission to a personality,” and “as this form of social organization becomes increasingly crisis-prone and insecure, all those who regard its characteristics as eternal are sacrificed to the institutions which are intended as substitutes for the lost religion.”15 Positivism, “a pathetic rearguard action on the part of liberalism’s formalistic epistemology, which (…) turns into public obsequiousness in the service of fascism,”16 for “[t]he apparent rigor and precision of thought promoted” by it “fundamentally turns out to be the same objectivity that gives both workers and entrepreneurs their due in conflicts” and “testifies with sacred oaths to neutrality at the same moment when the victims are being annihilated by bombs of neutral provenance.”17 Early critical theory can no more be defined by reference to the ‘double front’ against metaphysics and positivism than metaphysics or positivism can define themselves in relative isolation from generalized social crisis without, in this very gesture of abdicating any reflexive appropriation of their genesis from it, handing themselves back over to it.
Understanding this structural dynamic of ‘late’ capitalist society gives early critical theory a singular, distinctive task. Formulated negatively, as Horkheimer does in several letters of the late 1930s, the successful liberal defense of capitalist society means the reproduction of the necessary conditions for the indefinite socialization of new Hitlers.18 For the early critical theorists, true anti-fascism is anti-capitalism, and true anti-capitalism is revolutionary socialism. In unpublished fragments written in the mid-30s, such as “Bourgeois World” [Bürgerliche Welt], Horkheimer is unequivocal:
The late bourgeois know that their ideals will either, and only, be realized through proletarian revolution, and within a socialist order, or will never be realized at all. If there can be any theoretical knowledge in the field of human, and social, life; if anything whatsoever has been manifestly proven by history—then it is this insight. […] Therefore, those who carry the bourgeois ideals not so much in their words but in their hearts find as little community with those miserable liberal and democratic reformers as they do with fascists themselves, and, conversely, both of these groups know very well that their enemy is simply uncompromising knowledge, and the attitude which corresponds to it.19
However, the conventional interpretation of the ‘Frankfurt School’ in this period is a highly de-politicized one, and consists of two theses: first, that the initial research phase of the ISR in exile (~1933-1939) is a continuation of the pre-1933 research program of study and criticism of bourgeois society, and seems largely unaffected by more pressing issues like anti-Semitism and fascism until WWII begins; second, that the ISR’s flight from Frankfurt in 1933 is supposed to have forced its core members and their close associates to reflect on their unexamined socialist sympathies for the first time just as it made their continued commitment to socialist politics impossible.20 The conventional interpretation (which I have elsewhere called the cliche of the “long farewell” to Marxism), in short, is that the ISR core’s work in the 1930s is untimely in the pejorative sense, and that their experience through the rest of the decade forces them to confront fascism and abandon socialism. My hope is that the essays in this collection will contribute to proving this interpretation untenable.
In these polemics, Horkheimer presents the “foundations” of early critical theory as open sites of contestation against liberal apologists for “the bloody and stupefying domination of capital” to the one side “and the fascist enforcers of its order” to the other.21 No other grounds are needed, nor sought. In his opening remarks for the “Discussion about the task of Protestantism in secular civilization” (1931), Horkheimer asks his interlocutors “accept the barbaric nature [das Barbarische] of my explanation in advance, for my reaction is relatively barbaric indeed,” insisting any theoretical diagnosis of the problems of the present refuse to pass judgment on ‘spiritual decay’ or ‘cultural decline’ before addressing itself to the ordinary brutalities of needless suffering from hunger or cold. As Horkheimer’s Regius writes in the Dämmerung:
There are people who will not be disturbed about the existence of evil because they have a theory that accounts for it. Here, I am also thinking of some Marxists who, in the face of wretchedness, quickly proceed to show why it exists. Even comprehension can be too quick.22
The rhetorical form of polemic is for the sleepwalking social theorists of late capitalism who, like the mourning father of Freud’s Traumdeutung, dream of deathless burning so as not to wake to the stench of the burning dead.
I. Review: Oswald Spengler’s Jahre der Entscheidung [The Hour of Decision] (1933)
Spengler, Oswald, Jahre der Entscheidung. Erster Teil: Deutschland und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung. C. H. Beck. München 1933. (XIV u. 165 S.; RM. 3.20)
The Faustian culture of Europe, says Spengler,23 is threatened by two terrible revolutions: the “revolution of the white world” in the struggle between classes [Klassenkampfes] and the “revolution of the colored world” in the struggle between races [Rassenkampfes].24 Spengler interprets the class struggle as the mob-revolt [Pöbel-aufstand] of all the most base and common instincts against the strong and noble race of the propertied (as for Spengler property is a matter of “race,” “a gift of which vanishingly few are capable,” the result of long breeding conducted by exalted dynasties). The economic-social forms and theories of class struggle are only a mask: just as it was not the economic misery, but merely “vocation-agitation” which capitalism brought down on the masses that drove the emergence of socialism, the goal of socialist movements is, accordingly, merely to overthrow “the brains and moneyed millionaires” to enjoy the latter’s wealth for themselves. The motives of class struggle are the greed, envy, and vengefulness of declassed intellectuals who use and abuse the worker as a suitable sell-sword for purposes of personal ambition. They have artificially cultivated the worker into a martyr of society, whereas, in actuality—at least since trade unions and worker’s parties have been the true rulers of the state, i.e., since about 1916—[the worker] is himself the exploiter of capitalist society. His wages are a purely political affair, violently fixed high above any need in order to reduce industry to ruins. Thus, the present world crisis was brought on knowingly and willingly by labor leadership, by the labor leadership which cannot grasp that there are “two kinds of labor”: “Labor which only a very few human beings of rank are bred for, and other [labors] whose whole value consists in their duration, their quantum. You are born into one as much as the other. Such is fate. This cannot be changed…”
Whereas the “interpretation” of this social development fills nearly the whole book, the “revolution of the colored world” is dismissed in just a few pages. The assault of the colored races (particularly Asians) against the white race, which has been deprived of its powers by the World War and degenerates even now into pacifism, is already underway. Rescue—if it still is possible at all—can only come from a new “Caesarism”: from the absolute dictatorship of a great individual, supported by the strength of a host from which the legions of Rome will be reborn. Germany is the soil best suited for this dictatorship which would come to the rescue, because here alone, in Prussiandom, is there a race strong and healthy enough for such a dictatorship. No scientific judgment may be passed on such a diagnosis. To the extent it departs from what is obvious, it gives expression to the personal feelings of the author and comprises his political confession. The negation of all which Spengler does not hold to be Prussian applies as well to those values which, at least since the time Christianity entered the world, have cast light on humanity. Goodness, justice, and humanity, which were, at any rate, the ideals of quite a few Prussians as well, appear to him mere weakness and lies. He rejects the idealism and materialism of modern philosophy in a single, sweeping condemnation, because he sees quite rightly that both are preoccupied with the betterment of human existence—whether freedom and happiness, or “the blossoming of art, poetry, and thinking.” The fate of history falls on the shoulders of more robust powers, and he thinks this good.
It is presumptuous “to want to master living history through bookish systems and ideals.” But all the objectives of the liberal bourgeoisie are bookish to him, and even Christian morality, to the extent it does not exclusively consist in mere resignation. “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.” The history of the human being is the history of war, and will always remain so. Spengler sings its praises and calls this “valiant pessimism.” On the basis of such a spiritual attitude, he can even be enthusiastic about the present: “these are stupendous decades in which we live, stupendous—that is, terrifying and void of happiness.”25 It is evident he hates happiness; but not possessions, of course. The will to possession and property is only base among the working class, but not by any means among those already blessed with both. To him, rather, this [will] is “the Nordic meaning of life. It dominates and shapes our entire history, from the conquests of semi-mythical kings down to the form of the family in the present, which dies out when the idea of property does. Whoever wants for this instinct, they are not ‘of the race.’” There may be something right in this pseudo-materialistic conception of history. It is true that the fate of history does not depend upon intellectual forces, but “upon quite different, more robust powers.” It is true that no future deed can ever undo the blood and misery which compose the basic template [Grundtext] of history, past and present. It is true that despite all known and unknown heroes who exist in our “shallow” time, as they do in any other, existence for the greater part of humanity is a senseless struggle with poor results.
It is true that the lot of individuals in society is today determined, as in all chaotic periods, by the play of blind forces. But the hymn to meaninglessness, the delight in the fact that history is yet more natural history than human history, the triumphant gratification in thinking it will never become better and that all who believed it would were wrong, makes a mockery of any respect for the human being and its possibilities. This all-too-simple anthropology, that the human is evil from birth—as false in its exclusivity as is its opposite [Gegensatz]—today corresponds not to the “skepticism of the authentic connoisseur of history,” but only bitterness. Spengler’s work is a necromancy of Machiavelli, only without the latter’s belief in a happy future. Spengler is a realist; he stands on the firm ground of harrowing reality. What others brandished against the age as hideous accusation, he makes the guiding principle of the Nordic people he so reveres: property not for the sake of plenty and happiness (“whoever wills only contentment does not deserve to exist”), but for the acquisition of still great possession and still greater power, so on and so forth, for all eternity. This character has been depicted in literature—as Alberich, in Richard Wagner. “Schätze zu schaffen und Schätze zu bergen nützt mir Nibelheim's Nacht, doch mit dem Hort, in der Höhle gehäuft, denk' ich dann Wunder zu wirken: die ganze Welt gewinn ich mit ihm mir zu eigen!” The force which is embodied in Alberich is also the meaning of meaningless history which Spengler affirms. He speaks much of culture, but because this culture has neither the happiness of human beings nor even their betterment as its content, this culture becomes a hopeless mechanism of interlocking gears. Within it, joy is of no value: “Hagen, mein Sohn, hasse die Frohen!” The writing itself gives this barbaric frame of mind a consummate and grandiose expression.
Accordingly, the splendor of its language derives less from the depth or clarity of thought than from the imposing dimensions of its objects. Spengler finds it contemptible to concern himself with the small and glorifies the sublime—not, however, the moral sublime, which by no means escapes his contempt, but the mathematical sublime: the vastness of time, geographical expanse and distance, large numbers, the quantitatively immeasurable, in short, the concept of that which Spengler calls the Faustian, Hegel the bad infinite.26 His pathos is, therefore, especially shocking for those who are enthusiastic about pure ‘mass,’ not the ‘mass’ of workers about whom Spengler speaks with undisguised disgust, but the ‘mass’ which, whether serving as the form of the incarnation of years or kilometers, furnishes the ground for his scale of values. Even among the forces of politics, what impresses him, above all, is quantity. “Expansiveness is a power, politically and militarily, which has not yet been overcome…,” he says, referring to Russia, and repeats in reference to America.27 The changing content of politics only ever plays a minor role for him: politics is always about one and the same thing, sheer power! The superficiality of the book, which pretends to be a scourge of the shallowness of our time, is particularly evident in its fundamental categories.
Nietzsche’s hymn to man, beast of prey [das Raubtier Mensch] still had, despite everything, a social-critical undertone, which brought him into association with the impressionistic currents of his contemporaries.28 It was a protest against the growing inhibition of human forces through the ossification of the bourgeois order; within this hymn, solitary tendencies of the enlightenment still live. Spengler’s arrogant [bramarbasierende] elevation of the beast within man and states to heaven appears to be nothing more than a projection of the petty bourgeois philistine [spießbürgerlichen] experience of imperialist politics of the present into eternity.29 Because the little man sees the Völker are jealous of one another, but does not not know why, he makes the surface into its own ground and asserts mere robbery and lust for power is to blame; he confuses essence and appearance. Spengler’s enthusiasm for history, or how it appears in bad textbooks, as the sheer form of strength, conquering, punching-down, domination, for the ostentatious display of brutality both at home and abroad, for the elevation of barbaric contempt for law and justice into principle, by one who immediately breaks into tearful lamentations when he feels his own cause has been done wrong—all of these features of Spengler’s work render the exact outline of the caricature of the Prussian character unrivaled by those drawn by his declared enemies. This author has taken a legend seriously, and has modeled his inner self upon it.
His enmity towards the workers, indeed his misanthropy, is given such vociferous expression, as if he wanted to escape the accusation of possessing these qualities by making them into his very ideals. As the consummate document of a sensibility inclined towards sheer oppression, which has been petrified by concealed scruples into defiance and fabricates a theory out of the desire for domination [Herrschsucht], the book possesses some psychological and historical value. In no way, however, should it be regarded as characteristic for the authoritative, and in sociological terms extremely complicated, intellectual currents prevailing at present in Germany. Some features belong to the pre-war Junker spirit, the efficacy of which has today been severely impaired. A number in German criticism have already refused it even that.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Spengler’s Philosophy of History. (1935)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to J. Doppler, 5/2/1935.]30
Herr Doppler! Your letter of April 18th with the enclosed text31 has reached me at a time when the work before me is almost beyond me. While trying to secure the financial means for the continuation of our studies in a series of rather complicated negotiations, I have been able to finish a number of smaller works of my own and, in collaboration with other members of the Institute, have completed a manuscript of a large sociological anthology [viz., the Studien über Autorität und Familie]. Even now, however, I have barely a quarter of an hour left over for the most necessary correspondence. Therefore, I hope you’ll forgive me for only being able to skim through the draft of your dissertation on Spengler’s philosophy of history all too quickly. On the basis of this draft, naturally, it is hardly possible to see how exactly you mean to approach the matter. I am certain you will avoid a danger which some turns of your disposition might remind one of, namely—playing out a sociological doctrine of [social] situation [soziologischen Standortslehre] against cultural morphology. Relative to the efforts of the latest Wissenssoziologie to ascribe all cultural achievements in theoretical, artistic, political, or other domains to some so-called social situation, which is, moreover, very poorly defined,32 Spengler’s undertaking may still be called concrete. His attempt to bring what happens in spiritual domains into connection with the power politics of peoples and nations is certainly and highly inadequate. But the perspectives which he opens up in this way—and, above all, in a series of connections which he uncovers—may at the very least be of some limited service within the framework of a correct theory of history.33 As you yourself have mentioned in your exposé, Spengler has enriched historical research in many respects. Reading the Decline, for all of the indignation it arouses, at least expands the horizon of a thinking which has grown accustomed to the average histories. The Wissenssoziologie of the present cannot offer you this. But you know this as well as I do, and I am certain you will be careful not to make rushed classifications of ideologies and situations, or make all-too-sharp divisions between “objective” [objektiven] and “subjective” [subjektiven] conceptions of value in the Weberian sense.
Just as you are certainly not applying a static concept of a system in the attempt to “define the position of history within the system of sciences.” True, scientific cognition [Erkenntnis] has a determinate structure in any one historical instant. But both of the moments which condition this structure—the object of cognition and cognizing subject [Gegenstand und erkennende Subjekte]—are caught up in continuous transformation.34 Even if we were to call the theory of this transformation itself ‘History,’ there can be no doubt that history, grasped in such a way, is closely connected with certain practical interests. It is entirely conceivable that there comes a historical state of affairs in which cognition [Erkenntnis] centers not so much on that which transforms as on that which is relatively constant. Increased interest in history itself corresponds to the real struggles of the present, and this is no inducement to make history into metaphysics instead of natural science, as was previously the case. I will search for the critique35 you mentioned as soon as I find some time. You can imagine how difficult it is to find such manuscripts in my current situation. I hope it will come to light in the course of some of the clean-up operations I am currently planning, and, if so, I will send it to you immediately. [...]
II. Review: Henri Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1933)
Bergson, Henri, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. Félix Alcan. Paris 1932. (364 S.; Frcs. 25. —)
In his new book, Bergson does not merely restrict himself to the schematic application of his prior philosophical views to society, but instead provides a series of highly stimulating reflections on a number of social-philosophical questions. It is evident that he remains closer to the impressionistic origins of his philosophy than to the political function his basic thoughts [Grundgedanken] have since acquired by virtue of historical development. The intuitionism he helped to found now plays the role of diverting away from the theory of the tendencies of society as a whole; the new book shows that Bergson, in opposition to this, is concerned, albeit in a highly abstract way, with actual historical progress. In the spirit of French positivism, he explains morality and religion from the needs of society. The morale close is aimed at conserving existing social structures. As the natural tendency of every human individual to obey the system of customs which prevails in his group in perpetuity, it corresponds to ‘instinct’ in the rest of the world of the living.
This morality consists in the fact that the individual conducts himself as a member of those social units into which he was born. It binds him to his family and nation, and separates him from other families and nations. The universal love of humankind, or humanity [Humanität], is, according to Bergson, associated with the morale ouverte and must therefore not be considered an extension of more immediate feelings relating to instinct. The greater quantity of object corresponds to a difference in quality of affect. The morale ouverte appears to him as the momentary, unforeseeable incursion of the metaphysical stream of life into human history. The points of incursion are those great men, “certains hommes, dont chacun se trouve constituer une espèce composée d'un seul individu.” They give expression to a radically new feeling for the world, and this is imitated by many. The new is absorbed into the old circle of life and merges with it, at which point the circle closes once more.
Bergson does not recognize that the morale ouverte, on which, in his account, human progress depends, has, as much as the morale close, social conditions of its own. In accordance with the fundamental separation between intuition and analytical science in his philosophy, he separates the open, forward-facing, revolutionizing moral intuition from the system of customs which belongs to the self-preservation of a closed society. Thus, he fails to notice the fundamental dynamic of forward-driving and retarding moments within history, the dialectic of société close and ouverte. The distinction between open and closed morality corresponds to that between dynamic and static religion. In explaining static religion as a system of narratives, Bergson again demonstrates his affinity to positivist naturalism. [Static religion] is nature’s defensive reaction against the thought of the inevitability of death mediated by the human being’s ability to create fables, and is thus, so to speak, a purposive measure required by life which, in contrast to that of the animal, has has been endowed with intelligence. [Static religion] also promotes the subordination of egotistic goals to the general welfare, without, however, necessarily being identical with closed morality in development. The function of static morality is always directly intertwined with national needs. The tradition of religious narratives has a history all its own. Static religion, in contrast to closed morality, need only incorporate those social obligations without which every social bond would be torn apart.
Yet static religion is only the expression, the understanding-tempered formulation, so to speak, of the mystical certainty wherein the human being knows himself to be one with the stream of life, with the power of creation which transcends all individual life. Dynamic religion does not consist of the narratives which bind intellects to one another with regard to their continued existence, but in their identification with the life which each of us may discover within ourselves, the life which pulses through and beyond every fixed form. All legends, all gods are products of the creative striving from which the universe itself emerges unceasingly. The true mysticism does not stop at ecstasy: not only does it expound the contents of its ecstasies through its teaching, but itself becomes the power of creation in which the mystic immerses himself and expresses it through his life: “Sa direction est celle même de l'élan de la vie; il est cet élan même.” In connection with this doctrine of morality and religion, Bergson turns to consideration of future developments and says that “industrialisme et machinisme” has not brought humanity the happiness it once hoped they would bring.
Like the late Max Scheler, he believes Europe will succumb to overpopulation—indeed, that the whole world will, and will quickly—and so succumbs to the Malthusian way of thinking. A genuine Lebensphilosoph and metaphysician, he sees salvation as an inner conversion [inneren Umstellung]. He thinks “simple life” could replace the mechanism of the present if the material pleasures so sought after today were made to fade before a new mystical intuition. In one remark, however, Bergson says that the present needfulness [Not] of human beings comes from the fact “que, la production en général n'étant pas suffisamment organisée, les produits ne trouvent pas à s'échanger.” This thought could have led him beyond philosophy to science. “L'humanité ne se modifiera que si elle veut se modifier.” L'humanité, however, for the time being, is as little unified in will as it is rational in organization. The roots of this want can only be comprehended by means of a precise study of the most advanced economics and psychology. If simple life could help humanity, we would long since have been rescued; for the overwhelming majority of all human beings live in misery. As little as the finiteness of cognition [Erkenntnis] may be overcome by immersion in creative life without concern for rational science, social needfulness will just as little wither away through internalization [Verinnerlichung]. The intuition from which Bergson hopes for salvation in history as much as in knowledge has a unified object: life, centrifugal force, duration, creative development. In actuality, however, humanity is divided, and intuition, which penetrates through the contradictions towards unity, looks past what is historically vital, what lies right before its eyes.36
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Bergson’s Principal Fault (1934)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Hans Cornelius, 9/25/1934]37
At present, I am in the midst of completing a rather comprehensive critique of the latest book of Bergson’s, La Pensée et la Mouvant. He belongs, after all, to those few philosophers who deserve to be taken seriously. His principal fault seems to me to lie in the fact he does not successfully conceive the interaction of sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] and the understanding [Verstand] in actual science and therefore arrives at an unwarranted rejection of conceptual thinking. Such disregard leads him to create the myth of the Lebensstrom which flows through the world, a harmonizing fable in the most blatant contradiction with the actual course of the history of humanity.
Fragment—Horkheimer, Re: Irrationalist Philosophy and War (ca. mid-30s)
[On Irrationalism in Philosophy]38
The descendants of the old rationalism and empiricism have defended themselves against the increasing ostracism of thought, in part with very astute arguments. Some have even pointed out some of the social functions of irrationalism. Rickert, for example, describes Scheler's book on “The Genius of War,” which “serves to justify war as the climax of state effectiveness” (H. Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens, Tübingen [1922])39 as entirely consistent with the spirit of the Lebensphilosoph. “Anyone who not only sees that natural, vital life is growth, that it struggles against other life as check, but, at the same time, sees in this biological ‘law’ a norm for all cultural life, must indeed think like Scheler.”40
Interlude: Between History and Theology (1935)
Letter—Adorno, Re: Theology for Atheists.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 2/25/1935]41
I have read the new issue of the ZfS with great enthusiasm. I found the Bergson-essay42 quite extraordinary—the passage on the historian-as-rescuer [Historiker als Retter]43 moved me most profoundly. It is astonishing how completely here the consequences of your “atheism” (about which I believe you less and less the more fully you explicate it: for with every explication, its metaphysical force intensifies) run into those of my theological intentions, which, however uneasy they make you, nevertheless have consequences which are entirely indistinguishable from yours—I could even invoke the motive of the rescue of the hopeless as the central motive of all of my efforts without needing to say anything more; except, perhaps, to add to that the historical depiction of suffering and the non-emergence of the reader, [the reader] about whom you remain silent but is nevertheless the sole reader to whom such a history of creaturely suffering could be addressed. And, of course, I believe that just as not one of his thoughts would have a right to breathe if, when confronted by your atheism, it did not prove itself unconcealed and true, so too not one of your thoughts could be thought without this “what for?” as a source of strength through death, which burrows more forcefully into your cognitions [Erkenntnisse] the more tightly you seal them off from it; just as that ray of light which is not blocked by any wall but even possesses the power to reveal the innermost composition of the wall itself. I do not believe it would be a pointless and ideologically bourgeois [bürgerlich-weltanschauliches] beginning if we finally, instead of leaving this question unresolved (not as though it could be solved—yet we can renounce its solution even less!), talked this matter through to the end and unraveled it in full; and, for my own part, I could imagine all manner of social-theoretical consequences could stem from this, which would therefore also justify such a beginning when considered under the aspect of your present anti-metaphysic.
Letter—Adorno, Re: Fighters and Martyrs; Theory in Hell.
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/21/1935.]44
Germany was more horrific than ever before, the country has truly become hell, down to the smallest details of daily life. As for the fates of those closest to us, we only know so much: Liesel Paxmann is dead.45 Official reports say she died of pneumonia at her relatives’; in reality, from more reliable sources, she died a political prisoner in Düsseldorf. No one even knows whether she committed suicide, as they reported, or she was murdered. Perhaps the Institute can make inquiries. —[Willi] Dörter has been sentenced to many years in prison for dissemination of communist propaganda.46 —[Heinz] Langerhans has disappeared; no one even knows if he’s still alive.47 —Even Günther Stern’s [viz., Günther Anders’] sister is in prison, serving a year-long sentence for harboring communists.48 —You’ve surely heard of the Dubislav case.49 It has nothing directly to do with political matters, but is only conceivable against the background of all the horrors of Germany: after his wife mysteriously committed suicide, he gouged out his girlfriend’s eye with a corkscrew. He’s in custody, now in a clinic where they are keeping close observation of his mental state, writing his autobiography under the title “Love makes you blind” [“Liebe macht blind”] (in this case, at any rate, it did the other). —This is the horizon in which I have had to exist for four months now. You can imagine, then, how I’m feeling.
I have doggedly applied myself to [a study of] your work, and have found some happiness in this. I have just made the connection between two of your insights: first, your theory of the dependence of prédiction on its object [Gegenstand] (against Husserl’s belief in “predetermined objects [Gegenstände] as such,” without consideration of whether their structure can or even must be changed); second, your critique of Bergson, who undialectically dissolves conceptual solidifications without at the same time assuming their cognitive functions [Erkenntnisfunktion], in other words against his undialectical dynamics. I regard this analysis a decisive achievement.
III. On Theodor Haecker’s Der Christ und die Geschichte [The Christian and History] (1936)
Lao Tse writes:
‘For compassion
In war brings victory,
In defense brings invulnerability.
Whomsoever heaven would establish,
It surrounds with a bulwark of compassion.’
The old Chinese man was already aware of this seven hundred years before our era. (…) I believe that the ancient Chinese were not at all stupid; doubtless, they had fewer prejudices; doubtless, they dragged around fewer ideas from German philosophy professors. Lao Tse says of the one who knows him:
‘Neither can one attain intimacy with him,
Nor can one remain distant from him;
Neither can one profit from him,
Nor can one be harmed by him;
Neither can one achieve honor through him,
Nor can one be debased by him.
He is, therefore, the noblest person on earth.’
And about the exercise of power:
‘Ruling a big kingdom is like cooking a small fish.’
He also asserts:
‘Where armies have been stationed, briars and brambles will grow.’
Further:
‘He (the good general) does not use force to seize for himself.
He places placidity above all and refuses to prettify weapons;
If one prettifies weapons, this is to delight in the killing of others.’
Further:
‘Weapons are instruments of evil omen,’
and,
‘Victory in battle, we commemorate with mourning ritual.’
I have indiscriminately chosen these words, words that he gives as advice to the rulers of his time. It is claimed that the rulers followed them. This was seven hundred years before Christ. We now live two thousand years after the birth of Christ. Progress indeed! For the sake of progress we now fly in airplanes, and a few years ago the civilized world danced at the sight of the first airship, just like an Indian tribe before its medicine man. The sad thing is that many are suffering, and the danger is that this era will devour us. We are prepared. We are laughing.
— Horkheimer to Rosa Riekher and Fritz Pollock, 8/22/1918.50
[English Abstract] If Haecker's book on History and the Attitude of the Christian [can] be considered as an index, there seems to be a strong humanistic current in present day Catholicism. Haecker develops in his book the Christian belief that history manifests the will of God, and that all wars, upheavals and revolutions really occur for the salvation of the soul of the individual. He opposes the modern trend to deify nation and race, and presents the elevation of man from his fall, and his return to God, as the eternal goal of all that ever happens. Because Haecker insists upon the intrinsic value of each single man, because he refuses to accept the ruling totalitarian ideology of the day, even the non-Catholic can go a long way with him in his humanism. Horkheimer, however, demonstrates that the connection between this kind of humanism and Catholicism is a very loose one. The deep understanding of human misery that is evident in Haecker's pages fits other convictions and persuasions just as well as it does a Catholic philosophy. Haecker's contention that to reject a sense and a meaning transcending the temporal world is to drive man to despair, does not invalidate the rejection of a supernatural significance. Despair is no argument against truth. Grief over the present is well justified; nevertheless an attitude is possible which permits of a positive cooperation in the historical tasks of the day.
For the true Christian, there is one, single, real goal in the finite: death, “the quiet of the grave.” Whether the work of human beings endures for seconds, years, centuries, millions of years: “That wind or storm, which will blot and wipe out the traces of all finite goals, will come. An intellect which does not realize this has yet to reach its own natural heights. But just because he has, this does not mean he can withstand it.” Madness is a mercy for him, lies and false doctrines, like that of the eternal return of all things, are his refuge. (30) Deliverance [Rettung] from such sinking is given solely through the Christian outlook and faith. The final goals are posited in the service of God, in the service of a return to God. God himself is the infinite goal. Though the world seems a hell, God alone is Lord of history, (117) his will all-powerful; he uses the wills of men and devils “for His unchanging purposes and goals.” (91) The role of peoples in the tragedy, or comedy, of history “is assigned to them by their Creator, the divine dramaturg and judge himself.” (129)
Haecker’s book51 was not written with the intention of establishing a new theory of history in mind. He seeks only to outline the Christian, or rather the Catholic, conception. Through clarity of thought and language, through limiting it to essentials, this short work, meant for a broad readership, is to demonstrate the vitality of Catholic thought. For all his knowledge of the complexity of historical-philosophical problems, Haecker never flees from the most decisive questions into the sheltered domains of specialist facility which, as a consequence of isolation, have only secured their irrelevance. He develops the Christian point of view as a whole.
All which has beginning and end, which exists, also has its history: all particular histories coalesce into Universalhistorie, which, once begun, will someday come to an end. Particular histories have an order of rank: “The history of a hero or saint is itself hierarchically higher and fuller” than that of the average human being (47); those of animals, plants, and things refer themselves “to the history of the human being as the center and purpose of creation” (43). God himself is just as historyless as are values and ideas. The fact that [God, values, and ideas] are realized or “embodied” constitutes the course of history and determines its meaning, which, according to the Catholic conception, consists in the elevation and exaltation of the human being from out of his fallen condition. Each individual must carry out this ascent for and by himself alone. Even when it is not individuals, but social groups which are the primary bearers of history (50-52), [history] is ultimately about the salvation of each particular soul. In connection with the salvation of persons, all events in human and extra-human history acquire order and meaning. Historical trajectories are, of course, subject as much to the specialized scientific methods of geologists, biologists, political economists, and psychologists as they are to the critical scrutiny of historians; nevertheless, they remain a meaningless multiplicity, a chaos, in the absence of the light cast by the Christian belief that, through the incarnation of Christ, the divine-human process is woven into the profane, whereby the latter acquires its true reality and infinite significance.
God, human, and devil are the active forces in this process. Though external events may play an important role in deciding whether the human falls prey to the temptation of the devil or entrusts himself to divine grace, the decision ultimately transpires in the innermost recesses of the subject for itself. The subject is located between two unequal powers. The evil one, within the boundaries assigned to it in the plan for the world, tries to seduce the human being to misuse the freedom awarded to him by the Creator; God himself, on the other hand, shows the human being the path to salvation through his Church. Whereas peoples [Völker] win their dominions and disappear one after the other, the Church will endure until the end of days. Even if, “as is evident,” many of her representatives abandon the path marked out in advance by the Gospel and flout the precept to conquer without weapons but by means of the Spirit alone, and to bless “those who curse you” (134), at least [the Church] still proclaims this principle in her preaching, and many of her servants have time and time again sealed it through their lives. The people of God, however, who will adhere to the Gospel to the end and pass into eternity, will not be that of a natural community, race, or nation which forcibly spreads itself across the world today, but rather—so we may believe—will be that of individuals who have come together from out of all peoples.
In opposition to the writings of a number of modern philosophers of religion, who spiritualize, dissipate, or even put to the side the content of their faith to the degree that the reader can only guess from the theological coloring of their style what, precisely, the author is gesturing towards, Haecker actually proclaim a faith. By virtue of its independence from the successful currents in our time, its fidelity to determinate ideas and, above all, through its indwelling longing for universal justice, Haecker’s word evokes our respect, even if it is deceptive. The ground of Haecker’s thinking—unlike that of many appointed functionaries of the Church—is the tension between the events of the present and the faith. In many passages, contempt for the contemporary worldview, which glorifies the mere powers of nature or nation or leader, is evident. The content of the mass delusion [Massenwahns] which enslaves entire peoples, which, it seems to us, consists less in the fact that someone may earnestly hang onto marketable follies than in the fact that everyone, given the custom of displaying whichever conviction [Gesinnung] happens to be in the lead at the time, is forgetting the possibility of an actual one—such content is revealed in language alone: “Eternal heroes, eternal peoples”—temporal eternities, contradictiones in adjecto! Haecker knows all too well that there is no judgment too false, no obsession too tasteless and subaltern it cannot be just the right thing for the consolation and pacification of the degraded human being. As if their subsumption and subordination to that which pretends to be the highest nation or race, the contemporary abdication of independence in thinking and acting, this self-misunderstood idealistic abandon, were synonymous with true humility! A world in which the obedient mass, as false collectivity, has become an idol, would do well to remember that, within the Völker themselves, history is originally and always driven further by individuals opposed to the inertial drag of that which exists. The condition of progress is “the at times often tragic dissociation [Loslösung] of the individual from his community” (79)—that is, the struggle within the national group [nationalen Gruppe]. And if “the participation of free human beings in the shaping of this world is, as a rule, overestimated by non-Christians, at least those in Europe” (128), as this Catholic declares, Christians, for their part, should not imagine that history is made by God or the devil alone, and that the human can change nothing essential. Change and progress lie, to a great extent, in the hands of human beings. It is given to us to enforce the politics of the good against the politics of the bad. Without naming it explicitly, Haecker characterizes the latter as the totalitarian state. This second meaning of the political—which “unfortunately prevails” (56)—is “the usage and manipulation of human beings as means, on the grounds of psychological know-how [Erkenntnis] or oneness in feeling [Einfühlung], for the achievement of some purpose or goal, whether just or unjust.” This is precisely the definition of modern mass domination [Massenbeherrschung]; the substance of true politics aims at the goal of “a just order among human beings.”
The book challenges the reader to decide on its content, to adopt a mode of behavior that has fallen out of touch with the spirit of the times when it comes to religious intuitions. Haecker rightly castigates that vague thinking which confuses the fact that, throughout history, contradictory doctrines have been defended which have the same degree of truthfulness with the [idea] of the existence of contradictory truths (13-14). He does not elaborate on the social ground for this laxity. The relativism which was characteristic of the bourgeoisie during its liberal phase is still characteristic of the bourgeoisie in its totalitarian phase, despite its unconditional manner of speaking and regimentation of thinking at present. The religion which dwells within its social practice is ever and always the vulgar, narrow-minded materialism of profit and power. By closing themselves off to all materialism in response, significant social groups have alienated themselves from the truth altogether: the idea of materialism itself has been displaced into a “higher” realm by classical idealism, evaporated into mere fiction by positivism, and disparaged as a mere means of domination by the heroic realism of our day. When today a demagogue rejects the principles and deeds of his clientele on the grounds of foreign policy, his words are sometimes accompanied by a wink of the eye to the seduced masses, which cannot be noticed from the outside. This wink, which says that only the bad intentions are honest, relativizes the determinate content of his words; it is the barren truth of his speech. So-called authentic culture already bears this physiognomic sign of the völkisch mass orator to come. Where religion is concerned, the facts of the matter have long been obvious: the bourgeois [the Bürger] believes passionately in its necessity, not so much in its truth. However, for Haecker, though he refrains from such an analysis, the word is no mere means to another end which accomplices or ultimately even enemies might divine—rather, the word is a serious matter for him. The humanistic Catholic is free of the spiritual alienation [Geistfremdheit] of the relativistic bourgeoisie.
The decision demanded by his way of thinking is somewhat tempered by the internal contingency between its two constitutive features: humanism and Catholic dogma. His proclamation of the infinite value of the person, fidelity to the innate rights of the individual (78), struggle against the ideologies of race, nation, and Führerdom—these moments of his thinking form the properties of a conviction and civilization in retreat before the breaking darkness and connect Haecker with those who struggle for a better future for humanity. This humanistic structure can indeed be drawn to the fore from out of the complex of the Catholic world of thought; Haecker’s conviction finds its footing in this great tradition.52 However, this Catholic philosophy is similar to the idealistic philosophy Haecker rejects in that its theses can ultimately justify any mode of behavior towards existing society, be it critical or apologetic, reactionary or rebellious, without contradiction—indeed, without any violence needing to be done to it at all. With the historical-philosophical theses of God as the Lord of History and the salvation of the soul as history’s goal can be combined with conceptions which run directly counter to Haecker’s progressive critique of the spirit of the times.
The determinate connection between these dogmas and their real historical problems is not fully and explicitly articulated within the dogmas themselves, but is in equal measure funded by those interests which dominate the church. The Catholic preachers of the World War and their successors, who appeal to the Gospel just as much as as the author of the “Afterword,” testify against the humanity which resounds in Haecker’s language.53 Nor are the great cultural achievements of the Catholic Church—the teaching in social politics of the Middle Ages, the all-encompassing rationality of the Thomistic Summas, and Christian art—any more characteristic of the Church than the bloody history of its landlordship and the Holy Inquisition. The terror which the Church, in alliance with the nobility, has fostered at various times in the course of its existence, is completely without the rational elements which motivated the use of bloody deterrence against the enemies of a more rational form of society in many progressive movements. But if revelation—whether in itself or on the ground of the intelligent arts of interpretation and separation—is so ambiguous in relation to the historical struggle between a better future for humanity and humanity’s ruin, then those who are concerned with this struggle will, with all due respect for Haecker’s humanism, maintain their equanimity in the face of his dogmatic legend, from out of which Haecker’s independence to the darker tendencies of the present only seems to emerge.
Notwithstanding their venerable age, the doctrines dredged up by Haecker are no truer than the opinions of any other religion or sect. Duration of tradition and degree of truth have no direct correlation. It is said that the Lord our God employs devil and human being alike for his eternal purposes, that no sparrow may fall from its roost without him having willed it (84), let alone a head under the axe of the executioner; it is said that angels, i.e., spirits without body, help or hinder the preservation of the world, that murder and manslaughter are to be passed along as inheritance until God prevails in triumph eternal: this whole mythos—partly comforting, partly gruesome—becomes no more rational by virtue of Haecker’s commendable truthfulness. Such belief may indeed confer meaning to actuality, but not actuality to meaning; it is disclaimed by history. The beautiful prophecy that “whoever dashes against the cornerstone shall sooner or later be slain by it” (62) [Matthew 21:44] is not one degree more trustworthy than its opposite: that even the righteous shall be slain [Ezekiel 21:4]. There is an old Chinese narrative which is far superior to the Christian legend in this respect. It tells of the fate of several princes, four good and two bad. The bad, tyrants and exploiters of the people, lead rich and happy lives until their end. The terror which they spread stifles any disobedience. After their death, one may speak evil of them, but:
“Whether we revile or praise them they do not know it; does it mean any more to them than to stumps of trees and clods of earth?”
The good, friends to their subjects, servants to their country, suffer failure and famine, invasion by enemies and uprisings within. They die in misery and exile. After their death, they reap the fame of ten thousand generations, but:
“Though we praise them they do not know it; though we value them they do not know it. It matters no more to them than to stumps of trees and clods of earth.”54
The narrative dispenses with practical application.
Haecker refrains from seeking evidence in the present of God’s triumph, which “aims for eternity, not for time” (84); but at the very least, “signs” of divine success can be discovered in history. The modest claim to credibility made by this Christian conception of history arises in the course interpreting such signs, which stands in sharp contrast to the dimension of other historical claims which have been made by the Church. The opinion, for example, that Napoleon’s retreat from Russia was connected with his excommunication and should be interpreted as “the consequence of the anathema of a pope” without regard for all other explanations of this military event, calls for the consideration of whether there are other heads of state who would be more agreeable to the Eternal than those who, instead of excommunication and the curse of unhappy peoples, have earned the blessing of a pope. Even if the meaning of all world-historical events, crises, wars, and revolutions were actually determined by their significance for the salvation of the soul, as Haecker imagines, the friendship of the Church has nevertheless provided a truly poor model for how this standard ought to be applied. The decent, human mode of behavior that Haecker’s book may encourage in some passages is, in any event, no more closely related to the Christianity which has been operative in history than are the worst heresies. The objection that one’s orientation towards human beings is not as important as one’s orientation towards God—this thought, which may seem obvious to the decent, human believer, fares no better than the opinions it impugns, and among which it belongs.
The point of view which is objectively opposite Haecker’s conception of history—a view which denies the supernatural meaning of history, without thereby losing the understanding of “the indissoluble connections of the whole and all its parts” (92) as the positivist pseudophilosopher does—is barely taken into consideration by Haecker. The “pure atheist,” he says, is “a thoroughly aristocratic phenomenon” (15), but this conviction “naturally” belongs to an “aftertype [Afterart] of theology” (89). According to this claim—which Haecker shares with Max Scheler, whom he otherwise fought ardently against—any struggle against the religious point of view is in vain, because then it is necessary that some temporal good (power, fame, money, pleasure) is posited in the stead of the highest, in place of God.
Despite the ingenuity theologians have always employed in making this argument, it may very well apply historically to the bourgeois who is, at base, indifferent towards religion and the spirit in general—and also to the “modern man of action,” a specimen Haecker especially hates—but in any case remains an empty assurance before the self-conscious materialist. The state of affairs for which the latter strives, in opposition to the Church, does not have to be reified and eternalized: community with the actual interests of captive humanity and the sharpness of dialectical thinking safeguard us from idolatry more thoroughly than obedience to the Church, though the latter may be infinitely superior to obedience to the so-called leader-personalities which is today so widespread. Haecker’s charge of ‘Aftertheologie’ seems to us to apply far more to theology itself, insofar it cheapens the ideas of highest wisdom, love, and justice by ascribing them to the Lord of History. The impossible service of making this absurdity credible is expected from theodicy, of which Haecker says God not only allows but wants from us (85)—yet even Leibniz only won a sad infamy for himself in this commission.
There is a possibility of comprehending history without taking on the futile attempt of transforming it into a process of salvation through mere interpretation. The good, justice, and wisdom, which appear possible on the grounds of theory, are not yet realized so long as they remain a mere image in the heads of human beings. Those who would actualize the image have no need to make a God of it; rather, they know that this good too, when actualized, will still have a history and will still pass away. The finite goals for which the fighters and enlighteners of all times have faced death are yet nothing like death, despite what Haecker imagines them to be, for they are not eternal. They are distinguished from death precisely because of the mortal measures of happiness for which these fighters died.55 They did not bow before the higher religious mathematics according to which a life of agony and a life of enjoyment are equivalent to one another and null in relation to infinity. It was rather the objectives of the prevailing injustice which they considered to be equivalently null, and so gave themselves up that others might live otherwise.
In contrast, the materialist of everyday bourgeois life and the devout Catholic, prepared even for martyrdom, have always had this in common: that their actions were essentially related to the well-being of their own person.56 The vision of eternal bliss among the early Christians, as well as the majority of those who came after them, is distinguished by duration, but not so much content, from the earthly purposes of the children of the world. Therefore, every now and then, both of these stances [Haltungen] enter into a singular combination in one and the same person; on balance, the Church tends to take the side of the greater property. The childlike faith which Haecker promulgates has not seldom formed the naive superstructure of an inhuman actuality in the course of world history. It belongs to the greatness and wisdom of Catholicism that it does not completely dilute the idea of eternity and detach it from material desires, as is the rule in Protestant movements. However, if the materialism of bourgeois practice in a certain way presents the truth of theology, the materialistic theory rejected by Haecker, which holds up a mirror before such practice, ensures the motives of theology are not simply forgotten, but rather sublated [aufgehoben].57 This critique of religion, in fact, revokes the theological hypostasis of the abstract human being by developing the concept of God from out of determinate historical relations. Such a critique understands this abstraction, animated and sanctified by faith, as a result of social dynamics.
In that human beings, it teaches, no longer confront one another principally as masters and slaves, but as free beings, and the life of the whole is renewed by means of exchange, they equate their activities, the products of their labor, and themselves, and thus arrive at the notion [Vorstellung] of the human being in general, i.e., the human being without determined time, place, and fate, which is consummated in the concept of God in the modern age. What is real are the historically determined human beings who are connected to this form of social life—namely, the subjects of that abstraction which reflects social existence only imprecisely and abstractly—rather than their content, hypostasized and eternalized. This is not to say that every thought-structure, every context of knowledge, is a socially conditioned illusion [Schein]; nevertheless, the concept of God in the last centuries proves itself to be bound to a transient form of social existence. But the theory which has been suggested here—along with all of the hypotheses, psychological and otherwise, it encompasses—does not prevent us in the least from considering Christian ideology to be a decisive cultural progression beyond certain pagan forms of religion, nor does it diminish or conceal the truth and scope of of the thoughts which are associated with Christianity. To the contrary. By negating the ideas of the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, and eternal life as dogmatic posits, the human being’s need for infinite bliss is fully revealed and takes up opposition to the poor conditions of the earth.
It is not the case that the theoretical materialist, like the bourgeois materialist, must posit perishable goods as absolute: he knows only that the desire for an eternity of happiness, this religious dream of humanity, cannot be fulfilled.58 The thought that the prayers of the persecuted in their greatest need, that the prayers of the innocent who must die without their case being resolved, that their last hopes for a superhuman authority do not reach their destination, and that the night which no human light can illuminate will not be penetrated by the light of the divine either, is monstrous. Without God, eternal truth has no more ground or footing than infinite love; indeed, it becomes an unthinkable concept. But has monstrousness [Ungeheurlichkeit] ever been a valid argument against the assertion or denial of a fact? Does any logic include the law that a judgment is false just because consequence is despair? The error of imagining that “this small earth is set in a predetermined space next to a select and privileged star among the starry host,” this pious belief, which Haecker sees confirmed again by statements of “modern astronomers” and again “on the grounds of experience” (138), corresponds to a longing even atheists have long understood.
All of these wishes for eternity and, above all, the ingress of universal justice and goodness are, in contrast to the apathy of the positivist, common to the stance of the materialistic thinker and that of the religious one. But if the latter is comforted by the thought that the wish will be fulfilled in any case, the former is imbued by the feeling of the boundless forsakenness of the human being, which is the only true answer to the impossible hope. Contrary to Haecker’s point of view, the materialistic thinker need not fall into madness, though traces of a metaphysical sadness run through the writings of the great materialists.59 The pleasure which is so essential to materialistic thinking already bears within itself, as a phenomenon, the consciousness of transience and the bitterness of the end. This knowledge [Wissen] belongs to its very essence [Wesen]. Outrage over the senselessly impaired lives of the majority of all human beings, the affinity between hedonism and historical partisanship has its origins in the experience of the irretrievability of happiness.
The question of why any disposition towards the world for which even the good appears to be afflicted by the negative according to its essence does not reverse into despair—this psychological problem, which Haecker dismisses a priori—will be resolved not through the analysis of atheism but by proving the capacity for pleasure is not bound to the egotistic constitution of the soul [Seelenverfassung] of most religious adherents. The psychological structure, on the basis of which Haecker, in contradiction with determinate aspects of his work, regards perseverance in the materialistic theory to be impossible, constitutes a special case, albeit a widespread one, which, we believe, will some day cease to appear so natural. When not only the “mass madness and insanity” (118), through which, in Haecker’s true words, the experience of irreparable transgressions among the peoples is drowned out and sealed in, but also the consolation of religion loses its force; that is, with the emergence of a state of affairs that could forego such legends, then certainly the social, though not “the natural ground of melancholy, that melancholia which resides in the human being,” would disappear. Yet even this natural ground, death, would reveal another aspect under relations in which the purposes of the individual—unlike in a competitive society—would be abolished [aufgehoben] in the whole; this ground would be capable, stripped of religious and non-religious ideologies, of boundlessly increasing the solidarity among all living beings. In the fight against melancholy, the religious belief in the re-creation of the world after its demise (22) extends one span of the hand too far beyond it.
Interlude: Meditations on Metaphysical Sadness (1936/37)
Happiness is but a dream, and pain is real;
I have felt it now for eighty years.
All I know to do is resign myself to this,
and tell myself flies are born to be eaten by spiders,
and men to be devoured by sorrows.
— Voltaire, Letter to the Marquis de Florian dated March 16, 1774.
Many thanks for the newspaper clipping. Believe me that there is a close relationship between the incident in the “peaceful world” surrounding us that the brief article reported and the fractious world in which people annihilate each other with all the instruments of modern technology. This “unidentified driver” who, seeing the dog, didn't slow down and then drove off without caring about the small victim is precisely the kind of individual who makes this beautiful world unbearable. He is the root of all evil. He doesn't even understand that other goals than his own most trivial ones can also have a purpose. This driver represents business in terms of how it triumphs over humanity. He ran over the animal without giving it any thought, as contemporary history passes over the individual and his suffering in silence. And only one thing is certain: he will arrive at a place where it is impossible to live. This generation does not need to be envied by any other for its future.
—Horkheimer to Juliette Favez, 11/25/1936.60
Letter—Benjamin, Re: The Sadness of the Materialist (1936)
[Excerpt from: Walter Benjamin to Horkheimer, 12/24/1936.]61
The day before yesterday, I read your Haecker-essay. I am not familiar with the book you discuss. However, a number of years ago, I had occasion to review Haecker’s Virgil in “Literarischen Welt.”62 Your essay exudes—for all its moderation—the unswerving determination of one who is still willing to speak in German. The Chinese story within it is of great significance. —What you say concerning the melancholy [Schwermut] touches a special part of me: I mean, of course, my old love for Gottfried Keller. It was him whose grandiose sadness was actually, traversed by such colorful threads of lust, the materialistic kind: “Langsam und schimmernd fiel ein Regen, / in den die Abendsonne schien…”63 [“Slowly and gleaming fell the shower, / through which the evening sun shone…”]64 In this poem, a rainbow, which the wanderer cannot see above him, but which he knows can be seen above him from afar, serves as a metaphor for the promise of a future reconciliation of his “gloomy soul” [“düsteren Seele”]. But that is for another long chapter. And certainly out of all the chapters planned for the materialistische Lesebuch, it is, to me, the one whose discoveries could be most surprising.
Letter—Adorno, Re: Justice to the Theological Motive (1937)
[Excerpt from: Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/25/1937.]65
As I’ve already indicated, your “Haecker”-essay has made a strong impression on me. Above all, the deep seriousness and substantial formulations (...). You know the motives [Motive] you touch on there are the only ones which have ever led me to the use of theological categories, and, if I am not mistaken, you seem to have been thinking of some of Cronberger’s conversations [?] on this point, as have I. I have a few small linguistic objections, which are, perhaps, not entirely irrelevant when considering a passage of such extraordinary, if latent, pathos. The designation “monstrousness” [“Ungeheuerlichkeit”] seems to me too quantitative in tone to express what is meant—namely, simple despair. And, today, I would no longer use the expression of “metaphysical sadness” [“metaphysische Trauer”], perhaps because I once used it so passionately. But on the whole, I have the feeling that one stands on such scorching-hot ground here—in fact, that of hell itself—that each step one takes upon it is a painful one by necessity. Let me just mention one last thing: you say the Catholic’s hope for the afterlife and the hope of the bad bourgeois materialists have in common “that their actions were essentially related to the well-being of their own person.” I believe you do the theological motive injustice here. For the desperate hope, which seems to me that which in religion alone is more than mere cover-up, is not so much the worry for one’s own self as much as the fact one cannot truly think of the death and irretrievable loss of the loved one, or the death and loss of those upon whom injustice has befallen—and even today, I often cannot understand how one could otherwise take a single breath—without hope for them. In the third chapter of his “Elective Affinities”-work, which I still consider his best, Benjamin says that hope is only ever for others and never the one who hopes,66 and I believe this is also true for Jewish theology. Perhaps this one little feature is what prevents me from razing it all to the ground. But I know, of course, that of this, we will—for a long time, and perhaps for our entire lifetimes—have to remain silent.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Injustice to the Theological Motive (1937)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adorno, 2/22/1937]67
Regarding the “monstrousness” [“Ungeheuerlichkeit”] in my Haecker-essay, I can assure you we had exhaustive discussions over this term before sending off the manuscript. Therefore, I can only agree with you that there is much to be said against it. On the other hand, there are also a number of considerations in favor of it, which I do not wish to elaborate now that the essay cannot be changed. In any event, after weighing each of the various arguments, the “monstrousness” remained. Regarding the expression “metaphysical sadness,” I happen to feel slightly more free to use it than you might, since it has no particular connotations for me of which I am conscious. I was thinking primarily of a few specific passages in Voltaire, and believe it would not be so difficult to find parallel passages in other works. I believe I could draw from Maupassant68 and other literary authors here. Even as I write this, several lines of Delacroix’s notebooks come to mind which also apply here69—though I do not know to what extent he could be considered a materialist. Why should one not use the concept of “metaphysical sadness” which fits these sorts of statements so well? What I mean by this is explained with greater precision at the end of the Bergson-essay. As far as you, personally, are concerned, I readily concede I do the theological motive injustice. I cannot, however, agree with your interpretation of the Catholic, or more specifically the Christian martyr to whom my remark referred. It is not only theology which speaks against this interpretation, but history as well. Read what Harnack says of the martyrs.70 Your own thought, that “desperate hope” of which you speak, is, as you well know, very near to my way of thinking as well, and I believe one need not remain silent about it. Incidentally, neither you nor I have done so. Aside from the above-mentioned essay, I need only remind you, among other passages, to the end of your Kierkegaard.
Letter—Landauer, Re: The Future of an Illusion as Present (1937)
[Excerpt from: Karl Landauer to Horkheimer, 1/1/1937.]71
The first letter I write this year is to you. If one is allowed to be a little superstitious, it is, perhaps, a good omen for the year to begin with a letter one enjoys writing and contains nothing unpleasant. Most letters are either written for unpleasant reasons, concern unpleasant things, or are addressed to unpleasant people. The main reason for this letter is to inquire about your travel plans. I certainly hope you and your wife will visit and arrange things so we may spend a longer stretch of time together. As you well know, my schedule is now fairly regular and thus you can have whatever free time I have at your disposal. This year, there is an extremely promising conference in Budapest, May 15th-17th, which I would like to attend if at all possible, and, also if possible, combine with a short visit to Freud on the way there or the way back. This means I will be away for approximately eight days. If you let me know in advance when you plan to visit, I would be most grateful, as I could then perhaps free up an hour or two a day for the duration. When one is so extraordinarily isolated, it is a true joy to hear there will finally be a dear friend with whom one can discuss all those things which are most important. I don’t mean practical things. Happily, there is no need to worry about such things at the moment. Rather, in my loneliness, I find myself more in need than ever to discuss all of those things which are important in general. In Holland, I’ve had hardly any opportunity to learn about the course of the world and all of the aspirations which drive it. You are in the more fortunate situation of not being quite so alone, and of having a circle of dear colleagues around you. Here, it is entirely different. Here, the bourgeoisie is so stable that its infinitude is not in question, which has so rarely been the case for either of us in decades. Naturally, there is a sort of Salonkommunismus here, but I believe the time we may once have had for such things is past, even though we need not exercise restraint in these matters for external reasons.
Instead, the questions which are most pressing here are those which you have posed in your last essay. The significance of such problems had not dawned on me until recently, after a very long time, as I, standing somewhat apart, had long since stopped seeing them as problems at all, precisely because I had to reckon with them on my own 30 or 35 years ago. This is why I never before understood your joy over Freud’s The Future of an Illusion. For me, it was already old chestnuts. Well, since then we have learned better. Just recently, the story of the abdication of the English king clearly showed us the enormous power of the church.72 Here, though disguised in the cloak of the old morality, it showed us quite a lot of its hideous visage. In Spain [viz., in the Spanish Civil War], it is all the more gruesome, but, I expect, not quite so different. Since I know not the provocateur of your essay or his book, the details are naturally not for me. But the tendency of your essay certainly applies to me too. I would like to say just a few words about it: first of all, you have become so much more unreserved and open, even downright combative, in the last year. This makes me extremely happy, for, as you know, in the past I often felt sorry for you when you were so much more accommodating than my temperament allows me to be. To make a second note of this essay and all of your essays from this last year: while you once had so much difficulty with your writing, and really only wrote with ease in a more artistic mode in the stillness of your little room, as in your conversations with Regius,73 your writing now appears so fluid—better yet, sharp.
From what you now write, one has the impression which has always overwhelmed those present when you would converse with them or deliver a speech: that unsummable thoughts simply flow through you, and that you only draw from those which are most full. It does you good. And with this, you have yet another reason why I look forward to your visit, as always: one simply needs the presence of those with whom one can be happy. There is not much to report about us here. About a fortnight ago, there was a Freudfeier here, at which I spoke about the Dream.74 I was tempted to present the matter in such a manner that the old Freud, who is so dear to us, was rightly given pride of place. I really enjoyed showing the construct of the dream, which seems so completely detached from reality, is only a reaction to the outside world, something which the false students of Freud’s prefer to push aside completely. Isn’t it rather amusing that someone [viz., Carl Gustav Jung] who neglects the reality-side of the personality [Realitätsseite der Persönlichkeit] so unconscionably places the most particular value [Wert] on that which is shared by all human beings and describes it with a term from Nationalökonomie: the collective unconscious. As to why he does this, it is quite evident: because it is not collective; because it is nonsense [Unsinn]. I find it very rich that this expression has become so ubiquitous in general linguistic usage. Must, one is led to wonder, everything really be nonsense in order for it to be on everyone’s lips?
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: The Natural Subject of Reason. (1937)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Pollock, 9/20/1937.]75
The overall situation in Europe is quite sad. The fear of war itself is merely a moment in a social development in which all cultural values worth fighting for are inevitably perishing. The few people in whom the truth has taken refuge appear as ridiculous know-it-alls who use bombastic language and have nothing behind them. The consolation that certain people in the Old Testament also suffered the same fate is all the less helpful, as the success of the prophets was not overwhelming in the long run. The most unpleasant discovery to which materialism leads is that reason only exists insofar as it has a natural subject behind it. It is left to this natural subject to decide how to use reason. Reason can also be lost to this subject through no fault of its own. The recursive effect of reason on the subject is never so strong and lasting that the subject loses its character of naturalness. Thus, the famous identity that idealism lives on never arrives. But eventually the waters will return, over which no spirit floats…
IV. Remarks on Jaspers’ Nietzsche (1937).
Translator’s note: The Spießbürger
In his “Bemerkungen zu Jaspers’ ‘Nietzsche’” (1937), Horkheimer ends the first paragraph of his ‘Streitschrift,’ much in the spirit of Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift [1887], with an insult: “Thus spake the Spießbürger.”
Upon reading Horkheimer’s “Remarks,” Karl Löwith—to the end of whose ZfS review of several Nietzsche books,76 which included Jaspers’ Nietzsche. Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens (1936), Horkheimer’s own “Remarks” were appended at the last minute—replies: “It’s not that I think you should have handled the matter more gently, but perhaps you could have been more delicate in form and, for example, refrained from handing out the title of “Spießbürger” right at the outset.”77 Others were even offended on Jaspers’ behalf. In late 1937, Adorno writes to Horkheimer from London that he’d arranged to meet with Gustav Mayer (1871-1948) on behalf of the ISR. Mayer, who was best known for his biographical work on Friedrich Engels and historical work on the 19th century labor movement, was also in exile. Because of his high-profile status as a socialist—and Jewish—intellectual, he’d struggled to flee Germany in the mid-1930s with his family. In light of the ISR’s project in the mid-to-late 30s to not only maintain, but expand, the legacy of radical social thought and science that was no longer possible in Nazi Germany, Mayer was exactly the kind of intellectual the core members of the ISR were looking to collaborate with in some way. To his great dismay, however, Adorno discovers that Mayer’s sister, Gertrud, was, in fact Gertrud Mayer-Jaspers. Gustav Mayer was furious about Horkheimer’s “Remarks”; Adorno follows this by announcing his intention to take a stand if challenged: “for me, solidarity must come before diplomacy, and not only because I am not capable of behaving otherwise, but also out of institutional-tactical considerations.”78 When Adorno and Mayer met, Adorno defends the “Remarks” with as much vehemence as Mayer attacks them, which causes Mayer to back down; having ended the dispute, Adorno plans to invite him over again.79
Who is the Spießbürger? “Spießbürger/in“ (”Spießer” for short) is an untranslatable, idiomatic expression, defined in the Duden as “the narrow-minded [engstirniger] person guided by the conventions of society and the judgment of others,”80 and associated with the words Philister (philistine) and Kleinbürger (petty-bourgeois). Spießbürger likely originated in the middle ages as a description of lesser Bürgers in provincial cities who fulfilled their duty of required military service in person, armed with a simple spear [Spieß].81 According to the Duden, the term subsequently became a derogatory label for old-fashioned small Bürgers of the provinces who continued to use spears after the introduction of the modern rifle;82 finally, the term became a slang insult common among students in larger cities to refer to conservative small-town dwellers in the late 20th century.83 Despite a history of having stronger political valences—from Heine and Marx using it in the early 19th century to insult the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, to the 1968-ers accusing older generations of both cultural conformism and submissiveness to authority from the Nazi period to failed de-Nazification, and even the charge the term had in the 70s/80s to refer to middle-class enemies of counter-culture—the term seems to have become synonymous with ‘behind the times’ and associated with having conventional, conservative taste.84 (When I asked German-speakers for advice on how to translate the term, they suggested ‘square’ rather than my original, more ‘literal’ but also more ‘literary’ decision to translate it as ‘provincial bourgeois.’)
This history of Spießbürger is worth recapitulating not just because of the problem it poses for English readers and translators, but because its evolution from a descriptive term for a member of a certain class or class strata to a derogatory term in judging someone’s level of culture is itself a record of the formation of culture in history of class struggle in Germany. In other words, Spießbürger presents us with a problem for materialist interpretation, in the sense Horkheimer repeatedly formulates the task, from his early study of Vico’s interpretation of myth and metaphysics through patterns of social practice in “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” (1930)85 to his comments on critical theory as historical-materialist philology the Eclipse of Reason (1947).86 Aside from the historical variation of the class strata that Spießbürger was meant to describe—the members of citizen militias in the middle ages; the reactionary petty-bourgeois of the 19th century; the bigoted middle-class asshole of the 1980s—what is crucial for our purposes here is the ambiguity of the class perspective from which the judgment of the Spießbürger is passed.
For texts written in both the tradition—viz., Marxism—and intellectual environment—viz., 1920s/30s German-language letters and criticism—of Horkheimer’s “Remarks,” Spießbürger is most often translated as “petty-bourgeois philistine,” or shortened into either just “philistine” or just “petty-bourgeois,” depending on the context and discretion of the translator. On the one hand, Spießbürger is more likely to be translated as the class category ‘petty-bourgeois,’ for instance, in a story about dockyard workers mocking Spießbürger enthusiasm for naval propaganda during WWI.87 Thus, for Marx, the variety of class connotations Spießbürger had already acquired by the middle of the 19th century made it a particularly attractive insult for the downwardly and upwardly mobile ‘friends’ and enemies of the working classes. Marx hurled it at everyone from contemporary social theorists suffering from the ‘petty-bourgeois mentality’—from Proudhon to Bentham to Bakunin—to urban English settler-colonists brutally dividing up Ireland for plunder in the 17th century.88 On the other hand, Spießbürger is more likely to be translated as the aesthetic category ‘philistine’ in Adorno’s criticism (and self-criticism) in Minima Moralia (1951) of literary, theoretical, and artistic production under the conditions of monopoly capitalism;89 the convention of treating Spießbürger as one of several synonyms for ‘philistine’ tends, even in more careful readings, to confirm the impression of the elitist or haute bourgeois standpoint of evaluation Adorno is expected to have in advance.90
In the Manifesto, however, Marx and Engels themselves use Spießbürger in their criticism of “German, or ‘True’ Socialism” to connect judgments of the politically reactionary petty bourgeoisie (“Kleinbürgerthum”) and the culturally backward philistines (“Pfahlbürgerschaft”).91 What Marx and Engels describe in this section is the process of social transformation through which, in the course of the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the small bourgeoisie in 18th century Germany are increasingly threatened by destruction from two sides, both of which extremes are sharpening in the larger cities—the concentration of capital on the one and the rise of a revolutionary proletariat to the other; in response, the small bourgeoisie defend their ‘form of life’ on the terrain of culture against the proletariat and the big bourgeoisie, they convert the revolutionary tendencies of militant French socialist and communist literature into a force for reaction, and they do so in a distinctively German manner, by spiritualizing it into a boon for the ruling powers of the nation:
The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism. German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of “Practical Reason” in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally. (…)
The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome “French one-sidedness” and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy. (…)
While this “True” Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German Philistines [Pfahlbürgerschaft]. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class [Kleinbürgerthum], a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things. To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction—on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. “True” Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic. The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths”, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public. And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine [Pfahlbürgerschaft]. It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. [Er proklamirte die deutsche Nation als die normale Nation und den deutschen Spießbürger als den Normal-Menschen.] To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.92
This is, in fact, exactly what Horkheimer accuses Jaspers of, only on a higher level of ideological transfiguration [Verklärung].93 The German Spießbürger of the 18th century ‘spiritualized’ French revolutionary literature into partnership with the ruling powers of the nation. The Spießbürger Jaspers in the 20th defangs Nietzsche, heir to the most radical psychological insight of the French enlightenment, to sell him back, domesticated, across the Rhine, in advance of the new masters before whom Jaspers taught him how to heel. Horkheimer writes to Löwith (7/27/1937):
I have written a long postscript of my own to follow your collective Nietzsche-review, which will appear in the autumn issue. Since it has had a significant impact in France, as elsewhere, I wanted to test some specimens from his presentation by confronting them with Nietzsche’s text, in order to show, in detail, how Jaspers removed himself from the whole affair concerning the Jews, the French, the Germans, and the nation. We ourselves know all of this well and good, but it is unknown to those in other countries. Otherwise, it would not be possible for Jaspers’ book to be so widely praised as a great accomplishment, one supposed to show Nietzsche was no forerunner of the authoritarian regime.94
On the one hand, Jaspers makes Nietzsche out to be a true German, one who has enough hard love for the German spirit to spur them on to something better for it in the future, whatever that might mean and whenever that may be, enough to suggest a hidden criticism of the Nazis; on the other, he makes Nietzsche’s fascist reception plausible—sparing the Germans Nietzsche’s bile, but letting just enough through for the French and the Jews—while prudently stopping short of endorsement. By holding to the rule that everything one says must be true, but one does not need to say everything that is, Jaspers’ selective reading of Nietzsche’s aphorisms falls far short of their systematic scope to have done with systems altogether: “Nietzsche's aphorisms are not daring marginal observations that a person of that sort allows himself; they are not a proof of freedom and harmony that would confirm the possibility of the system. Rather, they make a claim that is at least as far-reaching as the latter and thus prove it to be obsolete.”95 Lacking even the will to system in his own thought, Jaspers falls into place in the one beyond it.
After reading Horkheimer’s “Remarks,” Löwith submits three protests on Jaspers’ behalf. First, that Horkheimer has unjustly judged Jaspers for a silence which might, in the context of the inverted world of Germany, may have seemed a heroic refusal to compromise himself.96 Second, that Horkheimer’s unmistakably Marxianizing interpretation of Nietzsche does him both too great and too little a service by making him the critic of the bourgeois order and plainly misrepresents Nietzsche by allying him, against the social democrats, with Marx: “As far as Nietzsche himself is concerned, however, I think he did more, and less, than just express the “truth of the bourgeois order.” Nor was the concept of a “classless society” spoiled for him by its supporters and his unfamiliarity with Marx!”97 Third, Löwith insists that if one were to fulfill Horkheimer’s demand and refuse to speak of Nietzsche “without clearly relating him to current events,” one could only find Nietzsche’s critique of the Second Reich is was by no means unequivocally a critique of the Third, that his ambiguous relationship to Bismarck and Wagner compromises even the former critique, and that Nietzsche must, in final analysis, be judged “on the basis of his illegitimate historical effects”—as “the trailblazer of today’s German Ideology” even if “one must not imagine the so-called trailblazer would ever himself follow a path others had paved.”98 Löwith is a strong reader of Jaspers. Like Jaspers, he would still like to smooth things out.
Horkheimer responds to each of these protests in the review itself. To take them out of order: to the first, Horkheimer’s objection to Jaspers is not that he is silent about the worries of the day, but that he borrows Nietzsche’s voice to say so much of nothing at all about them, and to say it with flair. This explains the harshness of Horkheimer’s judgment of Jaspers’ supposed contributions to university reform during post-war reconstruction: “In his book on Nietzsche, published under Hitler, he simply forgets about those parts of Nietzsche's doctrine which are most opposed to the Nazi philosophy. Heidegger was an outright Nazi, (…) [b]ut he was a genuine philosopher.”99 To the third, Horkheimer’s argument is that Jaspers’ (and, by extension, Löwith’s) reading of Nietzsche’s ‘ambiguity’ is precisely that which strips Nietzsche of his passionate ambivalences, his outright equivocations: “According to Jaspers, Nietzsche ought to appear to the reader in the same manner Wagner appeared to Nietzsche—namely, as a well-behaved type of German unclarity, about whom one cannot even speak of his aversion to “the national narrowness of the fatherlanders” without a “perhaps.”” To uncover the contradiction between Nietzsche’s thought and the society of his epoch (and ours) means uncovering the contradictions within Nietzsche’s thought as well.100 As Horkheimer writes in “Materialism and Morality” (1933):
From his psychological investigation of the individuals that act under the natural law of their personal interest he concluded that the universal fulfillment of that for which they strove—namely security and happiness—would have to produce a society of philistines [Spießbürgern], the world of the “last” men. He failed to recognize that the characteristics of the present which he so detested derive precisely from the dearth of propitious conditions for society at large. With the spread of reason that he feared, with its application to all of the relations of society, those characteristics—which in truth rest upon the concentration of all the instincts on private advantage—must be transformed, as must ideas and indeed the drives themselves. (...) Nietzsche’s theory of history misses the mark; he places the goal in an inverted world, if not quite in another one, because he misunderstands the movement of the contemporary world due to his ignorance of economic laws. His own moral philosophy, however, contains the same elements as that which he struggles against. He fumes against himself.101
And Adorno in Minima Moralia, (§60) “A word for morality”:
If in Germany the common citizen [Spießbürger] has proved himself a blond beast, this has nothing to do with national peculiarities, but with the fact that blond bestiality itself, social rapine, has become in face of manifest abundance the attitude of the backwoodsman, the deluded philistine [Philisters], that same ‘hard-done-by’ mentality which the master-morality was invented to combat. If Cesare Borgia were resurrected today, he would look like David Friedrich Strauss and his name would be Adolf Hitler. The cause of amorality has been espoused by the same Darwinists whom Nietzsche despised, and who proclaim as their maxim the barbaric struggle for existence with such vehemence, just because it is no longer needed. (…) The amoralist may now at last permit himself to be as kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche already was then. As a guarantee of his undiminished resistance, he is still as alone in this as in the days when he turned the mask of evil upon the normal world, to teach the norm to fear its own perversity.102
This is the meaning of the concept of decadence in Nietzsche’s self-critique of decadence for Adorno and Horkheimer: “the struggle of the bourgeoisie against its psychologically productive tendencies and, at the same time, (…) its bad conscience over the fettering of the forces of production” (Adorno);103 “[a]s soon as the masses transform themselves through [right] use of power, then power itself loses its “decadence” and becomes an effect of the [unified] and thus “superhuman” force of society” (Horkheimer).104 And with this, we can respond to the second protest Löwith raised. For Horkheimer, there is no need to pretend Nietzsche’s interests coincide with those of the proletariat.105 The Marxianizing interpretation of Nietzsche is also the Nietzscheanizing one—
It must indeed have escaped him that the intellectual honesty with which he was concerned did not fit in with this social standpoint. The reason for the foulness against which he fought lies neither in individual nor national character but in the structure of society as a whole, which includes both. Since as a true bourgeois philosopher he made psychology, even if the most profound that exists today, the fundamental science of history, he misunderstood the origin of spiritual decay and the way out, and the fate which befell his own work was therefore inevitable.106
To the extent Nietzsche meant it when he said ‘a great truth wants to be criticized, not worshipped,’107 to the extent he didn’t just want the right theory of society but the right society, then, Horkheimer concludes, the right theory of society might have helped Nietzsche clarify the desire which betrayed his narrow bourgeois horizons. If not, so much the worse for Nietzsche—he would only have been another Spießbürger, despite everything. But that ‘despite everything’ is precisely why when Löwith worries about vulgar Marxist readings of Nietzsche, Horkheimer’s response is that only Marxists can read Nietzsche without any vulgarity at all.
Remarks on Jaspers’ Nietzsche
For Jaspers, “the confusing thing is that Nietzsche never just contemplates and enjoys in aesthetic terms, but rather suffers to the point of despair, and yet is unable to find a ground for his anchor, and can therefore never become one with another human being, with the idea of a profession, with the fatherland. He is one only with his work.” The astonishment that a despair exists which is not calmed by the cultivation of private relationships, the family, a profession or the fatherland, clearly indicates the origin of this “Einführung in das Verständnis” of Nietzsche. Thus spake the petty-bourgeois philistine (Spießbürger).
Formalistic idealism, in the shape of which philosophy was once again tolerated in German universities after the public’s enervating experience with the Hegelian school, is known by nearly everyone as the way to think about the world without coming into conflict with it. To this epoch it afforded the security that man could fulfill his vocation if he went along with everything the ruling authorities demanded of him. The reaction to this idealism, which preserved only the worst inheritance of the Hegelian metaphysics in the transfiguration [Verklärung] of given forms of social life, was the turn towards “realism.” Its assurances of arriving at a material philosophy, advancing toward the “concrete”, uncovering “authentic” reality, delivering a “Sachphilosophie”, and making thought “existential,” have not, however, affected the formalistic and conformist character of this [realistic] thinking in the slightest. On the contrary. As the social strata with which German universities are vitally interconnected came into ever greater conflict with the true interests of the masses, philosophy, which lacked any conscious relationship to historical actuality, became more and more unambiguously reactionary. Though the seemingly objective categories remained as vapid as those of their formalistic predecessors, its continuous discourse of historicity, authenticity, heroism, myth, fate, and death—this style, which is at one moment aristocratic and the next popular, and in which only one thing is clear, namely that it is not concerned with transforming unjust [social] relations, even in cases where it testifies to Bildung and love of culture—bore the imprint of the present state of affairs in which such properties have become patently superfluous. The cynical hostility to thought of the new objectivity of positivism and the intonation of more refined metaphysics have this in common: that one can believe oneself to be in possession of the truth and yet remain the same petty-bourgeois philistine (Spießbürger) one already was.
Jaspers makes Nietzsche out to be such a thinker. He accomplishes the feat of presenting [Nietzsche] without confrontation. He need not inflict such violence. His obliging language attests to its provenance in liberal ideology: in this medium, all contradictions are submerged.108
Nietzsche analyzed the objective spirit of his time, the psychic constitution of the bourgeoisie. In view of the earthly possibilities of human beings, which he appraised so exuberantly as only a utopian could, the type [of human being] which appeared before him, with its masochistic drives, was unbearable to him. Akin to the representative thinkers of the early bourgeoisie, such as Hobbes and Mandeville, he pronounced the truth of the bourgeois order: “One has no right to live, to work, to ‘happiness’: in this respect, the individual human being is no different from the lowliest worm.”109 Christianity, especially that of Luther, as well as enthusiasm for fatherland, and every manner of obscuring given actuality, appeared to him as the harbingers of a new barbarism. He abhorred the substitute satisfactions of the petty bourgeoisie: the sects, metaphysical or otherwise, the cult of the Germanic people, anti-Semitism. His goal was a future in which an indeterminable plenty of human forces would be set free on the basis of unprecedented intensification in mastery of nature. The concept of the Übermensch denotes this condition. Nietzsche’s theory of how this was to be realized, the naive eugenic and socio-political measures, among which race-mixing plays a special role, are part of the price he paid for his isolation. Despite everything, he knew there would be many Übermenschen or none at all: “all good develops only among equals.”110 The idea that would have turned the superman from an unthinkable, self-contradictory utopia into a substantial, historical goal, the concept of classless humanity, was spoiled for him by its supporters. He did not know Marx, but only the social democracy of his time: he did not judge it so unjustly. As a consequence of his reluctance to engage with political economy, a reluctance which is bound up with his hatred of a world dominated by economics, he misunderstood the historical character of labor. He believed that it could not lose its enslaving effect. The domination of the masses appeared to him, therefore, as the condition of the Übermensch. But behind his seemingly misanthropic formulations lies not so much this error as hatred of the tolerant, self-effacing, passive, and conformist character reconciled with the present.
Jaspers's eloquent cover-up of the contradiction between Nietzsche's teachings and the society of the epoch corrupts his entire presentation. The existence of Nietzsche's political illusions certainly makes it impossible to deny any ground for a judgment that connects him to the preparation of a totalitarian society. Some apologists for the actuality of this state make it a rope to hang him with, and make him a prophet of oppression and servility. Jaspers knows better. He notes the gulf between the doctrine of the Übermensch and what he sees before him in Germany. Therefore, he first presents Nietzsche as a great German thinker, and considers him a “philosopher of rank” who deserves “appropriate study.” He excuses Nietzsche, makes him acceptable. Nietzsche must not be “falsely dogmatized”, one should not cling to “false objectifications, solidifications, absolutizations, naturalizations”, in short, one should deprive him of any determinate content. What does this mean for Jaspers’ philosophy? “Philosophizing as such leads neither to God nor away from God, but rather emerges from the origin of the transcendent relatedness of selfhood. It is human actuality which seeks to lift out of the depths of reason and existence that from which one in fact lives, namely the closely kept conversation conducted in whispers through the millenia,” which is thus an internal, departmental affair. The words Jaspers uses are terrifying. He speaks of the “horror of this factual breakdown in communication,” of abysses, sacrifices, and unrelentingness. But he assures us, as if speaking before an imaginary people’s tribunal, that Nietzsche’s struggle takes place “on a level at which no real battlefronts of existence arise: it is the deeper, more decisive struggle within the soul of each individual and in the souls of peoples, the inner, invisible, inaudible struggle, for the existential sense of which Nietzsche provides the weapons: searching questions, as occasions for misunderstanding, opportunities to prove oneself.” Of course, these weapons are harmless, and, ultimately, Nietzsche will prove himself despite these occasions for misunderstanding, which are, admittedly, not so easily forgiven today.
“In his countless, disparaging remarks about the masses,” one is not supposed to find "a nonexistent alienation from the people [Volksfremdheit].” — “That he often says Volk when he means masses; this usage of language should not lead us astray.” Whether, in view of what has transpired in the meantime, Nietzsche might not, on the contrary, be tempted to apologize because he ascribed to the masses the deeds of the Volk—this question does not occur to his lawyer. Certainly, Nietzsche drew unpleasant consequences from atheism. But everything is “ambiguous,” and in any case one cannot say it is a matter of “an unquestioned and cliche godlessness.” Ominous formulations can be translated into language that is still tolerable today. Nietzsche called the Reformation “one of the most deceitful eruptions of common instincts,” Luther “a savage and inauthentic peasant who gives vent to all accumulated, violent needs: the want to once more be a lord, to rob, to cast down, to curse, let alone the satisfactions sought by the senses themselves; above all, one looks lustfully upon the immense wealth of the church.”111 — “A people which submits itself to the intelligence of a Luther!”112 Protestantism has thus far only “known how to conserve itself in the mediocre North.”113 This is how he remembered that early German ‘awakening.’ Jaspers also refers to Nietzsche’s position on the Reformation. He says the following: “[Nietzsche] always rejects Paul and Rousseau, and nearly always Luther.” “[Nietzsche’s] gaze spans primeval times, the world of antiquity, India, Christianity, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Enlightenment, the peoples of modernity, circling around them with succinct, characterizing formulations,” the precise wording of which is best kept to oneself. One particularly “characterizing” formulation of Nietzsche’s reads that the German Reformation was a “savage and vulgar counterpart to the Italian Renaissance.”
That Jaspers does not compromise Nietzsche with regard to his position on the Jews goes without saying. But then, out of fairness, shouldn’t he have left aside the Greeks too? After all, Nietzsche said they could have gone to school under instruction by certain Jews of the Old Testament. One may doubt whether Nietzsche’s relationship to the Greeks, the Jews, the Germans, or the French is most decisive for an understanding of his teachings today. In any case, it is made more difficult if one leaves out the Jews and French altogether. Jaspers doesn’t even stop at silence. After having to suppress the most understanding and honorable lines about such factors of European culture that have ever flowed from a German pen, he dares not to make a few drastic statements about their deficiencies. But for the Jews and the French, if they are to be mentioned at all, Jaspers arranges it such that they are at least mentioned in a derogatory or merely neutral spirit. “I believe only in French education,” said Nietzsche. “I cannot foresee any century in history one could have fished up such inquisitive and, at the same time, delicate psychologists as those in present-day Paris; I name, provisionally, since there are none too few among them, Mr. Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, or, to highlight one of that strong race, a true Latin, of whom I am particularly fond, Guy de Maupassant. Just between us, I prefer this generation even to its great teachers, all of whom have been corrupted by German philosophy (Herr Taine, for example, by Hegel, to whom he owes his misunderstanding of great men and great times). Wherever Germany spreads, it corrupts culture.”114 Jaspers says only that Nietzsche had “for a time held the Frenchmen La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, but particularly Montaigne, Pascal and Stendhal, in highest esteem,” and cites the sentence: “In France today, their will is most ill.” That Nietzsche appreciated “Pascal and Stendhal” may be forgiven, but his engagement with Maupassant and Anatole France is one of those “occasions for misunderstanding.”
Nietzsche always and obviously, not just “for a time,” spoke of the Jews “with highest respect.” He was one of the enlightened bourgeoisie [ein aufgeklärter Bürger]. According to him, the Jews are “the oldest and purest race.”115 “Wherever they have gained in influence, it has been their task to bring a people ‘to its senses.’”116 The Jews, French, and Chinese have espirit. “The anti-Semites do not forgive the Jews for having spirit and money. ‘The anti-Semites’ is a name for those who ‘made off poorly.’”117 Their struggle has always been “a mark of the worse, more envious, and more cowardly natures: and whoever participates in [anti-Semitism] now must have a good deal of the mentality of the rabble in him.”118 This Jaspers does not say, but where he can cite a sentence according to which, along with Manu, Plato, and Confucius, the Jewish and Christian teachers had no doubt about their right to lie, or where he thinks he discerns an opposition between Nietzsche and Judaism, he makes no secret of it.
“When it comes to enthusiasm for the principles ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ or ‘the German Reich’—for this we are not stupid enough.” “‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ is perhaps the most idiotic slogan ever uttered.”119 To Nietzsche, nationalism, “fatherlandism,” was the “most culture-adverse disease and unreason there is.”120 His statements to this effect are so clear and occupy so much space in his work that even Jaspers himself couldn’t just write about it without [including] a word or two about it. But he does so with caution: “As always, Nietzsche pursues his thought to its most extreme consequences. Therefore, in such a context, ‘when everything points to greater and common interests’, the ‘national’ visible to him in his time was rather more likely to spell danger: ‘the national, as it is now understood, demands, as a dogma, narrowness.’” Today, to declare oneself in favor of Nietzsche’s thinking “in its most extreme consequences”, or even just to think it, might, in our time, be much more likely to spell danger.
That Nietzsche was not only a “free spirit” on the surface, [but] was a “good European” and that he never stopped hating nationalism, “the sickness of this century”, is illuminated by the sharpness of his social-psychological judgments of the so-called ‘German character’. “In its actions and reactions, Germany shows itself to be barbaric.”121 He called the Germans “a people of the most monstrous mixing and melding of races, in which, perhaps, a pre-Aryan element predominates”;122 he called the Germans his enemies due to their logical and moral “uncleanliness.” — “How degenerate its taste, how slavish towards dignity, standing, trappings, pomp and splendor a people it must have been when it deemed the unembellished the bad, the less embellished the worse! One should always reply to the moral arrogance of the Germans with this little word, ‘bad’, and nothing more!”123 He depicted their cruelty in the most lurid of colors. The breaking-wheel was to him “the most unique invention and speciality of German genius in the realm of punishment.”124 In Nietzsche, despite all of his limitations as a theorist, one finds truly prophetic judgments which alone are reason enough to take him seriously. “The Germans imagine that their strength must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty, to which they submit themselves gladly and with admiration: [and] all of a sudden, they are rid of their pitiful weakness, their sensibility for all that is naught, and devoutly enjoy the terror. That there is strength in gentleness and stillness, they cannot believe so easily.”125 — “For all of our greatest men, one must ever yet say: would that they had a little more of the genius and a little less of the actor to them.”126 — “The Germans have no concept of how mean they are, but this itself is the superlative of meanness, they are not even ashamed to be mere Germans… They discourse about everything, they hold themselves to be decisive, [and] I fear they have come to their own decision about me… My whole life is the proof de rigeur for these sentences. In vain do I seek from them a sign of tact, of délicatesse towards me. From Jews, yes, but never from the Germans.”127 And, in fact, Jaspers has come to a “decision” about him: he makes Nietzsche a true German. “Throughout his entire life, the original identification of his own possibilities with those of the Greeks accompanies him”: it is one with his will to the actualization of high Germandom, which has affinity to such Greekness. But while Greekness is completed and, for Nietzsche, the nodal point of history (almost like the appearance of Christ is for Christian believers), the German essence points towards the future, in the inaudible danger it holds for itself, with the effect that “Nietzsche’s love for the truly German, from whom he hopes he hopes for everything in the crumbling world, in the appearance of a pathos-laden critique which intensifies over the course of his life,” which, therefore, only stems from “boundless, often disappointed love.” And thus the “rebirth of Greece from the renewal of the German spirit” is quoted from a note casually penned by the young Nietzsche, and, in addition to that, what little else could be found in a few other places that could be exploited in the “German” sense. That is, of course, what is still meager and indeterminate enough for such a purpose. In this Wagnerian enthusiasm, even the sparse, Heine-like wishes for a better Germany in the “first Nietzsche” and the first volume of his Nachlass disappear, for “the great disappointment and the great disgust is approaching,” as Nietzsche’s editor himself calls it.128 This proximity, into which Jaspers brings Nietzsche’s “life as a whole” together with his alleged will to realize “high Germandom,” is a trick. Certainly, Nietzsche spoke of the “true” Germans from time to time. They “went abroad: present-day Germany is a pre-Slavic station and is paving the way for a pan-Slavic Europe.”129
Nietzsche clearly discerned in European democracy a possible soil for a new tyranny. Though his image of the latter wavered, such that he did not know whether it was the beginning of barbarism or of a higher stage of human development, his formulations in any event hit upon social-psychological actuality. “In the end, the uncertainty becomes so great that human beings collapse into dust before any commanding force of will.”130 Jaspers quotes this passage. However, discussing this problem and Nietzsche’s concern about whether the right leaders would step onto the scene, [Jaspers] says: “Nietzsche circles around the image of these actual, new lords without yet being able to present them as sculpted figures.” This “yet” is all too telling. The quotations praising leadership and the emphasis on the idea that on the heels of the leveling in democracy, “slavery” must finally arrive—one which is necessary for the elevation of the human being—are threaded together so seamlessly that the new lords can forgive Nietzsche for quite a lot. His recollection of “the moral hypocrisy of those in command” can pass into oblivion. But it is here that Nietzsche’s Führer-psychology gets to the heart of the present. “They know no other way to protect themselves from their own bad conscience than by behaving as executors of older or higher commands (from their forefathers, constitution, rights, laws, or even God) or, especially, by borrowing herd-maxims from the herd mentality, for example, [behaving] as ‘servants of their people first’ or as ‘instruments of the common welfare’.”131 He recognized early on that the Germans in particular excel at such “intoxication”, and interpreted it correctly. In this connection, “the soul of the servant (idealized as the virtue of scholar and soldier, even in the simpler sense)” did not remain hidden from him. The fact that Jaspers cannot eliminate the confusion between the future Nietzsche intended and the present of today as a consequence of his style and his existential pose, and even seems to encourage this confusion, shows perhaps more than anything else the inadequacy of this “Introduction.” According to Jaspers, Nietzsche ought to appear to the reader in the same manner Wagner appeared to Nietzsche—namely, as a well-behaved type of German unclarity, about whom (in contrast to Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, and Schopenhauer) one cannot even speak of his aversion to “the national narrowness of the fatherlanders” without a “perhaps.”
Nietzsche is so unknown abroad that even many of the most progressive spirits see him as a forerunner of the current state of affairs. He is thought of as something of a mixture of megalomaniac genius and boastful sergeant. Because of this, Jaspers’ book seems, from time to time, like the courageous destruction of a legend. It is therefore tolerated over here and over there. Notwithstanding the gaps in education among other peoples with regard to German philosophers, Jasper’s book is fundamentally untrue. One cannot speak of Nietzsche without clearly relating him to current events. He was not “at one with his work alone”, but had determinate historical goals, the realization of which he was seriously concerned with. With grandiosity, Jaspers says, “Nietzsche’s thinking shrinks back before nothing.” But he himself shrinks back before even the correct presentation, let alone correct interpretation, of Nietzsche’s critique of the present state of affairs and the presently prevailing type of human being, both of which have, since Nietzsche’s time, become much worse.
Without these critiques, Nietzsche cannot be understood. The independence which is expressed in his philosophy, the freedom from enslaving, ideological forces, is the root of his thinking. If Jaspers wanted to choose a historical subject-matter whose essence he would not have to distort in order to provide it with a measure of acceptability, he should not have fallen back on Nietzsche. In a situation like the one Kant found himself in with regard to religious things, Jaspers finds himself in with regard to philosophical problems in general—he decided to keep quiet. The saying that everything one says must be true, but one does not need to say everything that is, cannot be applied to Nietzsche in such a manner that the dubious passages are left out. Otherwise, the tolerated Nietzsche becomes as much of a petty-bourgeois philistine (Spießbürger) as his apologist.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Nietzsche as Psychologist (1936)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to K. v. Hirsch, 2/24/1936]132
… Among other things, you sensed that we treat Nietzsche differently than usual. For years I've studied him again and again and in doing so have noted how ridiculously little is still known about him. A study should be written about him that would, among other things, illuminate the relationship of his psychology to the French Enlightenment. The struggle against spurious ascetic morality has more to do with the early bourgeoisie's original concept of nature than the last century's ignorant philosophers of history, who misunderstand both, are able to conceive. The incorruptible psychologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among whom Nietzsche belongs intellectually, experience the problems of human relationships and the conduct of life per se in a much more direct and adequate form in that, after the shock to a belief in the sinfulness of unsublimated instincts, they protect themselves from falsely harmonizing these and thus constructing a distorted [self-consciousness], that is, a transfigured anthropology.133 Every middle-class, that is, privileged, existence that, in the analysis of its own impulses, does not allow itself to be misled by fear of discovering a social taboo and, on the other hand, is not psychically crippled by a total incapacity for any human relationship is necessarily led in this epoch to experience and struggle against compassion as a life-threatening force that stands in the way of every pleasure, of every unfettered unfolding of one’s own strengths. This conflict is so immensely instructive not only because social contradictions in the language of the inner life find in it an apt formulation but because the resolution that it found in the personal existence of every representative personality suggests a psychological discovery critical for the theory of history: the horror that is operative in history, of which the present provides new examples on a daily basis, is rationalized horror, at least during the last half of this millennium; it is terror “in the name of” God, “in the name of” justice, morality, honor, the nation, and so on. The subjects of this horror, leaders, the masses, and executioners, would distance themselves most of all from the assertion that torture provides pleasure, that it is exciting to see fear and suffering. All the pessimistic teachings about the wickedness of human nature, which come from Machiavelli's and Hobbes's progressive thought and have become the common property of every counterrevolution, already encompass the moral damnation of those dangerous instincts, and it would be tempting to look into whether earlier uprisings also evidenced such a positive relationship to animal rights as some do now. The delicacy and discretion of those who perpetrated horrors are certainly not infrequently extolled in private circles. Because of those great psychologists it now becomes apparent that the transcendence of repression, the non-ideological awareness of the natural relationship between horror and pleasure, is capable of destroying the force of this connection in practical life. It will be possible to bring this pleasure into a rational relationship to other tendencies, to include them in the economy of a way of life. It loses the universal, overwhelming energy with which it governs the entire being of the individual out of the dark sides of the soul. It is impossible to imagine Nietzsche himself as the barbarian monster under whose sign his most powerful disciples rule the world. Nietzsche was inoffensive in a distinct and at the same time eternally instructive way. His harmlessness derives from the most profound knowledge in perhaps all of human history about “nature.” In order to find the precursors of this concept of nature, of course, one may not depend on the pathetic outpourings of Shaftesbury and Rousseau. Rather, it is necessary to get to more independent and original souls of the Enlightenment. Sade possessed decisive psychological knowledge, like hardly any other person before Nietzsche. His refusal to impose the death penalty is what brought about his misery. Progress in psychological analysis undermines the possibility of rationalized horror. Sade was a very pitiful sadist.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Pirandello and Bourgeois Self-Criticism (1936)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Karl Löwith, 6/19/1937.]134
Dear Herr Löwith! The book reviews you have recently sent us have been received particularly well in our circle, and other friendly voices have said the same of the part already published in the last issue.135 We would like to offer you the chance to publish an essay in the Zeitschrift. Regretfully, the space for articles in the first of our 1937 issues has already been filled, but if you would have a work from your pen appear [in the ZfS] before next summer, 1-11/12 pages are free in the last issue of 1936. For the theme, I would suggest a study of Pirandello. From a literary-historical perspective, Pirandello’s work has often been understood as a specific execution of Lebensphilosophie. This schema has already, and repeatedly, been advanced in individual critiques and provides a recipe for understanding his individual pieces. We have no interest in adding another such explanation. Rather, we believe it is time to include Pirandello, literary or philosophical school he happens to belong to, among those authors who, since Balzac, have by means of the bourgeois spirit itself criticized and partially dissolved the categories that dominate its social reality. By grasping the concepts of the personality and the “I” not as original, as in idealism, but as socially inherited and putting them into question, he has made what I believe is an extremely important contribution to overcoming ruling ideology. However he interprets his own work himself, and the philosophical theory he develops alongside it, is not as significant here as is the objective sense of his dramas and narratives. If you are interested in producing a study in this direction, I would be grateful for a reply as soon as you have the opportunity.
“Only at the two opposite poles of human contact, where there are no words or at least no more words, in the glance and in the embrace, is happiness really to be found, for there alone are unconditional freedom, secrecy, and profound ruthlessness. Everything by way of human contact and exchange that lies between is lukewarm and insipid, it is determined, conditioned, and limited by manners and social convention. Here the word is master—that cool, prosaic device, that first begetter of tame, mediocre morality, so essentially alien to the hot, inarticulate realm of nature that one might say every word exists in and for itself and is therefore no better than claptrap. I say this, I, who am engaged in the labour of describing my life and am exerting every conceivable effort to give it a belletristic form. And yet verbal communication is not my element; my truest interest does not lie there. It lies rather in the extreme, silent regions of human intercourse—that one, first of all, where strangeness and social rootlessness still maintain a free, primordial condition and glances meet and marry irresponsibly in dreamlike wantonness; but then, too, the other in which the greatest possible closeness, intimacy, and commingling re-establish completely that wordless primordial condition.”
—Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man (1954)136
V. The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration (1938)
In his newest book,137 [Siegfried] Marck presents the outline of an ideology with which all of the various opposition groups in Germany and abroad should come to agree on, a kind of ideological unification program. In light of the number of similar attempts, it warrants no criticism for this in particular. In any case, it cannot be the task here to discuss the appropriateness of this purpose, which is clearly expressed in every line, in any detail. The pure conviction which Marck has always put into practice and is recognizable in this book as well is justification enough for engaging him here. The unforgiving judgment is passed not on the author, but the cause; it trusts the author may, in spite of everything, yet give it up. The pacifist stance, which appeared to the philosopher in 1918, before the peace, a path leading out of the darkness, has since become a dark path leading out of philosophy itself.
Marck professes himself a “neo-humanist.” It is not entirely clear what he understands the old humanism to have been: Christian Humanism, Renaissance philology, Feuerbach’s materialism. In any case, he leaves no doubt that the new is far superior to the old. “A movement, which arises like a phoenix from its ashes, has lost its naive immediacy.” This time around, the plumage of the mythical bird shimmers with blue, yellow, and red; it repeats the philosophical concepts which were the currency of the post-war period. Among the philosophical and scientific trends which have been fashionable since the days of expressionism, have found a temporary place of residence in Germany, and have sent their offshoots out into the world, there is hardly one which neo-humanism does not at least invoke by terminological allusions. Thus, very nearly all political and religious groups which might be dissatisfied with fascism are offered something in which they might recognize themselves [wiedererkennen]. The individual intuitions of each are refitted in such a way that their opposing counterparts can always agree with them. Their thoughts become indistinguishable from one another, and thus lose the last remnant of their already problematic substance. Neo-humanism is, in reality, not the least bit colorful, but monotone gray.
Religion fares the worst. The concepts of God throughout history reflect the wishes of human beings: the longing for eternal life, power, justice. The neo-humanist image of God betrays only a longing for a governing majority, the very one which did not come to fruition in the Weimar Republic. God is “the true center towards which the opposites, the totality towards which the parts—converge. He is the absolute concentration, against which everything circumscribed and demonic is only eccentricity.” Anyone who is not already immunized to such definitions of God by the recollection of a better theological tradition might still heed the warning of historical experience alone that ‘concentrations’ which drive out ‘demonic eccentricities’ left and right must still, in practice, decide which devil to start with. Once this decision had been made in Germany in 1919, its development through 1935 was nothing if not consistent. The consciousness that the ostensible center possessed of itself remained as political ideology, even after its long-unsettled social foundation had completely collapsed.
“God is a boundary concept [Grenzbegriff],” says Marck, so that neo-Kantianism need not walk away empty-handed either. But for Cohen, who could hardly be trusted to make such a gruesome claim, at least there is no right and left, no above and below, to a divine center [göttliche Mitte], let alone anyone who hopes, “in naive immediacy,” for heaven’s mercy. The notion [Vorstellung] of demonic “eccentricities” is as impossible in religion as in politics. The involuntary openness with which a false political intention comes to light through the seemingly profound expressions of the neo-humanistic religious philosopher stems from the fact that the religious impulse has not come to light through the right politics. Truth, restrained in politics by tactics, exacts its revenge, making religion the creed of moderate politics.
Religion, however, is only one of the components from which neo-humanism is formed. Even liberalism supplies “undying motives for humanistic concentration.” But liberalism has vanished from Europe. That social system of the last century so named was the unrestrained domination of the capitalist law of value; enlightenment, transposed in practice of the principle of competition. So far as the slogans leveled against Church and absolutism transcended the needs of the bourgeoisie and expressed the rightful claim of all human beings to the free unfolding of their powers and possibilities for happiness, they were hypostasized. Harmony was praised as idea and disavowed in practice. The Middle Ages called the Lord a Lord and the Bondsman a Bondsman. In the modern era, inequality has vanished behind the concept of the citizen [Bürger]. The transition to this mode of economy was a historical step forward which ushered in a period of productivity and horror. The history of this period contains not only the chapter of Jewish emancipation, but also that of the ‘Workhouse Tests,’ the brutal repression of the commune, and the terrors of colonial administration. The continuation of their ideology is no more possible than that of their economic foundations. The objection that classical liberalism at the very least had the right ideas, and that it is only a matter of applying them today, can hold no water here. Whoever says ‘freedom’ today must make very clear what, exactly, he means by it. Freedom in abstracto is all too compatible with the remissions of French police prefectures and the redemption of our Austrian brothers.
The isolated use of such categories has become impossible since Hegel. They are true only in the totality of cognition [im Ganzen der Erkenntnis]—namely, as critical functions, negating particular truths and conditions, pushing them beyond themselves. They do not prove themselves by virtue of being proclaimed or presented for the approval or disapproval of others. The presentation of that which prevails as a contradictory, inadequate, and bad actuality, one which has yet to come to its senses, and the practice which corresponds to this—this is the only legitimate use of ideas. In the time of the French Revolution, the slogans of the rights of man did not yet correspond to the goals which were sought in their name. In the 19th century, however, speech of freedom and equality had already become neo-humanistic, not because the goals had already been realized, but because any clear connection to the historical present and activity had disappeared. They degenerate into ideals. In liberalism, the ideal transfigures the reality before which it is held; the dominant form of society, which is driving towards collapse, appears as a moment of unbroken progress. The ideal exerts a moralizing influence. The commitment to freedom, which retains its meaning “precisely because it is never fully realized,” sanctions the unfreedom that always is. The masses, however, would not be held back by this. Even meaningful participation in “concentrations” presupposes that one analyzes without illusions and has theoretically sound goals.
“Bildungsliberalismus, the principle of critique, the religion of freedom, human rights, which ‘hang above inalienably,’ form the defensive elements of liberalism against the Machtstaat, without which no civilization is possible, and with the annihilation of which all barbarism begins.” The defensive elements did not prevent the liberals who were permitted to do so in Germany from defecting to the “Machtstaat,” not because they were bad liberals, but because in liberalism those human rights which hang above possess their true meaning and support, the ground of their existence, in the firmly anchored right to dispose of the means of production and are, consequently, abandoned wherever this right is put at risk. The true liberals at the time were not the Frankfurter Zeitung, but the directors of the dye industry, and they all remained true to themselves.138 Just how strong the “defensive elements of liberalism against the Machtstaat” will prove in the rest of the world remains to be seen.
Not even socialism may fall outside of the concentration. Neo-humanism wants a just, cooperative order of economic life and, “above all,” a crisis-proof economy. Marx did not understand socialism correctly. Certainly, Marxism contains “humanistic motives, but it cannot positively define socialist humanism because it is deficient as a political philosophy.” Marck rejects “revolutionary opportunism”: “An autonomous philosophy of history and anthropology confronts that of the Christian, as well as the Marxist, with the critical dialectic of the immanent-transcendent perspective.” How something like this is to establish a just order of economic life and, above all, a crisis-proof economy is only ever hinted at. It seems, however, that Oppenheimer would be better suited to provide a positive definition of the socialism neo-humanism has in mind than Marx. Or should Marck not concern himself with any theory of property and class at all? Then not only liberalism, but socialism too would remain only as “Bildungsidee”; it would move into the neighborhood of the Great Elector and adopt a vulgar, non-binding use of language.139
Marck agrees, therefore, not with Marxist socialism, but rather a “culturally- and anti-materialistically-oriented socialism,” and would not mind being called an idealist if “the word idealism had not become abstract and discredited through use by its beautiful-spirited epigones.” He cites so many German philosophers of the present with such obvious respect that it is not easy to guess who exactly he has in mind here; he regards all of the beautiful-spirited among them realistic and concrete. According to Marck, the right concept is not that of ‘idealistic,’ but “socialistic humanism”: “By its name alone, it expresses clearly what it wants to be: a cultural socialism, a liberal socialism. Of course, it is a cultural socialism that does not oppose the ‘material’ emancipation of the proletariat, but rather has such ‘material’ emancipation as its presupposition and sees itself, conversely, as a necessary and even constitutive element of the latter.” Socialism is to be “as a total movement, a struggle for culture”—without needing to be oriented towards the ‘material’ emancipation of the proletariat. The history of German social democracy should suffice to warn against the love of culture. In place of a critical disposition [krischen Verhaltens] towards the dominant culture, which would have been the sole chance for the preservation of its elements for the future, there was, in many cases, rather the renewed endeavor to wear the ill-fitting bourgeois wisdom of the day before yesterday as a showpiece, rather like the peasant dons the past fashion of his lord. Precisely because the struggle for culture is at the same time a struggle against a determinate culture, and indeed appears immediately as such, it cannot be a “total movement” in Marck’s sense.
Neo-humanism even maintains close ties to science and literature. Marck, a little belatedly, claims that philosophical anthropology, which flourished in Cologne fifteen years ago, is now beginning to “win its rights.” The notion [Vorstellung] that Scheler’s invention is precisely that which “restores freedom to the human essence [Wesen] as a constitutive element” is rather exaggerated. The restoration of human freedom happens, if at all, not through the false anthropological assurance of its existence in “mortal forms of appearance” and “ephemeral garments,” but through the theoretical and practical critique of existing unfreedom. Marck even professes support for the “Gestaltwissenschaft.” Everywhere he finds neo-humanist approaches, and therefore declares that “the present is [advancing] from the most diverse sides towards a concrete image of the human being.” “Critical psychology of thought, new monadology, gestalt-thinking, philosophy of the creative center, organic wholeness”—concepts all too reminiscent of the true “beautiful-spirited epigones”—are each cited by him as a title announcing new hope. Marck imagines that they bring human beings to themselves, “to the cognition [Erkenntnis] of their own center, to that ‘being-with-oneself’ [‘Bei-sich’] that does not exclude friendship with being, but which guards against surrender to an impersonal being.” Philosophy is not capable of this. So long as the world is not fundamentally changed, there is no friendship with any ‘Being,’ even that of the leader, which, in the long run, protects one against the impersonal being of the wall before which one is stood in line. It would be a great mistake to assume that the creative center or one’s own center, or whatever such dubious names for an allegedly personal centrum may be, could remain free from the lords of the Machtstaat when the periphery is rounded up and detained. Technology has progressed a bit since the good old days of the Inquisition; that is precisely why philosophical anthropology does not apply.
The one anointed the grand Protector of Neo-Humanism, however, is not Cohen or Scheler, but Thomas Mann. His “philosophical and political mission” is praised with boundless admiration; in it, everything is summed up: “In poetic and prophetic form, this message concentrates everything which a philosophical anthropology of our epoch is to elaborate through reflection.” We need not inquire further into the factual grounds of the coronation of Thomas Mann as summus philosophus, which are essentially derived from a sentence in The Magic Mountain: “Der Mensch ist Herr der Gegensätze.” [“Man is Lord of Opposites.”]140 This sentence, inspired by Nietzsche,141 contains, according to Marck,
“[The] program of a non-conformism which is by no means devoid of a love for humanity, but, to the contrary, provides the condition for it. It elevates the person and their primordial ground [Urgrund] above every cause, even the most sublime.”
In Hegel’s philosophy, on the other hand, the human being is “reduced, logically and historically, to a marionette of world spirit.” The truth of Hegel’s logic, to say nothing of Marxian theory, cannot measure up to Thomas Mann’s humanistic “personalism.” Mann stands “outside the schema of impersonal dialectics.” He guards over the Weimar legacy and gives form to the image of the new human being: “Oldest myth and most recent present meet in his work.”
It is safe to assume Thomas Mann would not feel entirely comfortable with the “philosophico-political message” neo-humanism has saddled him with. The author of Felix Krull may find it difficult to figure as the herald of an autonomous philosophy of history and anthropology and a partisan of the critical dialectic of the immanent-transcendent perspective. His work contains no program, even virtually, which is tailored to the present, certainly not that of a “non-conformism which, conversely, is the condition for love of humanity.” The varnish of irony, however, which the experienced reader may yet discover in Thomas Mann’s political compositions allows something of their ground to shine through: a rather passive resistance. Even this has more to do with non-conformist practice than the ideological topcoat painted over them on which the neo-humanist fixes his gaze. That Thomas Mann today, just as his brother (mentioned only in passing by Marck) has done for a long time, declares himself against the enforcers of the total world order is liberating. Due to his literary work, his testimony carries more weight than that of someone unknown. Prophetic ambitions are far from his intentions.
Thomas Mann can expect that political theory and practice will develop independently and, if needed, in contradiction to his ideas. Even then, he would still be better equipped to decide for himself. In his own words, he possesses “the self-criticism which allows our conditioned forms of life and spirit to open up to what we no longer are, what comes after us, the future.” With the deluge of such devoted requests made of him, he must sometimes find it difficult to distinguish whether he is supposed to advocate for a new humanity or advertise for the industrious elite. In all this uproar, it is not easy for Thomas Mann to carry out his intention of not simply following his own benevolent nature, but of making decisions with caution and justice. When it comes to political figures who would lead others out of corrupted environs, however, having a good name in those circles is no recommendation. The strenuous effort to find greats with the most unsuspicious origins possible is not only not revolutionary, but is only opportunism.
Even Goethe is to be integrated into neo-humanism. One can “best study the meaning of the creative, the trans-oppositional [Übergegensätzlichen],142 and the human through him. The evaluation of Goethe’s message, the grasping of his centrality in its critical meaning, pertains to the specifically neo-humanist field of activity.” Though the universities of post-war Germany have hustled and bustled their best in this field of activity, Marck is not so easily satisfied. The year of 1932, the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s death,
“... was dominated by the Hindenburg-Hitler dispute, by the hunger of the unemployed, by creeping civil war. The creative center lacked any opportunities for fulfillment. Will the day ever come when the greatest figure among the Germans will become a model for actualizations in the realm of the Volk and the state?”
Hindenburg and Hitler did not, in fact, diverge from one another, but converged for the sake of actualizations in the realm of the Volk and the state. Hitler corresponds much better to the concept of a “greatest figure,” and even more so to the notion of a model for actualizations, than does Goethe. Marck is an honest opponent of fascism. Therefore, the fact that Marck’s thinking is interspersed by cliches of the very spirit which neo-humanism seeks to combat should trouble him. For all the concern about dogmatism and other unpleasantries which accompanies any use of the old terminology, it is still less theoretically objectionable and more relevant to employ ‘the unleashing of the productive forces’ at present than look around for opportunities for the fulfillment of the creative center. In a time when the hope of humanity lies less in the abolishing ‘concentrations’ of the political philosopher than in abolishing concentration camps, the likelihood of being a member of a hopeless minority is not quite as damning a criterion as it might seem. An association of philosophical anthropologists and other autonomists, with the mass-despising Ortega y Gasset at its head, can still be more hermetically sealed off from the theory and practice of history than the most isolated of authors who only knows how to find fault with such concentrations of either kind.
Marck misjudges National socialism because he misjudges the Republic in which he grew up. The authoritarian state characterizes the phase of European society which is replacing liberalism. It means oppression [raised] to a higher level. The task of dominating the masses separated from the means of production and of toughening up the Volk for struggle on the world market, which is now carried out more systematically by the bureaucracy established for this purpose, was passed down from liberalism. Because these problems could no longer be resolved through the separation of powers, with parliamentary government, the bourgeoisie—or at least its most economically powerful core—resorted to fascism, for better or worse. The decision came with risks and heavy costs. It has since proven to be the right one. The German army was not an unprofitable investment. In international competition, no different than in national: den letzten beißen die Hunde. The advantage goes to those who, under the pressure of social relations, decide to convert most quickly. The others must make do with less. The spoils which fall to the fascist belong to him by right: he is the legitimate son and heir of liberalism. The wealthiest estates have nothing to reproach him with. Even the most extreme horrors of today have their origins not in 1933, but in 1919, in the shooting of workers and intellectuals by the feudal accomplices of the first republic. The socialist governments were essentially powerless; instead of advancing down to the very basis of these events, they preferred to remain on the loose topsoil of the facts. In secret, they held the theory to be a quirk. The government made freedom a matter of political philosophy instead of political practice. Even those who may privately have every reason to do so should not wish humanity to repeat this. It would run the very same course as the original.
National Socialism is not another kind of kitsch literature one can mock from exile, but the most well-polished political system of the present. The authoritarian regimes see right through the neo-humanism of the statesmen of the League of Nations. National Socialism can dispense with the well-educated conceptuality of an ideology and construct its so-called Weltanschauung according to its needs, because it keeps the oppressed masses in line through sheer violence, the promise of economic opportunities in the future, and its own, unique brand of satisfaction. In perverted form, its critique of parliamentary ideology in theory and economic planning by domination in practice demonstrates a better sense of social actuality than neo-humanism could dream to. The Nation in Hitler’s mouth is as substantial as the Christendom of the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury. The attempt to tackle National Socialism, in essence, by attacking Nordic physics, racial doctrine, or power-philosophy, without also and always striking its “source point,” one which it shares in common with liberalism itself, can only ever be superficial, no matter how well-intended. National Socialism can afford to be a bungler in idealistic philosophy because it is a master in capitalist reality.
The ending of the book opens onto a political vista. Marck does not wish to “paint a rosy picture of the future,” but thinks, “despite everything which has been mentioned here, of the possibility of a second German Republic.” Like the first, the second takes other states as its model. “The three great Western democracies, the [Czechoslovakian] state of [Tomáš] Masaryk and [Edvard] Beneš, have exemplified the actualities of this kind [of Republic], —with all of the relativities and limitations which are inherent to human beings.” These models, all of which existed at the time, are interpreted by Marck as liberal people’s states [freiheitliche Volksstaaten]. Marck’s Second Republic, however, is to inherit three achievements from the Third Reich as well: “the unified state, the Ministry of Propaganda, and military sovereignty.” This neo-humanistic solution is possible only within the framework of a solution “to the pan-European problem in the same spirit.” In a note, he worries that the course of 1938 has “thus far subverted our hopes.” Well, even a correct theory can give rise to false hopes. Disappointment can lead to revisions, and sometimes even to the overcoming of revisions. Since the book was published, the great Western democracies have imparted to the state of Masaryk and Beneš a lesson which could also be of service to neo-humanism.
Against the ZfS, [Siegfried] Marck levels the accusation that, according to its conception, all philosophical and scientific categories are "defined by their interconnection with the human labor- and production-process. However one’s search for justifications for this demand in the matter itself [der Sache selbst] in Horkheimer’s work—that is, for the immanent laws of philosophizing and the analysis of temporal categories—will end in vain.” Even if this does not quite hit on our intention, we still think that philosophy which calls itself political has long since turned into the critique of political economy. Philosophy either unmasks the historical situation or falls to its aesthetic epigones. In the immanence of the social relations of monopoly capitalism, the immanent-transcendent treatment of freedom cannot be held onto: it is too still too transcendent. Philosophical anthropology must become a denunciatory physiognomy. In 1935, the “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” were published in this journal. A comparison of this essay with the doctrine of the Lord of Opposites can shed some light on the difference in question. Among other anthropological qualities, the ability to make and keep promises is discussed. The foundation of promises, it says in the context of an economic excursus,
“becomes narrower every day. For it is no longer the contract but rather the power to command and to demand obedience that now increasingly characterizes domestic commerce. The social relationships involved in economic processes affect the entire spiritual and intellectual world and thus the constitution of human nature. In earlier periods of history, power was considered immoral when it came into conflict with contracts. Today, a contract violates morality when it runs counter to power relationships. Everyone who has anything to do with such matters knows this, and for that reason contracts must occasionally be drawn up rather hastily, and they must be settled more quickly now than ever. Their importance remains indisputable: they are binding praemissis praemittendis, they travel cursorily around the atlas of interests in a particular historical moment.”143
We have since differentiated our conception further, and published a further reflection on a theme related to that of the first, some time before the meeting in Godesberg.
“Negotiation has different faces at different times. Today it consolidates the domination of the biggest capital throughout all of Europe. The national contradictions between the European industrial powers are at present subordinated to the necessity of political reorganization. In both domestic and foreign policy, the world creeps softly or strides boldly toward dictatorship, the most appropriate form of government for monopoly. (…) The skeptical diplomats of the non-authoritarian countries of Europe, who make concessions to barbarism out of a "love of culture," have behind them dogmatic bankers nervous about their assets. Indeed, even these assets will be difficult to rescue. Machiavelli writes “that a general who wishes to keep the field cannot avoid a battle when the enemy is determined upon fighting.” He scoffs at the “indolent princes or effeminate republics” that instruct their generals only to be cautious. This accusation does not touch the skeptical individuals and polities that pursue this ineffectual tactic at the end of the bourgeois epoch; they don't even want to triumph.”144
Such an analysis of temporal categories [Zeitkategorien], which can only be diluted into [the analysis] of the existentials of Dasein with great difficulty, is happy to forego its own derivation from the allegedly immanent laws of philosophizing in the manner of the neo-humanist ontology of the League of Nations.
The illusionary image of the great Western democracies is not so external to a “political philosophy” which is not affected by the fate of those democracies. The philosophical concept of the human being is better determined negatively by the faithful depiction of the negotiating statesman than positively by praise of the Lord of Opposites. In our time, when a polished elite of leaders, economic or otherwise, conspire to beat blindness into the masses and an unwavering sense of grandeur into intellectuals, theory coincides with the effort to hold onto those senses humanity must come to if it is not to start all over again. The fear of isolation, which may rightly determine the actions of the politician in determinate phases of activity, does not befit the philosopher. Marck will one day come to understand that “changing the world, entirely in the manner of a dogmatic premise of philosophizing,”145 nevertheless contains more truth than the premise of absolute—and therefore in vain—concentration.
Appendix I: Dialectics of Decline (1937-1939)
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Exiting the Paris Exhibition (1937)
[Excerpt from Horkheimer to Pollock, 8/25/1937]146
I don't, of course, have anything new to tell you yet. In Paris, right on the evening of our arrival, we took a tour around the exhibition. Quite grand. But I'm just not a fan of grandeur. It's an industry – and not a sympathetic one. Next to the French it is the dictators who, as is fitting, have the most colossal buildings. Everything is aimed at being colossal. The individual is meant to feel his insignificance in the face of all these colossal things. The profession of architecture in the service of these gentlemen has the same task as that of the other branches of culture they dealt with before: it is meant to intimidate and overwhelm the viewer. Particularly disgusting are these women, steadily charging ahead next to the men and who are only recognizable as women by their fluttering garments. Charge ahead no matter what, ever onward and full steam ahead! This is what's now become of the figure of liberty in Delacroix's painting of the revolution. While Fuchs, in order to praise Daumier's paintings of the revolution, incidentally reproaches Delacroix's figure of liberty for being too pretty, I'm happy to embrace this more attractive symbol. We haven't been in any of the buildings yet, only in the King George Restaurant, where we ate supper. It was quite good, and the manager is a culinary specialist from Cannes. Of course, if the French are also going to follow developments in this field as in others, in the future you'll be sure to get grasses, raw beets, celery juice, and the like, freshly washed and presented surrounded by ice cubes at the beginning of a meal in restaurants like this. And hygiene, which is the only thing the aforementioned colossal allegorical figures seem to represent, will also triumph in the kitchen. Of course, we could have studied in depth the pre-established harmony between the conduct of war, bad food, and the physicians who declare it healthful. Basically, however, I'm not very tempted to walk around these contemporary exhibition halls. For the sake of research I'll go a few times, anyway. For me, exiting them will always be preferable to entering. …
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: “Against Hitler” (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Marie Jahoda, 8/10/1938]147
… Among the many letters I receive from Europe nowadays there are hardly any whose train of thought appeals to me more than that to which your letter bears witness. One sentence that you wrote regarding the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia touched me most of all: one would have to feel intellectual satisfaction that clarity and logic have emerged obviously victorious. I have stated it more positively: the theory that's been so unambiguously confirmed in the past few years, and now, in this apparent crisis where it is against us, this theory is a complete whole. It will also be affirmed where it is for us. … How right you are in making fun of the slogan that the English will go to war for the freedom of Czechoslovakia. The English, of all people! It would have hit the mark almost as precisely as the 1914 slogan of the Western powers “for democracy” and Prussian warmongering against czarism. I'm not even entirely in agreement with you when you propose the slogan “against Hitler” for our position. In my view Hitler is so obviously determined by the current historical developmental state of social conditions that, if these conditions remained the same, he would have to be constantly reproduced, even if in and with the help of countries that could in fact overthrow him. “Against Hitler,” therefore, refers purely to the appearance and not to the essence. If, however, because of diplomatic reasons the essence can't be named, there is no hope that the battle will achieve its goal. Humanity has been beaten back to the extent that there would be very little to hope for from a war. Theoretical work is currently more important than ever. — A lot could be said about your ideas on dictatorship. It seems to me that your use of this concept is a bit too clichéd. On the other hand, planned economy is such a barbaric phrase that it justifiably raises suspicion against the thing itself. That the socialists have replaced the concept of a free association of human beings with the concept of a planned economy illuminates the path traveled by them for many decades. In my mind's eye I can foresee the executives and professors who would be the planners under such conditions. I would certainly belong among those to be managed. To the extent that the concept of a planned economy is not the wall behind which certain democratic authorities and part of the union bureaucracy worm their way into fascism, it is a utopia of professors of political economy who already see themselves in it as advisors to the relevant bigwigs. …
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Between Absolute Concentration and the Absent Grounds for War (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Andries Sternheim, 10/7/1938]148
The overall political situation is incredibly sad. Through all the cries for war [Kriegsgeschreis], I never had a moment’s doubt that the so-called honorable peace would be maintained. That the Völker were in such a state of agitation has had, in this case, a desirable side effect. The participating statesmen everywhere appear as heroes of the peace [Friedenshelden]. You are entirely right to say the grounds for prestige [Prestigegründe] [viz., which would motivate going to war—J/C] have a very strong effect in Germany.149 But these [grounds for prestige] were not, as you might think, themselves grounds for the German government to go to war, which it would only have initiated against Czechoslovakia or Russia with the express consent of England and France; instead, such a circumstance was only grounds for Chamberlain to save Hitler from embarrassment.150 In any appraisal of the political situation since 1933, it must be assumed that the present-day German government, once come to power, has been exercising an essential function not only for Germany but for Europe, and from which even the powers of the West [Westmächte] cannot exempt themselves in the long run. The fall of the German government could, in any case, only have consequences the likes of which neither the English nor the French governments would want. In the event of war, the French and English governments would not have known which outcome would have presented them with more frightful problems: victory or defeat. I am convinced that, as far as Central and Western Europe are concerned, we may expect a fairly long period of peace (albeit an incredibly sad one).
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: “Chamberlain Wept” (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Hans Klaus Brill, 10/13/1938]151
As the peace, which had become appetizing [schmackhaft] to the peoples [Völkern] through the gigantic efforts made to show it was under threat, the great statesman and their preferred publics took care of the rest by weeping for it in person. Chamberlain wept, Simon was deeply moved, Daladier wept, the Czech ambassadors wept, the Pope fainted from being so moved, women presented flowers, weeping; the terrible revenge of the victors in the Sudetenland all began with the tears of those who handed it over to them. These tears are an aesthetic phenomenon of the first rank, and, out of artistic motives, I would like to collect documentation on them. I would be grateful if you could cut out as many in-depth reports from the pages of German and French newspapers about these emotional scenes [Szenen der Rührung] and send them my way.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Anti-Semitism and the Illusion of Happiness (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to H. Honegger, 9/5/1938]152
What do you say to the Italian anti-Jewish laws? The point of least resistance. Since the world can't be gobbled up as quickly as thought, they're going after the Jews. At the same time, the fascist successes in the last few years are really no trifling matter. Danzig and Austria and Abyssinia and I don't know what else! The sphere of influence is expanding to all parts of the world, and in spite of that you hear: Whip the Jews! Things are not going well for the masses under fascism, however much it's growing. It's not leading people to the right frame of mind but purely to the illusion of being in the right frame of mind, and that's just not the same thing, even if today not even philosophers know anymore how to make the distinction. To make people really happy continuous improvement of living conditions is required, unceasing change of the world. Simpler practical steps suffice to guide them to the illusion of happiness, for example, the segregation of minorities, who are always worse off than the masses.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Decomposition in Decline (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to K. & E. Goldstein, 11/19/1938]153
During this decline of the world the desire is overwhelming to set down what one has to say so that it can fall into the right hands at some other place and time. Not only love is contained in this desire. In the midst of all difficulties I've made a remarkable discovery. Books are being burned in Europe. Some hope rests in the libraries here. But, more and more, the books that one gets one's hands on here show signs of a strange illness.154 It begins with the four edges of the pages taking on a red-brown color that then makes its way further and further toward the center. The parts in question first become brittle, and finally all life seems to have fled from them. If you touch them, perhaps folding down a corner, the part in question stays in your hands and turns to dust. It is mostly the French books that show signs of this illness, but it is in no way limited to them. Nature is in cahoots with fascism.
Letter—Horkheimer, re: Theory and The Horrors of “In Deutschland, nichts Neues” (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 11/25/1938]155
I am presently under a frightening amount of pressure from work, otherwise I would write to you at length. For today, only this—[…] [I have decided to] begin the preparatory work for the book on dialectical philosophy. In this spirit, I plan to discuss matters with you not infrequently, and, hopefully, not just in spirit but face to face. […] The general situation is developing in a completely logical manner. Knowledge that the theory is exact in its negative aspects does not, to be sure, alleviate the horror, but it does justify the hope that it will one day prove itself in its positive aspects as well. War over the Czech question was impossible; moreover, it was not even desirable. The battle-cry for democracy which would otherwise have drawn a number of countries onto the field against Germany appeared was, in any case, not an opportune one in light of Germany’s demand for the right to self-determination for the Sudetendeutschen. The resulting ideological confusion would have exceeded that of the World War. Beyond this, there was no group in Germany which would have been capable of leading it rationally in the case of defeat. Nothing has changed. “In Deutschland, nichts Neues”—the reporters would have to write, if only fifty Jews were slaughtered a day.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Semblance of Hope in the Time of Confusion (1938)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Juliette Favez, 12/6/1938]156
The news from Germany, and not only from Germany, is so shocking that nothing can be said. The only consolation that can still be offered to humanity is that in this terrible time of confusion, which may well last for some decades yet, will, like the decline of antiquity, sow the seeds of a new and purer culture. A process is also taking place now that can be compared to the development [Werden] of Christianity: lies and horror have spread so thickly over the world that those who do not allow themselves to be consumed by them will, to a great extent, become immunized against moral evil. [There are very few seeds,]157 and more go under every day. But in the end, this experience cannot pass over humanity without leaving a trace. The concepts of the infinite value of the individual soul, of mercy, of brotherly community arose from ancient tyranny and slavery. Totalitarian mass mania [Massenwahn] will also give way to a more concrete conception of freedom than was previously held in general. One could of course reply that the people who perish today, and probably the people living today overall, will have no more of this. But the semblance [Schein] of such hope, which may visit the despairing in their final minutes, derives its historical right from this idea. That the night does not last forever may yet console those killed in it. Despite everything, what the human being is will not be decided by the anti-humans [Widermenschen] who, today, are making the earth into hell.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Method and Style in the Critique of Fascism (1939)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Heinz Jacoby, 2/16/1939]158
Dear Herr Jacoby, —I thank you for sending your work [viz., a short essay, titled “Die Verachtung des Menschen”].159 Of the many manuscripts which we are receiving at present from Europe and other parts of the world, yours is one of the very few we have found close and sympathetic to us. Proof such as this, of your mentality [Gesinnung] and the direction of your interests, is another example of just one of the reasons we sincerely regret not having a presence over there. It seems to me, in any case, that we could be of greater help to more people in the most decisive matters there, more so than [we can] here. What you say (on p. 2) about the division of labor could be developed into a highly important analysis of the fundamental processes which lead to the reversal [Umschlag] into the totalitarian state, in addition to your considerations on bureaucracy. I believe that your method [Verfahren] will advance even further with time as you continue to sharpen your suspicion of immediately positive categories. Concepts such as “Humanitarian” and “morality of solidarity” are to be used only with the most extreme caution. Such words risk being all too acceptable to all too many people. The distinction between your critique of fascism and the critique of those who were merely displaced (or replaced) by it must jump out to the reader from the start. Thus, when you quote the sentence that “man loses that which is essential to him under the domination of the apparatus,” it would be rather difficult to outline this ‘essential’ with greater precision, because it relates not so much to the past as it does to the future; what is certain, however, is that the specific region of philosophy it calls to mind, and from which you have adopted it, tends to burden your argumentation with borrowed obscurity rather than make it more transparent.
Belief in something Originary, Inward, or Essential, or in some other primordial reservoir [Urbestände], which has somehow been lost to us and which we are supposed to remember once more, would, in fact, be quite difficult justify. With good reason, you inveigh against spinelessness before the fetish of the apparatus. You demand, however, the retention of moments which relate to character. Certainly, there is much to recommend this, but I believe I need not point out to you that the struggle against the apparatus and for character originally belongs to authoritarian ideology. It is infinitely difficult to use such concepts with the correct mediations—indeed, I would say, with the right touch of irony—by means of which their relationship to the whole of critique, which, as we know, is alone the true one, is preserved. Here, problems of style come into play, problems which make it so difficult for me to write at present that I could hardly arrive at any final formulations. My short remarks should show you how seriously I have taken your small work.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Atrocity as Social Principle (1939)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to J. Favez, 6/13/1939]160
The fact that the tragic events about which you write are occurring with almost no notice being taken of them is a reflection of the current state of affairs. Atrocities barely make an impression anymore unless the victims are particularly prominent individuals. What is currently taking place in Spain is indescribable. One hardly dares think about the details of the Japanese campaign, events that have been taking place for years on a daily and hourly basis. I've heard factual descriptions that would justifiably make you lose sleep for the rest of your life. What we remember of stories about the Thirty Years’ War or of Goya's paintings pales by comparison with the punitive measures taken against Chinese villages where the poorest of the poor live. We're capable of imagining how soldiers in the lower ranks will act when facing punishment because each and every one of these soldiers knows that, if severely wounded, he will be helped into the beyond by his own doctors because transportation away from the front would be too expensive. Soldiers of the lower ranks, therefore, will in no way view just dying as a punishment. The civilized powers observe this with serenity. And now we hear that England is making the strongest efforts to reach an understanding with Japan after Franco was led to victory by England. I remember well a conversation I had with a leading English banker when I visited Europe in 1937. At the time I asked him what he thought of the Japanese war. I'll summarize his answer: “The Japanese will first have enormous difficulties, but, in the end, it will help British trade.” We still have to wait and see whether this speculation is correct. But you get the impression of a morality from which the world still can't wean itself.
In view of such conditions it's self-evident what this portends for the fate of such a powerless group as the Jews. The following sentences are found in Hobbes, who classically formulated the principles of the society now beginning to manifest itself:
“But the infliction of what evil soever, on an innocent man, that is not a subject, if it be for the benefit of the commonwealth, and without violation of any former covenant, is no breach of the law of nature. For all men that are not subjects, are either enemies, or else they have ceased from being so by some precedent covenant. But against enemies, whom the commonwealth judgeth capable to do them hurt, it is lawful by the original right of nature to make war; wherein the sword judgeth not, nor doth the victor make respect of mercy, than as it conduceth to the good of his own people.”161
The individual who is viewed by the state as someone foreign and who has no power behind him, “nocent or innocent,” can expect no mercy.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Theory Before the War (1939)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to J. Favez, 9/11/1939]162
Your letters of August 21st, 24th, and 29th lie here before me—and how much has happened since you sent them! A state of war has been declared which is nevertheless not (yet) a war, and a war is being waged without such a state having been declared for it at all.163 You are right to say that knowing in the present has the immediate effect of a kind of consolation. This is the only reaction of human beings who refuse to be driven mad by reality. I confess that today, the most dogged unswervingness [der schroffsten Unbeirrbarkeit] is needed not to lose sight of those tendencies of social life which we once recognized as those which are most fundamental through the chaos of facts [Wust der Tatsachen]. If the improbable, a general condition of war, should take full effect, then the shared interest between Central and Western European powers which has determined their politics through the summer of this year would, indeed, seem to have been extinguished by contradictions [Gegensätze] which we did not consider relevant at the time. However, it is precisely this which I cannot bring myself to believe. Rather, even in this extreme case, the development towards barbaric collectivism which Europe would have had to confront regardless could not have been terminated. I do not know whether it would even have been slowed.
The feeling that the ideological opposition [ideologische Gegensatz] in whose name war would be waged is already outmoded, and that, if no miracle occurs, the Völker concerned would all fall prey to one and the same fate, is horrifying. The weariness, however, over the prospect of war which is apparent among the whole Western populace has, I believe, its foundation on the insight that even victory would not solve the most crucial problems. The abatement of enthusiasm in France is no coincidence. It signifies something quite different from the absence of enthusiasm in Germany. Here, there is an extremely alert skepticism towards the government, which could, under certain circumstances, reverse into outright antagonism; there, there is a feeling of senselessness, which forms one of the preconditions for the as yet unsatisfied authoritarian longing. Unfortunately, I cannot now speak in more detail; it would be out of place. For now, I am only full of the wish that this—I am firmly convinced—senseless and calamitous process will go no further. However, I want to take this opportunity to say one thing to you one more time: whatever may come, you may be assured that we are thinking of you here and will not let you down.
Letter—Horkheimer, Re: Dialectics of War and Peace (1939)
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Paul Honigsheim, 9/12/1939]164
Heartfelt thanks for “Voltaire and the Problems of Rapprochement Between Peoples” [“Voltaire und die Probleme der Völkerannäherung”]. In the present moment, this rapprochement [Annäherung] seems to be carried out in a rather unpleasant way, as between Siegfried and the Maginot Line. To your mind, what would Voltaire have said about this? Would he have been, in this case, pour ou contre la guerre? It seems to me that the concepts of war and peace have been, in a dialectical manner, set into motion by history, such that the condition of war on the Rhine is decidedly preferable to the conditions of peace we find in other countries. In any event, I can imagine a number of Jews and other people of color who would rather be in “no man’s land” than Vaterland, even if the French General Staff were to issue a daily communiqué about it.
That “love” plays no role indeed only suggests a rather poor prognosis for everything we call culture. As I once formulated the matter on an earlier occasion, culture rests on foreplay. Of course, this is only true of the culture we already know. Perhaps something will develop today which is, despite everything, “worth while.”
— Horkheimer to Henryk Grossmann, 8/9/1939.165
Appendix II: Excerpts from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critique of Religious Socialism (1931)
Translator’s note: From a conversation hosted by Paul Tillich in 1931, “Discussion about the task of Protestantism in secular civilization.” Opposite Tillich’s roster of religious socialists and systematic theologians, Horkheimer and Adorno were recruited to represent the non-theological position: materialism, socialism, philosophy. They do not disappoint. Below, I’ve translated the opening remarks made by both Horkheimer and Adorno, in which each takes a different approach to ‘immanent critique’: Horkheimer dissolves the religious-socialist problematic by simultaneously grounding and relativizing their absolute opposition between the religious and the secular, posing the problem of theory-formation from within the field of social struggle in response to shared suffering as a criterion for evaluating the theories which claim to address themselves to it.166 Adorno explodes the religious-socialist solution from within through bringing the movement of its concept to completion, at which point the task of ‘Protestantism in a Secular Civilization’—namely, demythologization—is shown to have fully migrated into the realm of the profane, by determinate negation, along with the religious Urmotiven, which, if we must speak of them at all, are no longer inherited through established religion. Both defend materialism as a philosophical attitude [Haltung], socialism as a political program, and deny the significance of the antithesis between the religious and the secular assumed by the religious socialists and systematic theologians. Each exemplifies their respective ‘model’ of dialectical critique which they will develop throughout the 1930s: for Horkheimer, the “open-ended” [unabgeschlossenes] dialectic, which follows Hegel’s “the truth is in the (social) whole” but recognizes “the whole is the false”; for Adorno, the “determinate negation” in which die Sache selbst of idealist thought betrays the untruth of idealism in the social content of its completed concept. As the discussion continues, both Horkheimer and Adorno’s objections grow sharper. It is a remarkable prefiguration of their future dynamic.
[Horkheimer, Re: The Religious-Socialist Problematic]167
Horkheimer: I would just like to express, very briefly, the impression [Heinrich] Frick and [Paul] Tillich’s words have had upon me, and how I react to them. I only ask that you accept the barbaric nature [das Barbarische] of my explanation in advance, for my reaction is relatively barbaric indeed. My theses, quite brutal, somewhat exaggerated, are as follows. First, I do not believe, cum grano salis, we have a field of rubble [Trümmerfeld] before us. Of what are we actually speaking here? If I may speak in categories of my own, I would say capitalism is no mere field of rubble, but, to the contrary, has made ready the organization of a world according to methods which are not radically new in the least, the entry into a new phase. Certain “constants” will likely remain. Following this, I would also ask: what actually is this hardship [Not] under which we all suffer? For my own part, I would prefer not to accept this without further ado. Do we all suffer from one and the same hardship, is it the hardship of the problematic of profane culture which torments human beings so? Human beings are tormented by much more real, much more brutal things, and this torment is not a new torment; this suffering, this material, materialistic suffering of human beings is what torments me here today, and on this matter it is, in fact, important to take a stand. From this point of view, I can do nothing but side with a certain party in this struggle and believe that the most important thing of all is to wage it in such a way that the senseless torment, so far as it is senseless, is eliminated [behoben], so far as it may be abolished [aufgehoben]. When I say ‘senseless,’ I mean something different by this than the majority of those present. By this I understand torment to whatever extent it is not necessary in light of the spiritual and material forces at the disposal of human beings. I have the notion, and cannot rid myself of the theory of the world which I do have, that the organizational form which is the dominant today essentially conditions this real suffering, this real torment. When I went to university, I was told: Why yes, human beings must always suffer, for nature is scarcity. This turn of phrase has since turned out to be false, to be as polite about it as I was then. It is in no way ‘just so,’ and anyone remotely educated can tell you it comes down to the organizational form of humanity. To what extent this is connected with spiritual things is an enormous problem. I would only say that if I place myself within this struggle—and here we come to what is most important for me—is it really so important whether the way in which this struggle is conducted is connected with primordial religious motives [religiösen Urmotiven] or not? I would almost like to say, following a thought of Spinoza’s—I have so little time to pose the question or the problem to myself: is there a philosophy or religious view which might legitimize this, my attitude [Haltung] in this struggle, as that which is adequate? It could be said, as I have done recently, that the metaphysician, the religious man is not enough moved by the suffering of right now, has not enough love for the transient human being. For the clear depiction of these problems, I thank Herr Frick, but do not know whether all of this is so important, whether secular civilization can be described such as: technology, the Weltanschauung which undergirds it, the vision of the human being who beholds himself in this way—all of these things, if one were to throw their opposition [Gegensatz] towards religion into relief—is any of this really that which is crucial? I am of the conviction that the so-called deification of the machine is an ephemeral phenomenon. There in Russia, it surely has a completely different meaning than in America. To speak as an economist, I would say that to conflate America and Russia in this way is a superficial diagnosis. A whole series of facts, those which have just been mentioned, seem to arise from the fact that theologians, too many others of us too, concern themselves too little with these realities and see only a great opposition between religion on the one side and the secular on the other, and I know not which of them could be the right word in our time.
[Adorno, Re: The Religious-Socialist Solution]168
Adorno: Horkheimer has anticipated much of what I wanted to say. I will attempt to formulate something on the theme of profanity. It seems the following lies before us:—I use Tillich’s terminology here—he characterized the position of profanity has with respect to Protestantism as dialectical, i.e., such that, on the one hand, what is theological must enter into profanity fully and without restriction in order to prove itself genuine; on the other hand, the claim [Forderung] is raised against profanity that, because [profanity] itself has only an anarchic, chaotic character, because it is a field of rubble, it needs the religious. I believe that so long as one stands by this conception, one has not taken the claim [Forderung] of profanity itself as radically, as seriously as would be necessary for anyone who grasped the thought of the profane as the theater of truth. The religious motive, which, in Tillich’s conception, in any case, would be the deepest lying one, is that of de-demonozation [Entdämonisierung], which I call demythologization [Entmythologisierung]. This is, however, a motive, and this seems to be crucial, which does not itself need to be derived from any given motives of any positive, available theology, but which has completely passed over into profanity. I could even imagine in this crucial moment that the function of Protestantism has, as a matter of fact, been fulfilled and exhausted, historically speaking, at the same time, that the transference of all it meant into profane categories has been successful, that the claim of demythologization has been carried over into profanity completely as well. If this is the case, it could be possible that the theological categories themselves, so far as any yet remain, are no more than husks, empty husks, from stages of history past in this process of demythologization, and which are dredged up with intentions I could not characterize as good without exception. I know quite well that in Tillich’s theory, the relation is not so simple, i.e. that the process of demythologization is not itself a clean one, but a dialectical one; that the mythical cannot simply be wiped away, but always reappears, again and again, and that the true productive forces of history are precisely these reservoirs which could be characterized as mythical—this, I would concede. But I would say, nevertheless, that this moment of return [Rückgriffs] itself, that of carrying the mythical along with us, is by no means localized within the sphere of explicit religion, but that this return of the mythical has its place decidedly in profanity. In the prehistoric phenomenon of hunger, there seems to reside precisely that demonic power which must be stopped again and again, in order for the demonic to be broken. Thus, I prefer to speak of demythologization rather than de-demonization. Demythologization is dialectical. On the other hand, there is a piece of nature with which humanity might, eventually, reconcile itself. The possibility of reconciliation seems to lie there, in the sphere of profanity, while the moment of necessary mythification [Mythifizierung] falls away, precisely because it lies in profanity just the same. However, I believe that one ought to demand the radical departure from the positive forms of the church in general if one accepts a concept of Protestantism such as Tillich and Frick do. Something in the details: the primordial religious motives [die religiösen Urmotive]. Here, there is some very questionable equivocation. If by these what is to be understood is nothing other than: there is something religious or mythical which lies hidden in socialism, which resurfaces, recurring again and again, then I would say these primordial religious motives are nothing other than questionable demonizations [Dämonisierungen] which must be fought against (for example, [Fyodor] Stepun, Leninkult). These motives, these so-called primordial religious motives, must be absolutely shut out of this. The instant one wants to reduce socialism to such moments, one has tied oneself to precisely that which is to be criticized by socialism in the most radical terms. This applies equally to fetishization, the cult of the machine, which is incompatible with the most basic notion of socialism, with the very ontological development of socialism. If we must speak of such primordial religious motives, they are not to be found where religious goods have been scattered throughout the sphere of the profane, but are only found there, where they are the most profane themselves, and any attempt to remove them from there, where they are found, as if they were transparently religious ideas, seems to be a wrong path. As things stand, an expression such as that of the “religious man,” who may be active in socialism or elsewhere, strikes me as one worthy of the highest suspicion. In truth, the ‘religious man’ is probably the un-religious one, if by religion one still understands demythologization.
Postscript—Adorno avec Wahl
Review: Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes and Walter Lowrie’s The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard. (1939)
Wahl, Jean, Études Kierkegaardiennes. Editions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S. ; fr. fr. 100.-)
Lowrie, Walter, Kierkegaard. Oxford University Press. London u. New York 1938. (XIX u. 636 S. ; 25 s., $ 7.—)
The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard; a selection, edited and translated by Alexander Dru. Oxford University Press. London u. New York 1938. (LXI u. 603 S.; 25 s., $ 7.—)
Dating back to the French reception of Max Scheler, an existential-philosophical school has formed in France—grouped around the Recherches philosophiques and propagating the doxa of Heidegger and Jaspers. The aim of Jean Wahl’s compendium is to support such efforts through documentation, tracing the origins of existential philosophy back to Kierkegaard, which is already plain as day in the academic Seins- und Daseins-philosophie in Germany. Since Bach’s study of his work in 1903, Kierkegaard has by no means been entirely unknown in France. Wahl’s book, however, is the first undertaking in French reception to present Kierkegaard, biographically and theoretically, as a monumental figure. The Études show the utmost expertise, erudition, and care; they endeavor from the outset to find continuous [sprunglos], unanimous motivations throughout Kierkegaard’s body of work. But, to adopt one of Wahl’s own distinctions, the Études, for all intents and purposes, count as “Interpretations” rather than “Explications.” In each case, they proceed in an exegetical fashion, and mostly an apologetic one: there is no room left for critique, be it of Kierkegaard or his fashionable epigones. The questions which finally appear in the short chapter titled “Conclusions, Questions” are posed in a rather tranquil form: was Kierkegaard bound to sacred scripture in an authoritarian manner? Or: was the Kierkegaardian concept of paradox merely a rationalization of private experiences? These questions are never driven to the point of a philosophical analysis of Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity itself, nor to any analysis of the fiction which lurks behind the doctrine of the individual as a relation relating to itself absolutely.169 But Kierkegaard in particular should be defended against such exegetical respect. Wahl makes Kierkegaard out to be ‘a classic,’ removing the sting of the thorn which he not only felt in his own flesh, but turned against society: “Kierkegaard avec Nietzsche, master of the dialectique existentielle.”
The trivialization of the one who, in the end, published the Augenblick and declared therein that in Christendom the proposition “the moon is made of green cheese” could easily be enforced as a state religion as soon as preachers were paid for it; the trivialization of a thinker who is, despite everything, a true enemy of that which exists—this trivialization is particularly manifest by the fact that Heidegger and Jaspers—who first warped Kierkegaard, in their distinctively grandiose style, into a conformist and ideologue—are discussed alongside Kierkegaard inter pares (as if peers), receive long separate sections of their own, in which their ‘relations’ to Kierkegaard are treated at length with great delicacy. What is demanded of any faithful, rather than merely respectful, exegesis never occurs: protest against the abuse of the Kierkegaardian victim of unhappy consciousness for their festive cult of darkness.
Only once does this insight dawn:
“On peut se demander si l'effort philosophique de Heidegger et de Jaspers ne consiste pas à montrer dans certains concepts de Kierkegaard les présuppositions nécessaires de toute étude phénoménologique et si leur œuvre Il'est pas une sécularisation et une généralisation de celle du penseur danois.”
In other words: one may wonder whether such effort does not, in fact, seek with great ambition to strike him dumb. Where Kierkegaard himself is concerned in any event, in the “Unscientific Postscript,” the very concept of ontology is expressly dismissed. Thus, alongside his unbroken solidarity with Kierkegaard, who wanted nothing to do with such affairs, a solidarity for business as usual prevails in Wahl, who would serve as “intermediary” between the concerned parties—even as far as the “robust” house philosophers of Eugen Diederichs Verlag.170 In the scientific sphere, however, Wahl’s book achieves everything it set out to do.
Like Wahl’s, Lowrie’s book seeks to attract a readership for Kierkegaard by extensive documentation; it assumes readers will be unfamiliar with the texts. But the endeavor to attract English and American interests is quite different from the effort to draw in the French. Where Wahl’s concern is geisteswissenschaftliche motivation, Lowrie is content with the biographical. Kierkegaard’s thesis that subjectivity is truth becomes cheap pretext for self-effacement: “And because his works are so largely autobiographical, or reflect his own life in its successive stages, no interpretation of them can be intelligible which is not essentially biographical.” (IX) Lowrie’s biography is ‘orthodox’ in more than one sense. One could almost say it adheres strictly to the framework of the Bayreuthian Kierkegaard-tradition, as represented today by names such Eduard Geismar and Emanuel Hirsch.171 The unrelenting impulse towards justification for the hero prohibits his casuistic procedure any critical insight into the self-stylization of Kierkegaard’s life. The relationship to Regine, the affair he provoked with the “Corsair,”172 the final sickness—all of this appears at the whim of Kierkegaard’s magic formulas, and the whole effort of the biographer is restricted to smoothing over any possible contradictions. The sole pragmatic boon of the study may be seen from the fact that Lowrie throws the political conservatism behind Kierkegaard into clearer relief than psychologically-oriented authors are capable of doing. Biographical zeal blinds Lowrie to Kierkegaard’s philosophical content and thus, necessarily, turns him against “subjectivity” itself, which is, after all, supposed to be the truth.
To illustrate this with a single case: Lowrie provides a glossary of Kierkegaardian terminology in the appendix which is, on the whole, questionable at best. Under the heading of “dialectics,” one finds the following wisdom: “Since SK criticizes sharply Hegel's ‘dialectical method,’ it must not be supposed that the dialectics he so much insisted upon is the same thing. Both deal with opposites, but the difference is that, whereas Hegel ‘mediates’ between them and thus reaches a point of repose, SK's thought continually vibrates between the opposite poles, recognizing that contradiction and Paradox are inherent in Existence, which because it resists the effort of the reason to regiment it into a system is denounced by reason as ‘the absurd.’” One need only contrast Lowrie’s caricature of mediation as a point of repose with the famous definition from Hegel’s Phenomenology, according to which “mediation is nothing but self-moving self-equality, or, it is a reflective turn into itself, the moment of the I existing-for-itself, pure negativity, or, simple coming-to-be,” to realize just what kind of blessing is bestowed upon Kierkegaard in such restriction to his own “existence.” That Kierkegaard is determined by Hegel right down to the innermost cells of his contradiction, indeed, that he has Hegel to thank for his most important counter-concept [Gegenbegriff], the qualitative leap, remains unknown to Lowrie. Thus, he is completely incapable of understanding Kierkegaard’s conception of dialectics itself. He even arrives at the grotesque assertion that, in the final phase of Kierkegaard’s life, which Lowrie unquestioningly regards as Christian in the positive sense, Kierkegaard, apparently having himself arrived at the ‘point of repose,’ was “no longer dialectical.” (As if dialectical theology did not exist.) The complete lack of both erudition and penetrating insight in his thought makes Lowrie’s tirades against the “professor” and “research,” which Lowrie recites in imitation of Kierkegaard, doubly embarrassing. However, the function such tirades assume for Lowrie is betrayed by the sentence: “Eric Przywara,173 one of the most talented of the younger Jesuit theologians, has written a prodigiously clever book about SK—so clever that I do not pretend to understand it.”174
Kierkegaard certainly hated his Hegel, but at least he did not boast about not understanding him. Today, Kierkegaard himself has fallen into the hands of hateful obscurantsdom [hämischen Obskurantentum]. —Lowrie is not wrong to imagine that Kierkegaard, represented by Barth, strengthens the Protestant opposition in Germany. It would not be uncalled for to pose the question to him of whether his own book, to say nothing of Emanuel Hirsch’s,175 could prove itself likewise.
Alongside Lowrie’s book—as a “corrective,” to speak as Kierkegaard would—Oxford University Press is publishing a quality edition of the Journals, carefully selected and translated by Alexander Dru. Though guided primarily by Haecker’s two-volume edition, it is also of significant importance for German readers, because it includes a great number of passages Haecker’s does not.176 For any familiarity with Kierkegaard, the journals are still invaluable: they are just as far removed from philosophically inflated self-rationalization as they are from fictive sermonizing; they reduce the essential motifs of Kierkegaard’s thinking to an experiential core [Erfahrungskern], a reduction which proves to be an improvement on the purely psychological alternative.
Adorno’s Letter to Jean Wahl, 4/30/1939
Esteemed Herr Professor:
The Journal of Philosophy has sent me your letter. I wish to tell you: I am fully conscious of the fact that your stance towards the authoritarian regime is no different from my own. My objection was solely that your book, by strict self-restriction to intellectual-historical hermeneutics in the Diltheyian sense, does not sufficiently acknowledge the real functional change that Kierkegaard’s philosophy has undergone; that the boundary line between Kierkegaard and modern Existenzphilosophie is drawn so cautiously; that anyone who didn’t already know better would hardly be able to sense that pandemonium is being unleashed under the banner of Existenzphilosophie in Germany. As you’ve no doubt guessed, I was thinking primarily of Emanuel Hirsch, who has become a henchman of National Socialism despite representing the orthodox Kierkegaard-tradition. However, I am also of the view that what Jaspers has made out of Kierkegaard has all too much to do with more sinister things. As far as critique of Jaspers’ standpoint is concerned, I would direct your attention to the report on Jaspers’ Nietzsche-book by my friend, Horkheimer, in the ZfS (Vol. 6, S. 407ff.).177
Kierkegaard’s texts themselves are protected from such misuse to begin with by their relatedness to positive Christian theology, however questionable this relatedness may be. Once this theological dimension has been eliminated, it would seem there are no longer any boundaries in Existenzphilosophie to irrationalistic individualism and the glorification of blind being-so [So-Seins], maliciously foreclosing all possibility. Further, it seems to me that there is no context in which it is more necessary, nor more possible, to say this than in connection to the French philosophical tradition. There are many things at stake in this tradition which not even the micrological way of thinking, which I know you adhere to as close as I, can afford to dispense with.178 A straight path runs from the de-godded [entgötterten] Kierkegaard to the most pitiful German concept of “character”; this concept already plays a singular role in the prehistory of Existenzphilosophie for Schopenhauer and, in present-day Germany, can only be maintained as a slogan to obey rather than an incitement to think.
For me, as one so passionately devoted to the French spirit, it is a moment of great consternation: even among the most advanced of French spirits, I have yet to encounter radical counter-intelligence [Abwehr] in the field of philosophy itself—I do not mean personal political position—which could have come from France alone. And it is this kind of contemplative impartiality towards existentialism which is puzzling to me, because of which I have been compelled to regard you as a representative of a group without wanting to take anything beyond empirical groupings into consideration. It is precisely the extraordinary impression which your work made on me as a scientific achievement that has given me the determination to express the critical moment with unreserved emphasis. I would only add this—that to me it appears a political analysis of Kierkegaard himself is most pressing, and further that I consider it a significant shortcoming of my own book that I did not present the political and social side of the matter concretely. I fear a political physiognomy of Kierkegaard would uncover more features of the New German in him than anyone wishes to find.
With most sincere regards, yours
—T.W. Adorno
Alfred Schmidt “Die ‘Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.’ Geschichte und Gegenwärtige Bedeutung” (1980): “One of the difficulties of an adequate understanding of Horkheimer's intentions is to correctly grasp the implied double front (doppelte Frontstellung) against metaphysics and positivism. There can be no question of Horkheimer's project being hostile to science—as is sometimes claimed today. The criticism of positivism has never prevented Sozialforschung from ‘recognizing and promoting its professional achievements.’” In: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Jahrgang 1: 1932. Mit einer Einleitung von Alfred Schmidt. (Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 25. [link]. Author’s translation.
Cf. Alfred Schmidt (1993 [1974]): “Horkheimer’s thinking maneuvers from the outset between two fronts: against meaning-constitutive, dogmatically proclaimed metaphysics, and against anti-conceptual positivism, which abstractly denies any meaning whatsoever that extends beyond the here and now. For Horkheimer, just as thought cannot be restricted to immediate utility, so there can be no pure desire for knowledge, removed from material reality. Those who pretend to pursue a “disinterested striving for truth” are laboring under an ideologically loaded “philosophical delusion.” Thought pursued “for thought’s sake” has “lost its sense, which is to be a means of improving the human condition.” Moreover, such a “pursuit of truth” contradicts its own claims inasmuch as “it necessarily replaces truth with a phantom: the absolute, ie. transcendent truth.”” From: “Max Horkheimer’s Intellectual Physiognomy”, in: On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives. Edited by Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonß, and John McCole. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993 [1974]), 27.
For Horkheimer’s outline of the ‘basic features’ of this process, see his “Preface” (1941):
“The articles in this issue deal with some problems implied in the transition from liberalism to authoritarianism in continental Europe. During the nineteenth century private industry consisted of numerous independent entrepreneurs who in each country competed with likewise independent traders and bankers for social power. The outcome of this struggle expressed itself in the relative size of the capital controlled by each of them. Dominion over men and things was distributed among the members of this diversified social group according to the rules of exchange. Power had be come decentralized; it has been transferred from relatively well-organized privileged bodies to the multitude of proprietors who possessed no other title than their wealth and their resolve to use it. The course of social production was the resultant of their respective business policies. Seigneural ordinances were replaced by anonymous laws and autonomous institutions, by economic, legal, and political mechanisms which reflected the size and composition of the nation’s industry.
Competition among independent entrepreneurs eventually culminated in the giant concerns of monopolist industry. Under their hegemony competition assumed a different form. Their urge to compete with equals within the nation declined, and with it the motive for increased investment and full employment. The great leaders of business and other avenues of social life found their peers only across the various national borders. Rivalry among equal powers shifted more and more to the international Scene alone. The transition affected culture as a whole.
With the advent of fascism, dualisms typical of the liberalistic era, such as individual and society, private and public life, law and morals, economy and politics, have not been transcended but obscured. Individuals have become less and less independent of society, while society has fallen to the mercy of mere individual interests. With the decline of the individual, moral feelings that stood against authoritarian law have lost their force, while authoritarian law has been entrusted to a perverted moral sense. Rigid discipline such as ruled inside the factory has now spread through out the hinterland, borne forward by elites who in their composition and function have combined economy and politics. The leaders of industry, administration, propaganda, and the military have become identical with the state in that they lay down the plan of the national economy as the entrepreneur before them had laid down policy for his factory. At the same time the state manifests its private character in that the enormous power wielded by the elites inevitably segregates them from the whole as bearers of very special interests. Theirs is an extraordinary standard of living, a unique technical and political experience, and a streamlined unconcern for material and ideal barriers, distinguishing them from the mass of the governed. These common traits, however, do not endow the ruling group with a real solidarity. The big industrialists attack the führers for their expensive political apparatus; the führers blood purge the under führers because of their radical claims; the generals would like to get rid of all of them. To counterbalance their antagonisms, no common faith exists, as among the medieval clergy, no belief in chivalry and princely blood, as among the seigneurs of absolutism,— ideals which had combined with their material interests to hold these groups together. The unity of fascist leaders is cemented merely by their common fear of the people they tyrannize, by their dread of ultimate doom. This clique does not become the dupe of its own ideologies; it shuffles them about freely and cynically according to the changing situation, thus finally translating into open action what modem political theory from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Pareto has professed.
These are the basic features of authoritarian society as it took shape after the debacle of European liberalism, and most typically in Germany. Under National Socialism the distribution of goods is carried on by private means, though competition has become even more one-sided than in the era of the 200 families. Intra-national competition turns into oppression. Only those on top may prosper; the amassing of new fortunes is precluded by taxation. The victors of the competition have their free play.
As long as its power had been decentralized, industry, propelled by its self-interest, had to cater to the needs of the population and, willy-nilly, promoted technical, political, and social progress, at least to a certain degree. But under its totalitarian set-up big industry is in a position not only to impose its plan upon its former competitors, but to order the masses to work instead of having to deal with them as free parties to a contract. Popular needs deter mine production far less than they did through the market, and industry converges on the production of instruments of destruction. Planned waste of intelligence, happiness, and life succeeds the planless waste caused by the frictions and crises of the market system. The more efficiently authoritarian planning functions and the more smoothly nature and men are exploited,—the more are subjects and objects of the plan dominated by dead matter and the more sense less, exorbitant, and destructive becomes the whole social apparatus which is maintained for the perpetuation of power exclusively.
Nowhere under fascism can the planful organization of social life follow out its own inner logic, for it can nowhere shape society according to human needs and potentialities. The plan, conceived and executed in the interest of private economic groups, is constantly obstructed by the changing necessities of power politics within and without, while the popular needs it pretends to satisfy are frustrated— notwithstanding the vaunted accomplishments in Wehrpsychologie, dive-bombing, intelligence service, pincer movements, underground factories, and so on. The blind calculative rationality of business life, so bitterly denounced by fascism, has carried over to the authoritarian society. Formerly, the cleverness of businessmen had not been able to prevent the results of their clever calculations, made in the privacy of their production offices, from developing into the pernicious laws of the business cycle, crisis, and depression. Now, in authoritarian society, this selfsame ir rational rationality becomes madness with method. Under this so-called socialism it is not mankind conscious of its common good and solidarity that guides its own destiny; the natural conditions, the pressures of the masses, the rivalries of cliques play them selves off against each other in the sinister hearts of the führers and emerge as the blind laws of fascist economy. During the earlier periods of private industry the achievements of men turned increasingly against them; no masterpiece of engineering, no gigantic factory, no ladies paradise arose without enhancing the power of society as well as its misery. In authoritarian society, technical, social, military advances are the handmaids of doom and disaster. Every frontier tom down by fascism only strengthens the walls separating men from each other, every means of communication it improves only places them farther apart, every scientific invention only blinds them the more to nature.
Progress in the abstract triumphs. The world belongs to the clever, and the devil take the hindmost, —this is true more than it ever was. The principle of letting nothing lie still, of stirring everyone to action, of tolerating nothing that has no utility, in a word, dynamism, is the soul of fascism. Moral taboos and ideals are abolished; true is that which has proved serviceable. Can anyone dare question the serviceability of the secret police, of concentration camps, blood purges against the insane, anti-Semitism, relentless activization of the people? Fascists have learned something from pragmatism. Even their sentences no longer have meaning, only a purpose.”
In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science [SPSS], Vol. 9 No. 2 (1941), 195-198.
In: Ibid., 198.
Horkheimer “An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program” (1938):
Other philosophical studies discuss the characteristic intellectual trends of the present day. The prevalent relativism and positivism, as well as their opposite, metaphysics, rationalism, and irrationalism, are analyzed from their common social roots and in their philosophical limitations. Our group has learned from its experience in Germany that the intellectual instability of relativism robs man, and especially the scientist, of his weapons against romantic metaphysics. Rational thinking cannot be limited to analyses and mechanistic methods nor must it fall into metaphysics, which has triumphed in Europe just because thinking has been impoverished by rationalism. The attempt is made to develop philosophical [foundations] for a critical theory of society in which the contradiction between those modes of thought will be sublated.
In: MHA [Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 656—Dokumente zur Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung (p. IX 49a-IX 55.1-5) / link: https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/horkheimer/content/pageview/6623269]
Horkheimer. In: “Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart (Vorlesung)” [1926] Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 10. Edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990), 175-176; 186-187. Author’s translation. [Hereafter: MHGS, Bd. ‘x’]
Cf., Horkheimer, “Chivalry” (ca. 1935/36-38): “In that period in which bourgeois institutions were still intact, human beings developed corresponding character traits which, now that such institutions are no longer intact, reveal the contradictions [Widersprüche] inherent to them, just as society at large now does.” Author’s translation, In: Collection: Horkheimer's Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes (ca. 1935/36-1938)
Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 6/17/1937:
“A graphological evaluation would be of little use in all of this. Graphology consists of the attribution of specific character traits to specific styles of strokes. The means it uses are still extremely crude, in spite of the apparent differentiation of related categories. In my view it can only be used with some certainty in the case of large samples of certain strokes. For example, it is known that innate inhibitions and problems are usually present in view of this or that handwriting characteristic and even, for example, that there is a danger of so-called asocial behavior. This knowledge can be of use to private industry and sociology. Among a hundred applicants for the job of nanny or cashier, you just wouldn't consider one of the twenty applications that unquestionably shows evidence of those characteristics. The relative frequency of specific character constructs in specific social circles can also be diagnosed on the basis of more extensive surveys. The sources of error are partially eliminated on the basis of the law of the large sample. However, in view of the scanty empirical material on the basis of which those experiential rules have been established, their application to individual problems is extremely debatable. I don't want to deny that there are individual receptive graphologists who occasionally arrive at a striking interpretation. But they also occasionally arrive at the opposite. In any case, I would guard against letting my attitude toward a person, in whose development I'm personally interested, be somehow determined by graphological interpretations. I'd be sure to see if it becomes evident that the person is entirely corrupted and unable to develop any further. Graphology can't take this experience away from me. Logically viewed, what we have here is similar to physiognomy. Stupid individuals frequently have a low-set brow. This person has a low-set and retreating brow, so I don't want to deal with him. […] You see why I consider even the extremely detailed questions to which you are now expecting an answer from graphology as very problematical.”
In: A Life in Letters (2007), 106-109.
In: Ibid.
In: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 214.
On critical theory’s content as the ‘dynamic motif’ in the dialectical unity of opposites from Marx’s critique of political economy, see Horkheimer’s “Postscript” (to ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’) [1937]:
“Unlike modern specialized science, however, the critical theory of society has continued to be a philosophical discipline even when it engages in a critique of the economy. For its content is the transformation of the concepts which dominate the economy into their opposites: fair exchange into a deepening of social injustice, a free economy into monopolistic control, productive work into rigid relationships which hinder production, the maintenance of society's life into the pauperization of the peoples. Of central importance here is not so much what remains unchanged as the historical movement of the period which is now approaching its end. Capital is no less exact in its analyses than the political economics it criticizes, but in even its most refined estimates of particular, periodically recurring events knowledge of the historical course of society as a whole supplies the dynamic motif. Its distinction from the veiws of the pure economic specialist is due not to some special philosophical object but to its regard for the tendencies of society as a whole, which regard plays a decisive role even in the most abstract logical and economic discussions.”
In: Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and Others. (Continuum, 2002), 247.
See Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Postscript” to “Against Knowingness” in the Notes and Sketches to Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947): “For bourgeois reason is obliged to claim universality while its own development curtails it. Just as, in an exchange, each party receives its due but social injustice nevertheless results, the exchange economy's form of reflection, the prevalent rationality, is just, universal, and particularistic, the instrument of privilege within equality. Fascism makes it pay the price. It openly represents the particular interest, thus unmasking reason, which wrongly flaunts its universality, as itself limited. That this turns clever people all at once into dunces convicts reason of its own unreason. But the fascist, too, suffers under the contradiction. For bourgeois reason is not only particularistic but also, indeed, universal, and in denying its universality fascism defeats itself. Those who came to power in Germany were smarter than the liberals and more stupid. The “progress toward the new order” has been carried largely by people whose consciousness progress has left behind—bankrupts, sectarians, fools. They are exempt from error as long as their power precludes all competition. In the competition between states, however, the fascists not only are just as capable of making mistakes but—with qualities such as myopia, bigotry, ignorance of economic forces, and, above all, the inability to perceive the negative and include it in their assessment of the situation as a whole—are also impelled subjectively toward the catastrophe which, in their hearts, they have always expected.” In: Ibid., 174.
Horkheimer, “Zum Problem der Voraussage in den Sozialwissenschaften” In: ZfS, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1933), 407-412. Author’s translation. (Full translation forthcoming.)
In: “Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart (Vorlesung)” [1926] MHGS, Bd. 10 (1990), 176-178.
Horkheimer, In: “On Bergson’s metaphysics of time” (1934). Translation by Peter Thomas, revised by Stewart Martin. Radical Philosophy 131, May/June 2005, 10. Link: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-bergsons-metaphysics-of-time
Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth” [1935]: “[T]he intellectual situation has for decades been dominated by the craving to bring an eternal meaning into a life which offers no way out, by philosophical practices such as the direct intellectual or intuitive apprehension of truth, and finally by blind submission to a personality, be it an anthroposophic prophet, a poet, or a politician. To the extent to which individual activity is circumscribed and the capacity for it eventually stunted, there exists the readiness to find security in the protective shelter of a faith or person taken as the vessel and incarnation of the truth. In particular periods of the rise of contemporary society, the expectation of steady progress within its own framework reduced the need for an interpretation that would transfigure reality, and the rational and critical faculties achieved greater influence in private and public thought. But as this form of social organization becomes increasingly crisis-prone and insecure, all those who regard its characteristics as eternal are sacrificed to the institutions which are intended as substitutes for the lost religion.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, Max Horkheimer. Translated by G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John Torpey (MIT Press, 1993), 183.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 10/22/1936: “Next year's confrontation with “scientific philosophy” will then be all the more decisive. We recently conducted some extensive discussions in seminars at the institute for the purpose of getting oriented. The last time Otto Neurath lectured on the most recent fate of this school of thought, something he knows well. Basically, the whole thing is only a pathetic rearguard action on the part of liberalism's formalistic epistemology, which, even in this field, turns into public obsequiousness in the service of fascism. If an important function of neo-Kantianism has been to glorify the society whose preservation it serves through an apologia of the dominant scientific enterprise, then all cultural spheres per se are now shamelessly sacrificed to irrationalism. Indeed, it can't mean anything else than that only those thoughts that can be expressed by means of modern logic may be considered knowledge. Now that it is, however, proving to be ever more obvious that one basically can't express anything at all that way, in the end it is all exposed as the battle against the application of thought to society and history per se. Just leave us our jobs as physicists and chemists, as modest servants of industry, and in return science will assiduously maintain its silence about all human concerns! That sounds like the declaration of midlevel industry in Germany: let us conduct our modest business, and we will cede complete political authority to you. What is revealed here is precisely what I pointed to in the essay on truth: the preestablished harmony of scientific specialties and barbarism.” In: A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, Max Horkheimer. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 69-70.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 12/8/1936: “The apparent rigor and precision of thought promoted by these gentlemen fundamentally turns out to be the same objectivity that gives both workers and entrepreneurs their due in conflicts and that, in the awareness that it is also heroic not to stick up for the assailants, testifies with sacred oaths to neutrality at the same moment when the victims are being annihilated by bombs of neutral provenance. An explanation of the actual significance of precision and objectivity to which the liberal tradition has now dwindled appears not unimportant to me. The identification of this abstract moment of an exactitude, which, upon closer scrutiny, turns out to be its opposite, with the concept of truth per se is only the glorification of the silence of these last liberals with which they sanction and help to further spread the horror that has descended on the world through their totalitarian followers. This current philosophy engages in mathematics, and the rest is silence. This abstinence is by no means passivity, because it definitely produces audible propaganda for itself. It represents much more a part of the cultural apparatus whose function it is to silence humanity. Its effect can be compared with the action described below, which terrifies me not so much because of its symbolic significance for humanity but for the sake of the continued existence of the sphere in which it is applied. This quote comes from the August 28, 1936, issue of the newspaper Le Gutenberg, the organ of the Swiss federation of typographers: ‘In the beautiful volume dedicated to his father, he (Guillaume Vogt) complacently recalls that the members of an antivivisection group asked to visit the university's laboratories. Professor Schiff told them that the animals were put to sleep, but not a single cry could be heard. A skillful cut to their vocal cords made it impossible for them to cry out.’” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 94.
See, for example, Horkheimer to Marie Jahoda of 8/10/1938, collected below: “In my view Hitler is so obviously determined by the current historical developmental state of social conditions that, if these conditions remained the same, he would have to be constantly reproduced, even if in and with the help of countries that could in fact overthrow him.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 140-141.
See the author’s translation of “Bourgeois World’ in: “Horkheimer's Fragments d’Essais Matérialistes (ca. 1935/36-1938).”In the same, see “On the Materialist Theory of History” and “The Bad Elements of Liberalism” for further developments in conceptualizing the latent fascist reaction fostered by liberal-democratic apologies for capitalist social domination.
For example, see Rolf Wiggershaus’ interpretation of the first several issues of the ZfS written in exile and published through Alcan for the strongest version of the conventional interpretation. In: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson (Polity Press, 1994), 133-142.
See the author’s translation of Horkheimer’s unpublished fragment “On the Materialist Theory of History” (ca. 1935) in: Ibid.
“The Pitfalls of Terminology,” English translation from: Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (Seabury Press, 1978), 24.
English: The Hour of Decision. Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1934)
For Spengler’s first deployment of the notion of the ‘Faustian’ character (a historical orientation of will towards expansion) of the West, see The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, Translation with notes by Charles Francis Atkinson (George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1926 [1917]).
Spengler: “The decades in which we live are stupendous—and accordingly terrifying and void of happiness.” The Hour of Decision. Part One: Germany and World-Historical Evolution, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (London George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1934), ix-x.
Horkheimer, “The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy” [1934]: “Irrationalism is now being constrained, just as it once constrained science. Reason and technology are no longer simply laid open to vilification; now only certain matters are kept beyond the reach of conceptual thought by “banishing (them) to the sanctuary of the irrational.” These matters are grouped above all around the concept of sacrifice. In wide areas, however, the new attitude acclimates human beings to a rational conduct of life. Concrete thought is promoted to a greater extent than before, and technology affirmed. The ethos of work, which includes this positive relation to rational forces, is itself of course irrational. Technology is not understood as an aid to human beings and brought clearly into connection with their happiness; this would indeed contradict its role in contemporary society. Instead, technology undergoes an ethical and aesthetic mystification. Spengler celebrates it as an expression of Faustian striving; for Dacque, the construction of a machine signifies “a glimpse and a realization of an eternal idea, if we view this activity as the physical realization of a primal image through an act of the mind”; “what is (a machine) but a true homage to the ideal meaning of iron, which receives life through our spirit, so to speak, and which thus symbolically shows us its inner countenance.” Ernst Jünger declares “that technology itself is of cubic origins, that it disposes over peculiar symbols, and that behind its processes is hidden a struggle between forms (Gestalten).” Rationality is affirmed—though in an irrational, distorted form—to the extent that it contributes to the competitiveness of the dominant powers in war and peace. However, thought is accused of being destructive wherever it runs counter to the glorification of power and its various ends.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 231.
“Expansiveness”: [die Weite]. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson as “Distance” in The Hour of Decision (1934), 61.
Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Book V, §197; & Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 1., §11. Often translated into English as ‘man of prey.’
Etymology (bramarbasierende): “based on Bramarbas,” bramarbasieren is derived from the name of a satirical figure, Bramarbas, in early 18th century German letters.
Horkheimer to Josef Doppler, 5/2/1935. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 342-345. Author’s translation.
[MHGS, Bd. 15 Ed. Fn.:] Exposé of a dissertation on Oswald Spengler's philosophy of history, which Doppler planned to submit to Emil Utitz (1883-1956, philosopher, 1934-38 professor in Prague).
See Horkheimer’s critique of Karl Mannheim’s theory of “situational determination” of ideology in his “A New Concept of Ideology?” [1930], in: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 131; 133-134; 140-141; 146-149.
Horkheimer begins an outline for such a reception of Spengler ‘within the framework of a correct theory of history’ at the end of his “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930]: ““The human mind is naturally impelled to take delight in uniformity.” Of course there is a wide gap between Vico's attempts at a unitary explanation of history and those constructive syntheses which putatively contain the principle by which one can not only understand the past but predict the future as well. Within such systematic approaches to the philosophy of history, history is, as it were, the body of a unitary framework of meaning that one can logically and clearly contemplate and envision in its final form. Hegel's monumental system as well as Spengler's simple framework both contain this structure, according to which one culture becomes domineering, experiences its youth, heyday, and decline, only to be superseded by the next one. Vico also offers us the satisfaction of a universal vision of history; in his works as well we find delight in “uniformity.” Indeed, what in Spengler's schema may not be interpreted merely as historical-philosophical daydreams may not be thus interpreted in Vico's works either. However, in contrast to Spengler, Vico harbors the philosophical conviction that, in spite of the recurrence of old forms and of the fact that, at the end of each cycle, humanity sinks into barbarism, the eternal task is to establish the finite dominion of a just order. This thought is specifically grounded in the identity between the laws of history and divine providence. Toward the beginning of The Decline and Fall of the West, Oswald Spengler says, “Let the words 'youth,' 'growth,' 'maturity,' 'decay' … be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states … determine for each of these higher individuals (that is, cultures) what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in the riot of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of world-history that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone.” Vico, probably following Machiavelli, had long ago put this image, according to which the view of world history should unfold itself tous in the present time, to a use that offered itself to him without compulsion and which, in any case, is metaphysically unencumbered. Our science, he points out, comes to “describe at the same time an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline and fall.” For Vico, history does not develop from the free expression of Spirit, but rather, in its beginning and its development, it is necessarily determined by the forces of material conditions and their reciprocal relationship with primitive human beings; hence Vico is convinced that regardless of where a society is found, it must in every case follow the same course as others. One can thus in fact determine the main outlines of an “ideal history” according to which the destinies of all civilizations are fulfilled. As Vico formulates it: “Wherever, emerging from savage, fierce, and bestial times, men begin to domesticate themselves by religion, they begin, proceed, and end by those stages which are investigated here.” Thus in the first epoch, the giants ruled: fantasy constitutes the form of knowledge, whose expression is fantastical poetry. The second epoch, which Vico calls the “heroic,” witnesses the emergence of classes and states. The heroes, that is, the patricians, consolidate themselves as armed forces against the plebeians, the clienteles, in order to protect the property system and to defend themselves against those who own no property. Kings emerge from among the patrician leaders in such social conflicts. They are thus the ones who “lead the fathers in quelling the revolts of the famuli.” “For the nature of the strong is to surrender as little as possible of what they have acquired by valor.” Vico examines the other stage of his “ideal” history, the “age of man,” less thoroughly. He dedicates by far the greatest part of The New Science to the analysis of the poetic and heroic ages. The early monarchies are first followed by aristocracy, then democracy, then empire, and finally decline. "The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.” Thus Vico, like Machiavelli, is convinced that a regression to barbarism and a new beginning must follow each cycle. For Vico, the immediate reason for this conviction lies in the fact of the Middle Ages, which represents a new age of heroes, the second barbarism. There is hardly a more profound chapter in The New Science than the one in which Vico compares the Middle Ages in their dark cruelty and narrowness with earlier epochs to which classical mythology bears witness. This Catholic did not shrink from asserting that the title “Holy Royal Majesty” and the arrogation of spiritual worth among the medieval princes represented a recurrence of the self-deification of the heroes in Greek myths and was founded upon similar social conditions. Vico provides paradigms for a comparative sociology that—with the possible exception of Voltaire—far surpass anything else that was achieved in this area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is also significant that Vico does not apply the framework of an ideal history speculatively in the sense of an a priori, that is to say, as a fate that is imposed from outside. Rather, he argues from empirical grounds, as when he explains the new barbarism as arising from historical mass migrations. Wherever humanity is cast back upon its origins through such events—be it a matter of natural occurrences, the invasion of uncivilized hordes, or the anarchic self-destruction of civilized peoples—then the entire developmental process must begin anew and run its course in the same way according to the social laws that Vico believes he has demonstrated in The New Science. Regarding his science he explains, “the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case.” Vico's doctrine of recurrence consists in a simple belief in the repetition of things human. We must follow him in his conviction that the possibility of a return to barbarism is always open. External catastrophes can play a role in its return, but so too can the events that humans themselves bring about. The migration of peoples is indeed an event of the past. However, beneath the deceptive veneer of the present age, tensions are at work within cultural states that very likely could bring about horrendous setbacks. Of course, fate is operative in human affairs only to the degree to which society is not able consciously to regulate its affairs in its own interest. When a philosophy of history contains a doctrine of a dark but self-governing, autonomous, and effectual meaning to history that one attempts to trace in schemata, logical constructions, and systems, one must counter by showing that there is precisely as much meaning and reason in the world as human beings realize within it. In as much as the discovery of lawlike regularities in history can serve as a means to such realization, then Vico, this early “interpretive” philosopher of history, was a path-breaking spirit.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 386-387.
See Horkheimer’s Letter to Wittfogel, 3/8/1937: “At a first glance, this does not seem to be much of an improvement. Kant’s philosophy shows that what can be said with unconditional certainty about the objects [Gegenstände] of our natural-scientific cognitive labor [naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisarbeit] is nothing other than what reason has, unnoticed, already added to their matter [Stoff] in the course of perception. However, if one analyzes this doctrine through deeper study, it becomes clear that the germs of a later, dialectical conception [die Keime einer späteren dialektischen Auffassung] are already at hand. According to Kant, the actual world, the “thing in itself,” furnishes the objective material [gegenständliche Material] with which science is concerned. This matter [Stoff], however, is said to be “preformed” by a hidden mechanism of reason—that is, as previously mentioned, as soon as we, empirical observers have knowledge [Kenntnis] of something, it has already been structured and ordered by transcendental functions unconscious to the individual. If I may simply communicate the results instead of entering into all-too-complicated considerations, this doctrine means nothing less than the fact that every individual, especially in the the special sciences, does perceive the actual world, not as it is “in itself,” but rather as it has become through the whole of human practice. Its outward, objective shape [objektive Gestalt], the direction of our attention, the process of abstraction, the manner in which we distinguish individual things from one another, etc.—none of this is original, but is already a product of human activity. In objectivity [Objektivität] itself lies subjectivity [Subjektivität]; in the theoretical object [theoretischen Gegenstand] lies rational practice [vernünftige Praxis]. A continuous reciprocity [fortwährende Wechselwirkung] prevails between them, and it can hardly be a surprise that science, so far as it restricts itself to observation [Feststellen], does not discover sheer chaos, but rational lineaments [rationale Züge].” In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 73-79. See the author’s “Translation: A Letter on Kant’s Apriorism, Horkheimer (1937)”
[MHGS Bd. 15 Ed. Fn.:] Doppler asked for a critique of Lenin, which Horkheimer has previously mentioned, to be sent to him. This is probably Horkheimer’s review of Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written in 1928/29, in: MHGS, Bd. 11 (1987), p. 171 ff.
Cf. Horkheimer, “On Bergson’s metaphysics of time” (1934): “It is not from the alleged immersion in the absolute, which according to Bergson should be mediated by philosophy, that the illusionless composure of the real fighter emerges in opposition to the élan lauded by Bergson. Rather, such a composure arises from the consciousness of overcoming the existing unjust divisions and catastrophic contradictions in favour of a, still to be worked out, happier state of humanity. In this the clear knowledge of oppositions is just as decisive a moment as knowledge of the tendencies that strive towards unity, the judgement of the opposing interests just as important as connection with the correct forces. Not to view the unity of the interior, but to realize it externally is the historical task.” In: “On Bergson’s metaphysics of time” (1934). (2005), 15.
Horkheimer to Hans Cornelius, 9/25/1934. MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 231-232. Author’s translation.
MHA: [Na 800] Zum Irrationalismus in der Philosophie; Fragment. Typoskript, 1 Blatt.
The date of composition for the fragment is most likely 1934/35, in the window of time between Horkheimer’s work on “The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy” [1934], which includes a critique of Bergson, and “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935], which focuses on Scheler and his legacy.
Horkheimer’s note: (H. Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens, Tübingen 1922, p. 30)
Horkheimer’s note: (A.a.0., p. 102.)
Adorno to Horkheimer, 2/25/1935. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 328. Author’s translation.
Max Horkheimer, “Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit.” In: ZfS Vol. 3, No. 3 (1934), 321-342.
[English Abstract, titled “Observations on Bergson’s metaphysic of time”:] Bergson develops, along with his metaphysic, a positivist theory of science. That both are strongly interrelated in his works is a demonstration of their close relationship, which also is characteristic of the present philosophical situation. Bergson has in general accentuated those problems of methodology and matter that had been neglected by contemporary science. He has contributed in an important way to the development of psychology and biology, and his central theme, — the problem of time in its reality — is a focal category of every theory of history. Bergson has paid special attention to the difference between time that is lived and that abstract time that dominates in the natural sciences. Frequently his discussions approximate a dialectic approach. H[orkheimer] stresses these tendencies in his discussion of the new book. The subordination of Bergson’s thought to his metaphysical ends, however, has interfered with those parts of his works that might have otherwise borne fruit. Instead of using his psychological analyses to penetrate more clearly into historical relationships, he uses them as supports for his vision of “creative development.” The contradiction that pervades Bergson’s entire philosophy manifests itself in the unhistorical character of this thought and the attempt to define the function of time in its theoretical implications. H[orkheimer] demonstrates that Bergson is led to negate time because he elevates the concept to a metaphysical principle.” In: Ibid., 341-342.
English: Max Horkheimer, “On Bergson’s metaphysics of time.” Translated by Peter Thomas, revisions by Stewart Martin. In: Radical Philosophy 131, (May/Jun 2005), 9–19. (pdf)
Horkheimer, “On Bergson’s metaphysics of time” (1934): “By imagining himself to be independent from time, the metaphysician must also misjudge those who strive theoretically towards it. The task and honesty of the writer of history have no place in Bergson’s work. The fact that, in the analysis of the possible, he indeed comes to speak about academic philosophy’s misuse of the concept in the sense of pre-existing ideas, but does not speak of its productive use in the sense of historical tendencies, belongs to his limited natural scientific way of thinking. The function of science in technology and industry doesn’t escape him, but the meaning of theory for the historical struggle does. But one shouldn’t speak here of this immediately evident lack so much as of another, less momentous, failing. The superstition that everything which is past also exists in the present without the consciously managed activity of remembrance, and will be ‘advanced’ in the future, precisely because real change is indivisible, suppresses not only the role of the historian in the struggle for new forms of life of society but also its assignment to preserve that which has been lost in memory. ‘Memory ... has no need of explanation. Or, rather, there exists no special faculty whose role would be to retain the past in order to pour it into the present. The past preserves itself by itself, automatically.’ The exercise of this capacity, especially denied by Bergson, is the business of the historian. There is no doubt that the historian requires the instinctive power to which Bergson refers from his first writings, in opposition to the compartment theory of memory. There is interaction between the unconscious forming of each social and individual unity through the past and their ordering in memory which formulates earlier experiences and places them in the service of conscious work in the future. Through the deliberate ordering and preservation, banished by Bergson from metaphysics, history makes itself not merely into a tool for better social relations, but also into a mirror of past injustice. No future heals any more that which has happened to humans who have passed away. They will never be called upon to be blessed in eternity. Nature and society have done their work to them, and the idea of the last judgement formed from the eternal longing of the oppressed and mortal constitutes only a residue of primitive thinking, which mistakes the futile role of humans in natural history and anthropomorphizes the universe. In the middle of this immeasurable indifference, only human consciousness can be the place in which suffered injustice is sublated, the only instance which isn’t satisfied. The almighty good that was supposed to erase suffering in eternity was from the beginning merely the projection of human participation in the dull universe. The art and religion in which this dream has found expression are just as immediate witnesses to this dissatisfaction, as they have been a pure means of domination in many places in history. Now, where trust in the eternal must collapse, history constitutes the only ear to which contemporary humanity, and even past humanity, can still present the complaints of the past. Even if this appeal could not become a productive power for a better society, the function of memory alone already places the profession of the writer of history over that of metaphysics.” In: Ibid., 18–19.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/21/1935. In: Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel, Band I: 1927-1969. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp, 2003), 85-86. Author’s translation. [Hereafter: BW, Bd. I]
[BW, Bd. I. Ed. Note:] Liesel Paxmann: Liesel Paxmann (1909-1935) finished her doctorate in Frankfurt before 1933; she was a member of the Roten Studentengruppe of the KPD. In 1933, she emigrated to Prague, but returned to Germany in 1935, presumably on behalf of the party, and was arrested at the border. Horkheimer dedicated his collection of essays, published in 1968, to her memory.
[BW, Bd. I. Ed. Note:] Dörter: Willi Dörter (1898-1968) was from 1929 to 1931 a student assistant at the Frankfurt Institute. In early October 1933, he was arrested for his efforts to found the SAP (left-opposition Bolshevik-Leninists) and sentenced in 1934; he was imprisoned in Frankfurt-Preungesheim until 1935. In 1936, he was sent to the Börgermoor concentration camp for resuming illegal activities. Following his release in 1936, Dörter fled to Geneva; then to Paris in 1937, where, in the summer of 1948, Horkheimer met him once more (cf. Horkheimer Briefwechsel 1941-1948, S. 1017). Later, Dörter lived in New York, working as a bank clerk.
[BW, Bd. I. Ed. Note:] Langerhans: The sociologist Heinz Langerhans (1904-1976); studied in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main. Received his doctorate under Horkheimer’s direction in 1931. From 1929 through 1931, he worked at the Institute in Frankfurt. In December 1933, Langerhans was arrested “for continued social-democratic party activity against the NSDAP” (Heinz Langerhans, Lebenslauf). He was released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939. He fled through Belgium and France, where he would be interned again in the camps at St. Cyprien, Gurs, and Les Milles, and then to the USA in 1941. From 1941 through 1945, Langerhans worked for the Institute again. He taught at Gettysburg College from 1947 through 1956.
[BW, Bd. I. Ed. Note:] Günther Stern’s sister: Eva Michaelis-Stern (1904-1996), who subsequently worked at a children’s welfare organization in England, then moved to Palestine. —Günther Stern (1902-1922), who went by the name of Günther Anders after emigrating, studied with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg im Breisgau; in 1933, he fled to Paris, then to the US in 1936.
[BW, Bd. I. Ed. Note:] Dubislav: Walter Dubislav (1895-1937), studied mathematics in Göttingen and philosophy in Berlin, where in 1922 received his doctorate and habilitated at the Technischen Hochschule (TH) in 1928. Dubislav had been an associate professor at the TH since 1931 and was co-founder and final chairman of the “Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie.” In 1936, he emigrated to Prague. —No further details have been established regarding his case. In a letter of 9/9/1936, Dubislav wrote Horkheimer from Prague [that the criminal proceedings against him had been discontinued before the first hearing on account of, he claims, his character and professional status, after which he left the country. — J/C]
In: A Life in Letters (2007), 16-17.
(fn. 1) Theodor Haecker, Der Christ und die Geschichte. Hegner. Leipzig 1935. (152 S. ; RM. 3.80, geb, RM. 5.50)
(fn. 2) Another document of Catholic humanism in the present is the recently published book by Jacques Maritain, Humanisme Intégral, Paris 1936 (cf. review section). Maritain is directly concerned with the application of this kind of thinking to prevailing social problems.
“Ce nouvel humanisme, sans commune mesure avec l’humanisme bourgeois, et d’autant plus humain qu’il n’adore pas l’homme, mais respecte réellement et effectivement la dignité humaine et fait droit aux exigences intégrales de la personne, nous le concevons comme orienté vers une réalisation sociale-temporelle de cette attention évangélique à l'humain qui ne doit pas exister seulement dans l’ordre spirituel, mais s’incarner, et vers l’idéal d’une communauté fraternelle. Ce n’est pas au dynamisme ou à l'impérialisme de la race, de la classe ou de la nation qu’il demande aux hommes de sacrifier, c’est à une meilleure vie pour leurs frères, et au bien concret de la communauté des personnes humaines; c’est à l'humble verité de l’amitié fraternelle à faire passer—au prix d’un effort constamment difficile, et de la pauvreté, —dans l'ordre du social et des structures de la vie commune; c’est par là qu'un tel humanisme est capable de grandir l’homme dans la communion, et c’est par là qu'il ne saurait être qu’un humanisme héroïque.” (S. 15)
(fn. 3) Th. Haecker, Ein Nachwort, Hellerau 1918
From the Daoist classic, the Liezi. Quotations from A.C. Graham’s standard English translation: “All those four sages lived without a day’s joy, and died leaving a reputation which will last ten thousand generations. Truly the reality was not what their reputation should have earned them. Though we praise them they do not know it; though we value them they do not know it. It matters no more to them than to stumps of trees and clods of earth. (...) Those two villains lived in the joy of following their desires, and dying incurred the reputation of fools and tyrants. Truly the reality was not what their reputation deserved. Whether we revile or praise them they do not know it; does it mean any more to them than to stumps of trees and clods of earth? The four sages, although the world admires them, suffered to the end of their lives, and death was the last home of all of them. The two villains, although the world condemns them, were happy to the end of their lives, and again death was their last home.” In: The Book of Lieh-tzŭ, A new translation by A.C. Graham. (Pub. John Murray, Distr. Grove Press, 1960), 151-152. [link]; Horkheimer cites R. Wilhelm’s German translation (Liä Dsi, Das wahre Buch vom quellenden Urgrund, hrsg. von R. Wilhelm, Jena 1911, S. 85-87. [Link])
Cf. Horkheimer, “Thoughts on Religion” [1935]: “The attitude of today's martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the afterlife but the happiness of men who come after them and for whom they know how to die.” In: Critical Theory (2002), 130.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935]: “While solidarity with struggling, suffering human beings obviously tends to make one apathetic toward metaphysical assurances, a particular notion appears to reside in the passionate effort not merely to seek meaning in the world, but to contend that such a thing exists. According to this notion, all human beings who do not believe in such a meaning become purely egoistical, know nothing other than what is to their own advantage, and become simply base. A coarsely materialistic conception of man thus lurks in metaphysical systems, in contrast to materialism.“ In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 160.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Thoughts on Religion” [1935]: “The productive kind of criticism of the status quo which found expression in earlier times as a belief in a heavenly judge today takes the form of a struggle for more rational forms of societal life.” In: Critical Theory (2002), 129.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935]: “A theory free from illusions can only conceive of human purpose negatively, and reveals the inherent contradiction between the conditions of existence and everything that the great philosophies have postulated as a purpose. The unfolding of human powers, which these days have atrophied, is thus a motif that goes back even further than the humanism of the Renaissance. However, this motif does not need to assume the mystical character of an absolute principle. The corresponding will to the realization of a better society finds an endless number of stimuli in contemporary conditions.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 156-157.
Cf. Horkheimer, “Materialism and Metaphysics” [1933]: “If materialist theory is an aspect of efforts to improve the human situation, it inevitably opposes every attempt to reduce social problems to second place. The materialist's criticism has been provoked by the recent spiritual trend which hypostatizes the monadic individual and thereby devalues the importance of providing proper economic foundations for society. But it also opposes every attempt to play down the importance of insight into the earthly order of things by turning man's attention to a supposedly more essential order. Especially does the materialist see deception being practiced on men by every type of philosophy which seeks to justify a really groundless hope or even to obscure its groundlessness. For all the optimism he has about changing situations, for all that he treasures the happiness which comes from solidarity among men and work for a changed society, he has a pessimistic streak as well. Past injustice will never be made up; the suffering of past generations receives no compensation. In idealist circles, too, there is a pessimism but it is directed at the earthly present and future, that is, it turns upon the impossibility of a future earthly happiness for the generality of men and is usually expressed as a fatalism or feeling of imminent destruction. The sadness congenial to the materialist, however, concerns past events. He will have nothing to do with general conjectures "that the population of the earth as a whole, under principles prevailing up to now, may have reached a rate of growth which is disproportionate to the amount of food that can be made available by technology, science, and economic progress," [Max Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1926), p. 166.] with the idea that we may have already passed the optimum level of technological productivity, or with pessimistic images of a decadence of the human race, of a “turning point in the life of mankind as a whole and in its aging process.” [Scheler, op. cit., p. 167.] Such ideas and images interpret the dilemmas inherent in a form of society which inhibits human powers as a weakness of mankind.” In: Critical Theory: (2002), 26-27.
Horkheimer to J. Favez, 11/25/1936. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 87.
Walter Benjamin to Horkheimer, 12/24/1936. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 799–800. Author’s translation.
[MHGS, Bd. 15 Ed. Fn.:] Theodor Haecker, Virgil. Vater des Abendlandes, Bonn 1933.; Walter Benjamin, ‘Privileged Thinking. On Theodor Haecker’s “Vergil” (1932), in: BGS 3, p. 315 ff.
English: Walter Benjamin, “Privileged Thinking. On Theodor Haecker’s Virgil.” [1931]. In: Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2, Part 2. 1931-1934. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 569-575.
G. Keller, “Abendregen,” in: Complete Works, Vol. 3, Munich. S. 25.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/25/1937. In: BW, Bd. I. (2003), 279-281. Author’s translation.
Benjamin’s “Elective Affinities” [written 1919-1922, published 1924-1925]: “For in the symbol of the star, the hope that Goethe had to conceive for the lovers had once appeared to him. That sentence, which to speak with Hölderlin contains the caesura of the work and in which, while the embracing lovers seal their fate, everything pauses, reads: “Hope shot across the sky above their heads like a falling star” (R239). They are unaware of it, of course, and it could not be said any more clearly that the last hope is never such to him who cherishes it but is the last only to those for whom it is cherished. With this comes to light the innermost basis for the “narrator’s stance.” It is he alone who, in the feeling of hope, can ful llthe meaning of the event—quite as Dante assumes in himself the hopelessness of the lovers, when, after the words of Francesca da Rimini, he falls “as if a corpse fell.” That most paradoxical, most eetinghope nallyemerges from the semblance of reconciliation, just as, at twilight, as the sun is extinguished, rises the evening star which outlasts the night. Its glimmer, of course, is imparted by Venus. And upon the slightest such glimmer all hope rests; even the richest hope comes only from it. Thus, at the end, hope justi es the semblance of reconciliation, and Plato’s tenet that it is absurd to desire the semblance of the good suffers its one exception. For one is permitted to desire the semblance of reconciliation—indeed, it must be desired: it alone is the house of the most extreme hope. Thus, hope nallywrests itself from it; and like a trembling question, there echoes at the end of the book that “How beautiful” in the ears of the dead, who, we hope, awaken, if ever, not to a beautiful world but to a blessed one. “Elpis” remains the last of the primal words: the certainty of blessing that, in the novella, the lovers take home with them corresponds to the hope of redemption that we nourish for all the dead. This hope is the sole justi cationof the faith in immortality, which must never be kindled from one’s own existence. But precisely because of this hope, those Christian-mystical moments at the end are out of place, arising as they do—in a manner unlike the way they arose in the Romantics—from the striving to ennoble everything mythic at ground level. Hence, not this Nazarene essence but rather the symbol of the star falling over the heads of the lovers is the form of expression appropriate to whatever of mystery in the exact sense of the term indwells the work. The mystery is, on the dramatic level, that moment in which it juts out of the domain of language proper to it into a higher one unattainable for it. Therefore, this moment can never be expressed in words but is expressible solely in representation: it is the “dramatic” in the strictest sense. An analogous moment of representation in Elective Affnitiesis the falling star. The novel’s epic basis in the mythic, its lyrical breadth in passion and affection, is joined by its dramatic crowning in the mystery of hope. If music encloses genuine mysteries, this world of course remains a mute world, from which music will never ring out. Yet to what is it dedicated if not redemption, to which it promises more than conciliation? This is inscribed in the “tablet” that Stefan George has placed over the house in Bonn in which Beethoven was born: “Before you wage the battle of your star, / I sing of strife and gains on higher stars. / Before you know the bodies on this star, / I shape you dreams among eternal stars.” The phrase “Before you know the bodies” appears destined for a sublime irony. Those lovers never seize the body. What does it matter if they never gathered strength for battle? Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.” In: “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” Translated by Stanley Corngold. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Belknap Press of HUP, 2002), 354-356.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 2/22/1937. In: Ibid., 295-296. Author’s translation.
Adorno: “You mention Maupassant in connection with metaphysical sadness. In my letter of the 28th—which you will most likely receive at the same time as this one—I even suggested you write an essay about him.” Adorno to Horkheimer, 3/2/1937. In: BW, Bd. I. (2003), 313.
[BW, Bd. I Ed. note:] “metaphysical mourning” / Voltaire / Maupassant / a few lines from the notebooks of Delacroix: Several decades later, Horkheimer would quote this specific passage of Voltaire in a lecture entitled “Schopenhauers Denken im Verhältnis zu Wissenschaft und Religion”: “Le bonheur n'est qu'un rêve, et la douleur est réelle”—Voltaire goes on to say: “il y a quatre-vingts ans que je l'éprouve. Je n'y sais autre chose que me résigner et me dire que les mouches sont nées pour être mangées par les araignées, et les hommes pour être dévorés par les chagrins.” (Voltaire, Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1820, vol. 68: Correspondance générale, tome XIII, p. 377 [Letter to the Marquis de Florian dated March 16, 1774]) - [Happiness is but a dream, and pain is real; I have felt it now for eighty years. All I know to do is resign myself to this, and tell myself flies are born to be eaten by spiders, and men to be devoured by sorrows.] [link] Re: Maupassant, Horkheimer wrote Benjamin January 11th, 1937: “Thank you for the reference to Keller. I assure you, we will remember him at the right time. What’s more—the specific relationship between transience and pleasure [Vergänglichkeit und Lust], which you have drawn attention to here, is found in all great bourgeois fiction. Just think of Maupassant.” (Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1937-1940, S. 24). Re: Delacroix’s “Journal,” which is the most likely referent here, there are a number of passages to be found, so more specific reference may be omitted.” In: BW, Bd. I. (2003), 299.
[BW, Bd. I Ed. note:] “Read what Harnack says of the martyrs”: In a conversation from 1972, Horkheimer quotes Harnack in the following words: “A great theological historian, Harnack, once depicted the manner in which Christian martyrs felt when they had to endure the terrible death of the Roman arena, for instance. ‘In the midst of their torments [Qualen], they thought it a passage to eternal bliss.’” (Horkheimer, GS 7, p. 444f.) —The exact source of the quote could not be determined; a similar passage can be found in: Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, Vol. 2: Die Entwicklung des kirchlichen Dogmas I, Darmstadt 1980 (p. 471): “For the Christian, life in this world means training for death; and death means life eternal. All that connected them to blessed death was already touched by the breath of eternal life; thus bones were dearer to them than gold and precious stones.” In: Ibid.
Karl Landauer to Horkheimer 1/1/1937. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 9-11. Author’s translation.
[MHGS, Bd. 16 Ed. note:] Edward VIII, who had only reigned as King since January 1936, abdicated in December 1936 because his impending marriage to a divorced, American woman was approved neither by Parliament nor the Anglican Church.
[MHGS, Bd. 16 Ed. note:] Dämmerung was published in Zurich in 1934 under the pseudonym “Heinrich Regius.” Henricus Regius (Henrik van Roy, Henri de Roy, 1598-1679) was a professor of medicine in Utrecht. After exposing himself as a Cartesian, he was temporarily banned from teaching, but even Descartes later distanced himself from Roy’s theses. For the young Horkheimer, Roy was probably an exemplary figure as a free spirit.
[MHGS, Bd. 16 Ed. note:] “Freuds Lehre vom Traum,” a lecture delivered on December 12th, 1936, in Amsterdam.
Horkheimer to Pollock, 9/20/1937. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 235. Author’s translation.
Karl Löwith, “Nietzsche. Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens.” [Sammelbesprechung: Jaspers, K., Nietzsche. Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens. Walter de Gruyter. Berlin und Leipzig 1936. (VIII u. 437 S.; RM. 7.—, geb. RM. 8.—); Nietzsche, F., Mein Leben. Moriz Diesterweg. Frankfurt a.M. 1936. (15 S.; RM. 1.—); Oehler, R., F. Nietzsche und die deutsche Zukunft. Armanen-Verlag. Leipzig 1935. (132 S.; RM. 3.—)] In: ZfS Vol. 6, No. 2 (1937), 405-407.
Karl Löwith to Horkheimer, 10/25/1937. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 262–263. Author’s translation.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 11/29/1937: “Gustav Mayer has enthusiastically embraced [Kurt] Mandelbaum’s suggestion to meet with me, which [Mandelbaum] had already communicated to him before I received your letter, and [Mayer] invited Mandelbaum and I to meet him after dinner on Tuesday. I will then invite him to dine with us and us alone. However, something terrible has come to light: he is Jaspers’ brother-in-law and in a rage over your essay. Just what we needed. But when it comes to such discussions, one must take a stand, even at the risk of perpetuating a grudge. You would handle the situation better—for me, solidarity must come before diplomacy, and not only because I am not capable of behaving otherwise, but also out of institutional-tactical considerations. Pray for me.” In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 289–294. Author’s translation.
Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/10/1937: “Gustav Mayer started in immediately about the Jaspers[-essay], quite vehemently; but when I fought back with just as much vehemence, he backed down. He’s out of town now, but Gretel and I shall humbly invite him over again.” In: BW, Bd. I (2003), 504. Author’s translation.
In the Deutsche Rechtswörterbuch (DRW): Spießbürger: (ordinary [einfacher]) Bürger (II), who fulfills the duty of military service in person and with a (simple [schlichten]) spear [Spieß] (I); early on, transl.: simple [einfache], narrow-minded [engstirnige] person.
On the history of the rifle in Germany, see Friedrich Engels, “The History of the Rifle” [1860/61].
See the Duden entry (fn. 52 above) on the provenance of the term: “probable origin = Bürger armed with a spear (1) (cf. Schildbürger); then mocking, derogatory for the old-fashioned Wehrbürger, who still used a spear [Spieß] instead of the more modern rifle [Gewehrs]; then, student-slang term for the conservative small-town dweller [Kleinstädter].”
In an advice column blog post from 2015 about tips for foreigners living in Berlin, ‘The Berliner’ columnist Hans-Torsten Richter tells his own story about the evolution of the Spießbürger: “Spießer is a short version of Spießbürger—a positive term dating back to the Middle Ages denoting citizens who defended their cities with Spieße (long pikes or spears), usually the poorer ones who couldn’t afford a horse. But by the 1800s, lefty students from well-off homes like Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx began to use Spießbürger as an insult to describe the reactionary petit-bourgeois. For the 1968 generation, the Spießer was the slave-to-authority who had remained silent and conformist in the Nazi era. In the 1970s and 1980s the Spießer was still clearly identifiable: a bland, closed-minded bloke who drove an Opel Corsa, voted for the CDU, lived in a suburb, watched the Abendschau every night and spent his holiday reading Bild and chomping schnitzel in Mallorca—in short, the sworn enemy of every alternative subculture from punk to tree-hugger. But by the 1990s, commentators began to notice that anybody could be spießig—even punks and eco-warriors.” [Link]
Horkheimer, “Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History” [1930]: “It is not just mythology that Vico understood as a reflex reaction to social conditions; he also relates metaphysics to historical reality. Socrates's notion of intelligible genera and Plato's doctrine of ideas stem, according to Vico, “from observing that the enactment of laws by Athenian citizens involved their coming to agreement in an idea of an equal utility common to all of them severally.” Furthermore, concerning Aristotle's new concept of justice, Vico says explicitly “that these principles of metaphysics, logic, and morals issued from the market place of Athens.” This understanding of mythology and metaphysics, which in fact concerns how such things are connected and how they are “hidden,” signifies a tremendous advance over the simple assessment of Hobbes that such doctrines are invented only to deceive others. For Vico, these essentially distorted forms of reality appear at an early stage of historical development. Just as the state did not emerge from a voluntary and conscious act of human reason—as natural law doctrines hold—language, art, religion, and metaphysics similarly lack any rational origin. The task of scientific inquiry is to understand these cultural products as surface manifestations of history, to grasp the natural, instinctual social processes from which these manifestations issued and which are, in turn, reflected in them. Vico's interpretations of mythology are exemplary cases of how to understand the “spiritual” elements that arise from determinant social processes. Vico is far from wanting to understand the process of artistic and religious creation as the conscious or even intentional recasting of a given reality that was previously unideological. From the vantage point of their creator, the aesthetic creations, in which the sociologist later sees the reflections of a particular society and its epoch, appear as innovative, thoroughly “originary” products. There exists no prestabilized harmony between the potential of creative works to express something of society and the individual intentions that give rise to such works. Works of art attain their transparency only in the course of history.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 385-386.
Horkheimer (1947): “Philosophy must become more sensitive to the muted testimonies of language and plumb the layers of experience preserved in it. Each language carries a meaning embodying the thought forms and belief patterns rooted in the evolution of the people who speak it. It is the repository of the variegated perspectives of prince and pauper, poet and peasant. Its forms and content are enriched or impoverished by the naive usage of every man. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that we can discover the essential meaning of a word by simply asking the people who use it. Public-opinion polls are of little avail in this search. In the age of formalized reason, even the masses abet the deterioration of concepts and ideas. The man in the street, or, as he is sometimes called today, the man in the fields and factories, is learning to use words almost as schematically and unhistorically as the experts. The philosopher must avoid his example. He cannot talk about man, animal, society, world, mind, thought, as a natural scientist talks about a chemical substance: the philosopher does not have the formula. There is no formula. Adequate description, unfolding the meaning of any of these concepts, with all its shades and its interconnections with other concepts, is still a main task. Here, the word with its half-forgotten layers of meaning and association is a guiding principle. These implications have to be re-experienced and preserved, as it were, in more enlightened and universal ideas. Today, one is too easily induced to evade complexity by surrendering to the illusion that the basic ideas will be clarified by the march of physics and technology. Industrialism puts pressure even upon the philosophers to conceive their work in terms of the processes of producing standardized cutlery. Some of them seem to feel that concepts and categories should leave their workshops clean-cut and looking brand-new.” In: Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason. (Continuum, 1974 [Oxford University Press, 1947]), 165-166.
Re: German workers mocking Spießbürger enthusiasm for nationalist-militarist ‘naval theatre’ propaganda during WWI: “Moreover, German secret police reports of overheard conversations in workingmen’s pubs and other gathering places make clear that by no means all of them were ‘manipulated’ by the elites: ‘Workers repeatedly made fun of what they called Spießbürger, the petite bourgeoisie, and their eagerness to display enthusiasm for naval theatre. Patrons of workers’ pubs were recorded as regarding the naval pomp and ceremony as a waste of money’ (…). Dockyard workers often disliked [ceremonious] ship launchings ‘as symbolic events marking the loss of jobs.’” John Beeler, “Review: The Theatre of Navalism in Germany and Britain,” in: The International History Review, June 2008, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2008), 336.
In the late “Ethnographical Notebooks” of ca. 1881, Marx uses the term to refer to rich English settlers from London plundering and looting Irish lands and cities in the 17th century: “D. beswusste Zweck d. James was “looting”, was d. Bursche Colonisation nannte. Vertrebg u. Unterjochung d. Irish, u. confiscation ihres Lands u. Habe, alles das unter d. Prätext von Anti-Popery. 1607 O’Neill u. O’Donnell, noch in possession of vast tracts of country, the last great Irish chieftains, crushed. 1608 d. Chiefs im Norden, Sir Cahir O’Doherty etc crushed (ihr Revolt). Nun 6 counties of Ulster – Trone, Derry, Donegal, Fermahagh, Armagh u. Cavan – confiscated to the Crown u. parcelled out among adventurers from England and Scotland. Dazu benutzt Sir Arthur Chichester (Bacon’s plan gefiel nicht dem beastly fool James II), the lord deputy, der zum Dank erhielt the wide lands of Sir Cahir O’Doherty for his share in the wholesale spoliation. (see O’Donovan, “Four Masters”. Die reichen Spiessbürger der London City were the largest participators in the plunder. They obtained 209,800 acres and rebuilt the city (i.e. Derry) since then called Londonderry. Nach d. plan finally | adopted for the “plantation of Ulster” the lots into which the lands were divided were classified into those containing 2000 acres, which were reserved for rich undertakers and the great servitors of the crown; those containing 1500 acres, which were allotted to servitors of the crown in Ireland, with permission to take either English or Irish tenants; and, thirdly, those containing 1000 acres, to be distributed with still less restriction. The exclusion of the ancient inhabitants, and the proscription of the Catholic religion, were the fundamental principles to be acted on as far as possible in this settlement. Cox says that in the instructions, printed for the direction of the settlers, it was especially mentioned “that they should not suffer any laborer, that would not take the oath of supremacy, to dwell upon their land”. (p. 497-500 l. c.)” In: The Ethnographical Notebooks of Karl Marx, transcribed and edited, with an introduction by Lawrence Krader (Van Gorcum & Co., 1972), 287-336. [link]
See Adorno’s Minima Moralia (2005 [1951]), for example: (§41) “Inside and outside.”: “Piety, indolence and calculation allow philosophy to keep muddling along within an ever narrower academic groove, and even there steadily increasing efforts are made to replace it by organized tautology. Those who throw in their lot with salaried profundity are compelled, as a hundred years ago, to be at each moment as naive as the colleagues on whom their careers depend. But extra-academic thinking, which seeks to escape such compulsion, with its contradiction between high-flown subject matter and petty-minded [spießbürgerlicher] treatment, faces a scarcely lesser threat: the economic pressure of the market, from which in Europe the professors at least were protected. The philosopher who wishes to earn his living as a writer is obliged at each moment to have something choice, ultra-select to offer, and to counter the monopoly of office with that of rarity. The repulsive notion of the intellectual titbit, conceived by pedants, finally proves humiliatingly applicable to their opponents.” Theodor Adorno [1951], Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated from the German by E.F.N. Jephcott. (Verso, 2005), 66.
Or (§136) “Exhibitionists.”: “Artists do not sublimate. That they neither satisfy nor repress their desires, but transform them into socially desirable achievements, their works, is a psycho-analytical illusion; incidentally, legitimate works of art are today without exception socially undesired. Rather, artists display violent instincts, free-floating and yet colliding with reality, marked by a neurosis. Even the philistine’s dream of the actor [Spießertraum vom Schauspieler] or violinist as the synthesis of a bundle of nerves and a tugger of heart-strings, has more truth than the no less philistine theory of instincts [spießbürgerliche Triebökonomie] according to which the favorite children of renunciation get rid of the stuff in symphonies and novels.” In: Ibid., 212-213.
See Paul Ingram (2019) for a much more generous and responsible, but still ultimately conventional, treatment of the category of ‘philistine’ (for which Spießbürger is only one term among many) in Adorno’s aesthetics: “Theodor Adorno’s philistine functions as the other of art, or as the ideal embodiment of everything that the bourgeois aesthetic subject is not. He insists on the truth-content of the derogation, while recognising its unjust social foundation, and seeking to reflect that tension in a self-critical turn. His model of advanced art is negatively delimited by the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for enjoyment, which represent the poles of the aesthetic and the social. The philistine is also the counterpart to the connoisseur, with the interplay between them pointing to his preferred approach to aesthetics, in which an affinity for art and alienness to it are combined without compromise. However, Adorno fails to realise fully the critical potential of the philistine as the immanent negation of art and aesthetics.” In: “Adorno’s Philistine: the Dialectic of Art and its Other,” Historical Materialism 28, 3 (2019): 82-112, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-00001735
In the DRW: Pfahlbürger: a person living in the vicinity of a city (in the legal sense) and participating (to a greater or lesser extent) in its rights of citizenship / civic rights [Bürgerrecht]; the legal institution of Pfahlbürgerschaft was opposed by the land-owning lords [Landesherren] as a breach of the territorial sovereignty [Territorialhoheit] they desired.
For Horkheimer’s definition of ideology as ‘harmonizing transfiguration of contradictions,’ see his “On the Meaning and Boundaries of a Sociological Treatment of Philosophy” [1930?]: “To us, however, this determination of the concept [of ideology]—ideological = socially conditioned—appears both too broad and too narrow. Too broad, because it applies in equal measure to all intuitions and theories; too narrow, because it regards only the so-called intellectual [geistigen] functions as the bearers of ideology, whereas the ideological apparatus of society is evidently much more extensive. Second, and this is crucial, the prevailing linguistic usage seems to support the opinion that the sociological investigation [Untersuchung] of a proposition can take the place of the examination [Prüfung] of its objective correctness [sachlichen Richtigkeit], or, in other words: that the investigation of social conditionality has something to do with its truth. But the incorrectness, the wrongness, that should accompany characterizing something as “ideological” is not precisely not its self-evident conditionality, but its harmonizing transfiguration of contradictions [harmonisierende Verklärung des Widerspruchs].” In: MHGS, Bd. 11. (1987), 219. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Karl Löwith, 7/27/1937. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 202-203
Horkheimer to Benjamin, 2/23/1939: “To return to the inadequate orientation of French intellectuals, I would like to refer you once more to their conception of Nietzsche, which, I believe, I mentioned to you in an earlier letter as well. The image that even the most progressive Frenchmen have of Nietzsche is revealed not so much in the pitiful utterances in the special issue of Acéphale as in the role that Freud plays in the publications of the avant-garde. Whether positively or negatively disposed, they appear to view Freud as the only psychological theoretician to have appeared in Germany. They prove to be true fetishists of systematic presentation. If you'll pardon my saying so, I believe they worship the masquerade even more fervently than the Germans ever did. The opinion that the French know how to read aphorisms better than others is entirely incorrect; they are hardly put off by Freud's pedantic and quite unclear style, which continuously reminds one of the pose of the modest and sober scholar; they hardly know what to make of Nietzsche's aphoristic style. His apparently loosely structured form in no way guarantees, as it does in the case of many French writers, that basic fundamentals will not be dealt with, that one will make casual observations and essentially feel safe. Nietzsche's aphorisms are not daring marginal observations that a person of that sort allows himself; they are not a proof of freedom and harmony that would confirm the possibility of the system. Rather, they make a claim that is at least as far-reaching as the latter and thus prove it to be obsolete. Contemporary French intellectuals are too naive for this.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 149-150.
Karl Löwith to Horkheimer, 10/25/1937: “Dear Herr Professor Horkheimer, my thanks for your letter of July 27th, which I received yesterday shortly before the new issue with my Nietzsche-reviews + your postscript. I took a keen interest in it, and you are, of course, right to ruthlessly demonstrate that + how he removed himself from the whole affair. But—and I have had the occasion to note this often during my three years in Rome—the situation is so queer that the same thing which, in Germany, appears as heroic renunciation, as noble distance, and so forth, must make the exact converse impression outside—so different are the “historical” standards of evaluation there + here. In light of such a difference in situation for those living + thinking inside and those outside, any critique should, in my opinion, take this into account in order to be just. It’s not that I think you should have handled the matter more gently, but perhaps you could have been more delicate in form and, for example, refrained from handing out the title of “Spießbürger” right at the outset.” In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 262–263. Author’s translation.
Karl Löwith, in: Ibid. Author’s translation.
Karl Löwith: “You say at the close, quite rightly, that one cannot speak of Nietzsche without clearly relating him to current events. Yes, but the great difficulty here is that Nietzsche’s critique of the Second Reich is by no means unequivocally a critique of the Third Reich, as his position towards Bismarck etc., and especially to Wagner, was already highly ambiguous! And finally, it seems entirely sensible to say that Nietzsche's “consequences” fall back onto him [auf ihn selbst zurück] and to judge him on the basis of his illegitimate historical effects. (That Nietzsche is a “trailblazer” [“Wegbereiter”], even the trailblazer of today’s German Ideology, is, it seems to me, beyond any doubt—only one must not imagine the so-called trailblazer would ever himself follow a path others had paved.)” In: Ibid. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Frederic Lilge, 3/9/1948: “There are a few points in the book which I would have formulated differently, e.g., the role of Jaspers whom I consider one of the most blatant examples of clerical opportunism in German academic life. The philosophical ideas, first those of Husserl, later of Heidegger, which he arranged for the higher layers of the educated public, assumed in his language the kind of pseudo-profundity and semi-aristocratic esoterism which characterized the German “Elite” between the two wars. While I regard the Allgemeine Psychopathologie as an outstanding book, I think that later on Jaspers himself was not free from the attributes of that same hollow idealism to which he seemed to be so strictly opposed in his beginnings. All one has to do is to compare his publication Die Idee der Universität with what Scheler said on the subject. Jaspers harbored the strangest illusions regarding social justice in the recruiting of the German student body; he defended the thesis that the nation provides for her members economically through the state and that in the university, being a state institution, national interest must inevitably and justifiably be effective in the selection of teachers and students. In his book on Nietzsche, published under Hitler, he simply forgets about those parts of Nietzsche's doctrine which are most opposed to the Nazi philosophy. Heidegger was an outright Nazi, at least before Hitler's ascent to power and during the first one or two years of the regime. But he is a genuine philosopher.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 256-257.
“Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” [1938]: “Nietzsche expresses more the critique of a bourgeoisie in decline than veneration of capital's consolidation of its power. His admiration for Montaigne points to the human meaning of the utopia of the Superman, and permits us to see how the “leaders” of the present constitute its distortion. They represent the historical answer, so to speak, to Nietzsche's error that personalities can still exist in the future while the bourgeois mass continues, that the enslavement rather than the emancipation of the mass is the condition for a humane future. Nietzsche is contradictory, like Montaigne himself.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 304.
Cf. “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936] [Footnote No. 136]: “Nietzsche's critique of "European nihilism" amounts ultimately to the denial of cultural development since the beginning of Christianity. The nihilism spoken of in this article is more narrowly defined. It concerns the secret self-contempt of the individual on the basis of the contradiction between bourgeois ideology and reality. This self-contempt is usually linked with an exaggerated consciousness of freedom and of one's own or another's greatness. Because Nietzsche understands the term too widely and therefore unhistorically, he cannot understand that nihilism is overcome either by society as a whole or not at all. “We have grown to dislike egoism,” he complains in The Will to Power (Complete Works (New York, 1964), vol. 14, p. 11). But what he intentionally promotes is, however, merely the abstract self-consciousness of ancient slaveholders, and unintentionally, the good conscience of modern tyrants who reproduce the general nihilism which they carry in themselves.” In: Ibid., 399.
“Materialism and Morality” [1933]. In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 30-31. For the German, see: Max Horkheimer, “Materialismus und Moral.” ZfS Vol. 2, No. 2 (1933), 178.
Adorno (§60) “A word for morality.”: “Amoralism, with which Nietzsche chastised the old untruth, is itself now subject to the verdict of history. With the decay of religion and its palpable philosophical secularizations, restrictive prohibitions lost their inherent authority, their substantiality. At first, however, material production was still so undeveloped that it could be proclaimed with some reason that there was not enough to go round. Anyone who did not criticize political economy as such, had to cling to the limiting principle which was then articulated as unrationalized appropriation at the expense of the weak. The objective preconditions of this have changed. It is not only the social non-conformist or even the narrow-minded bourgeois who must see restriction as superfluous in face of the immediate possibility of superfluity. The implied meaning of the master-morality, that he who wants to live must fend for himself, has in the meantime become a still more miserable lie than it was when a nineteenth-century piece of pulpit-wisdom. If in Germany the common citizen [Spießbürger] has proved himself a blond beast, this has nothing to do with national peculiarities, but with the fact that blond bestiality itself, social rapine, has become in face of manifest abundance the attitude of the backwoodsman, the deluded philistine [Philisters], that same ‘hard-done-by’ mentality which the master-morality was invented to combat. If Cesare Borgia were resurrected today, he would look like David Friedrich Strauss and his name would be Adolf Hitler. The cause of amorality has been espoused by the same Darwinists whom Nietzsche despised, and who proclaim as their maxim the barbaric struggle for existence with such vehemence, just because it is no longer needed. True distinction has long ceased to consist in taking the best for oneself, and has become instead a satiety with taking, that practises in reality the virtue of giving, which in Nietzsche occurs only in the mind. Ascetic ideals constitute today a more solid bulwark against the madness of the profit-economy than did the hedonistic life sixty years ago against liberal repression. The amoralist may now at last permit himself to be as kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche already was then. As a guarantee of his undiminished resistance, he is still as alone in this as in the days when he turned the mask of evil upon the normal world, to teach the norm to fear its own perversity.” In: Minima Moralia (2005 [1951]), 96-97.
Adorno on Decadence (1/31/1936): “My pitch for the Zeitschrift: essay on the concept of decadence. It would be dialecticized [durchzudialektisieren] as: the struggle of the bourgeoisie against its psychologically progressive tendencies and, at the same time, as its bad conscience over the fettering of the forces of production. With the secondary intention to prevent the reactionary usage of the concept of decadence by the proletariat. The concept of decadence is also a topos noetikos of the constellation between social dialectics [gesellschaftlicher Dialektik] and psychology. There is much to be gained from Nietzsche, to whom you rightly refer in your “Authority”-essay! But only you could write that!” Adorno to Horkheimer, 1/31/1936. In: MHGS Bd. 15 (1995), 449. Author’s translation.
See also, Horkheimer’s Reply (2/4/1936): “The essay on decadence would certainly be vital for us. It would provide us the opportunity to finally publish a cohesive, authoritative statement on Nietzsche from our side.” Horkheimer to Adorno, 2/4/1936. In: Ibid., 452. Author’s translation.
“Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935]: ““Nietzsche wanted to give to the history “of the entire past a goal,” and stressed the possibility of higher forms of life. He thought that contemporary expressions of power arose from the laziness and anxiety of the masses and had nothing else to claim for itself. Even the dialectical principle of the masses did not escape him: “To help the common masses to rule is of course the only means of making their kind noble: however, one must hope for this first as one who himself rules, not in a battle for the rule.” The notion that those who are against power and for the masses are not identical to these masses is revealed in Nietzsche's view that one must force the masses to use their own faculty of reason and realize their own advantage. This maxim holds not only for those who rule but for their opponents as well. However, because Nietzsche kept the masses firmly separate from the superman without developing that dialectical principle, he remained vulnerable to the misuse that he despised, and was considered a herald for those who were ruling at the time. He understood everything that concerned the present except its inner nexus. Had he recognized and applied dialectic not just in his capacity as a classical philologist but rather in its contemporary form, he would have better understood those who considered the masses an atavism and who were striving to overcome the condition of their existence, the constant resurgence of poverty. It is unscientific to think of the superman merely as a biological type. This concept designates the higher stages of a future society that originates from the struggles in the present. The superman is either a social-theoretical concept or the utopian dream of a philosopher. The masses can only be condemned as long as the actual power that rules over them veils itself in a fictitious image of power. This is, of course, the distinguishing mark of rule over the masses in all previous periods of history. As soon as the masses transform themselves through their correct use of power, then power itself loses its “decadence” and becomes an effect of the uniform and thus “superhuman” force of society. The bridge to the future is not erected by lonely individuals, as Nietzsche had held, but rather by organized efforts, in which his opinions regarding eugenics play only an insignificant role and the will to a freer humanity is fused with an explicit and highly developed theory of society.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 165-166.
From Regius’ Dämmerung (1934): “Nietzsche and the Proletariat: Nietzsche derides Christianity because its ideals derived from impotence. By calling them virtues, the weak deliberately misinterpret love of mankind, justice, mildness because they cannot avenge themselves or, more precisely, because they were too cowardly to do so. He despises the mass, yet wants to preserve it as such. He wants to preserve weakness, cowardice, obedience, so that he may have room for the breeding of his utopian aristocrats. There must be those who sew togas for these men so that they don’t walk about like beggars, for if they could not live off the sweat of the mass, they themselves would have to operate the machines, and there no one intones Dionysian dithyrambs. Actually, Nietzsche is extremely pleased that the mass should exist. Nowhere does he appear as the real enemy of a system based on exploitation and misery. According to him, it is therefore both just and useful that men's gifts atrophy under wretched conditions, however strongly he may advocate their development in the ‘superman.’ Nietzsche's aims are not those of the proletariat. But the proletariat might note that the morality which recommends that it be conciliatory is mere deception, according to this philosopher of the ruling class. He himself inculcates in the masses that it is only fear that keeps them from destroying the system. If the masses understand this, even Nietzsche can contribute to the process which turns the slave rebellion in morals into proletarian practice.” In: Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926– 1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (Seabury Press, 1978), 32-33.
Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth” [1935]: “The only great spirit who, in the face of the gross thickening of this fog which has taken place since the middle of the last century, has achieved the freedom from illusion and the comprehensive view which are possible from the standpoint of the haute bourgeoisie, is Nietzsche. It must indeed have escaped him that the intellectual honesty with which he was concerned did not fit in with this social standpoint. The reason for the foulness against which he fought lies neither in individual nor national character but in the structure of society as a whole, which includes both. Since as a true bourgeois philosopher he made psychology, even if the most profound that exists today, the fundamental science of history, he misunderstood the origin of spiritual decay and the way out, and the fate which befell his own work was therefore inevitable. (“Who among my friends would have seen more in it than an impermissible presumption, completely indifferent to happiness?”).” In: Ibid., 214.
Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth” [1935]: “Nietzsche said that a great truth “wants to be criticized, not worshiped.”” In: Ibid., 211.
A critique of liberal ideology Horkheimer will level again in his critique of Siegfried Marck, “The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration” [1938], see below.
Nietzsche: “Man hat kein Recht weder auf Dasein, noch auf Arbeit, noch gar auf ‘Glück’: est steht mit dem einzelnen Menschen nicht anders, als mit dem niedrigsten Wurm.” In: Der Wille zur Macht. Eine Auslegung alles Geschehens, von Friedrich Nietzsche. (Alfred Kröner Verlag in Leipzig, 1917), §487.
Nietzsche: “alle Güte entwickelt sich nur unter seines Gleichen.” In: Die Fragmente von Frühjahr 1884 bis Herbst 1885, Band 5 [link]
Nietzsche: “eine der verlogensten Eruptionen von gemeinen Instinkten.” In: Die Fragmente: Ende 1886—Frühjahr 1887 7 (1-70)
Nietzsche: “ein Volk, welches sich der Intelligenz eines Luther unterordnet!” In: Die Fragmente von Frühjahr 1884 bis Herbst 1885, Band 5. [link]
Nietzsche: “Der Protestantismus, jene geistig unreinliche und langweilige Form der décadence, in der das Christenthum sich bisher im mediokren Norden zu conserviren gewußt hat: als etwas Halbes und Complexes werthvoll für die Erkenntniß, insofern es Erfahrungen verschiedener Ordnung und Herkunft in den gleichen Köpfen zusammenbrachte.” Friedrich Nietzsche. Der Wille zur Macht I. Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe. Aus dem Nachlaß 1884/88 (Alfred Kröner Verlag in Leipzig, 1922), §88. [link]
Nietzsche: “Ich sehe durchaus nicht ab, in welchem Jahrhundert der Geschichte man so neugierige und zugleich so delikate Psychologen zusammenfischen könnte, wie im jetzigen Paris: ich nenne versuchsweise — denn ihre Zahl ist gar nicht klein — die Herrn Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaître, oder um Einen von der starken Rasse hervorzuheben, einen echten Lateiner, dem ich besonders zugethan bin, Guy de Maupassant. Ich ziehe diese Generation, unter uns gesagt, sogar ihren grossen Lehrern vor, die allesammt durch deutsche Philosophie verdorben sind: Herr Taine zum Beispiel durch Hegel, dem er das Missverständniss grosser Menschen und Zeiten verdankt.” In: Ibid.
Nietzsche: “In Europa sind die Juden die älteste und reinste Rasse. Deshalb ist die Schönheit der Jüdin die höchste.” In: Die Fragmente von Frühjahr 1884 bis Herbst 1885, Band 5 [link]
Nietzsche: “Nebenbei bemerkt: Europa ist gerade in Hinsicht auf Logisirung, auf reinlichere Kopf- Gewohnheiten den Juden nicht wenig Dank schuldig; voran die Deutschen, als eine beklagenswerth deraisonnable Rasse, der man auch heute immer noch zuerst "den Kopf zu waschen" hat. Ueberall, wo Juden zu Einfluss gekommen sind, haben sie ferner zu scheiden, schärfer zu folgern, heller und sauberer zu schreiben gelehrt: ihre Aufgabe war es immer, ein Volk "zur Raison" zu bringen.” In: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. §348. [link]
Nietzsche: “Die Antisemiten vergeben es den Juden nicht, daß die Juden ‘Geist’ haben—und Geld. Die Antisemiten—ein Name der ‘Schlechtweggekommenenen.’” In: Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre, in: Bd. VI, S. 707
Nietzsche: “Junge Menschen, deren Leistungen ihrem Ehrgeize nicht gemäß sind, suchen sich einen Gegenstand zum Zerreißen aus Rache, meistens Personen, Stände, Rassen, welche nicht gut Wiedervergeltung üben können: die besseren Naturen machen direkten Krieg; auch die Sucht zu Duellen ist hierher gehörig. Das Bessere ist, wer einen Gegner wählt, der nicht unter seiner Kraft und der achtungswerth und stark ist. So ist der Kampf gegen die Juden immer ein Zeichen der schlechteren, neidischeren und feigeren Natur gewesen: und wer jetzt daran Theil nimmt, muß ein gutes Stück pöbelhafter Gesinnung in sich tragen.” In: Fragmente Anfang 1880 bis Sommer 1882, Band 3 [link]
Nietzsche: ““Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” — ist vielleicht die blödsinnigste Parole, die je gegeben worden ist. Warum überhaupt Deutschland — frage ich: wenn es nicht Etwas will, vertritt, darstellt, was mehr Werth hat, als irgend eine andere bisherige Macht vertritt! An sich nur ein großer Staat mehr, eine Albernheit mehr in der Welt.” In: Die Fragmente von Frühjahr 1884 bis Herbst 1885, Band 5 [link]
Nietzsche: “Die Deutschen haben endlich, als auf der Brücke zwischen zwei décadence-Jahrhunderten eine force majeure von Genie und Wille sichtbar wurde, stark genug, aus Europa eine Einheit, eine politische und wirtschaftliche Einheit, zum Zweck der Erdregierung zu schaffen, mit ihren „Freiheits-Kriegen“ Europa um den Sinn, um das Wunder von Sinn in der Existenz Napoleon’s gebracht, — sie haben damit Alles, was kam, was heute da ist, auf dem Gewissen, diese culturwidrigste Krankheit und Unvernunft, die es giebt, den Nationalismus, diese névrose nationale, an der Europa krank ist, diese Verewigung der Kleinstaaterei Europa’s, der kleinen Politik: sie haben Europa selbst um seinen Sinn, um seine Vernunft — sie haben es in eine Sackgasse gebracht.” In: Der Fall Wagner, §2 [link]
Nietzsche: “ein Volk der ungeheuerlichsten Mischung und Zusammenrührung von Rassen, vielleicht sogar mit einem Übergewicht des vor-arischen Elementes” In: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft. (1886), §244.
Nietzsche: “Von der deutschen Tugend.— Wie entartet in seinem Geschmack, wie sclavisch vor Würden, Ständen, Trachten, Pomp und Prunk muss ein Volk gewesen sein, als es das Schlichte als das Schlechte, den schlichten Mann als den schlechten Mann abschätzte! Man soll dem moralischen Hochmuthe der Deutschen immer diess Wörtlein "schlecht" und Nichts weiter entgegenhalten!” In: Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile. (1881), §231. [link]
Nietzsche: “das Rädern (die eigenste Erfindung und Spezialität des deutschen Genius im Reich der Strafe!)” In: Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift. (1887), Zweite Abhandlung, §3. [link]
Nietzsche: “Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung: sie sind ihre mitleidige Schwäche ihre Empfindlichkeit für alle Nichtse auf einmal los und genießen andächtig den Schrecken. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht. Sie vermissen an Goethe Kraft und meinen, Beethoven habe mehr: und darin irren sie!!” In: Fragmente Anfang 1880 bis Sommer 1882, Band 3 [link]
Nietzsche: “Bei unseren größten Männern muß man immer noch sagen: möchten sie etwas mehr Genie haben und etwas weniger Schauspieler sein!” In: Fragmente Anfang 1880 bis Sommer 1882, Band 3 [link]
Nietzsche: “Den Deutschen geht jeder Begriff davon ab, wie gemein sie sind, aber das ist der Superlativ der Gemeinheit, — sie schämen sich nicht einmal, bloss Deutsche zu sein… Sie reden über Alles mit, sie halten sich selbst für entscheidend, ich fürchte, sie haben selbst über mich entschieden… — Mein ganzes Leben ist der Beweis de rigueur für diese Sätze. Umsonst, dass ich in ihm nach einem Zeichen von Takt, von délicatesse gegen mich suche. Von Juden ja, noch nie von Deutschen.” In: Ecce Homo. Wie man wird, was man ist. [link]
(Horkheimer’s note 1:) Vgl. Vorwort zu Band 9 und 10 des Nachlasses in der Großoktavausgabe bei Kröner.
Nietzsche: “Das jetzige Deutschland ist eine vorslavische Station und bereitet dem panslavistischen Europa den Weg” XVI, 365. [link]
Nietzsche: “Die verfaulten herrschenden Stände haben das Bild des Herrschenden verdorben. Der »Staat«, als Gericht übend, ist eine Feigheit, weil der große Mensch fehlt, an dem gemessen werden kann. Zuletzt wird die Unsicherheit so groß, daß die Menschen vor jeder Willenskraft, die befiehlt, in den Staub fallen.” In: Der Wille zur Macht II. Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe. Aus dem Nachlaß 1884/88 (Alfred Kröner Verlag in Leipzig, 1922), §750 [link]
Nietzsche: “Sie wissen sich nicht anders vor ihrem schlechten Gewissen zu schützen als dadurch, dass sie sich als Ausführer älterer oder höherer Befehle gebärden (der Vorfahren, der Verfassung, des Rechts, der Gesetze oder gar Gottes) oder selbst von der Heerden-Denkweise her sich Heerden-Maximen borgen, zum Beispiel als “erste Diener ihres Volks” oder als “Werkzeuge des gemeinen Wohls.”” In: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft. (1886), §199 [link]
Horkheimer to K. v. Hirsch, 2/24/1936. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 60-61.
Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements” [1936]: “These hedonistic psychologists as a rule were portrayed as enemies of humanity, or praised on high by the latter. This happened most to Nietzsche. The superman, the most problematic concept with which the psychologist left the analytical realm Nietzsche had mastered, has been interpreted along the lines of the philistine bourgeois's wildest dreams, and has been confused with Nietzsche himself. The adventurous element seemed so appealing. Greatness, blood, and danger have always been cherished in paintings and monuments. But Nietzsche is the opposite of this inflated sense of power. His error lay in his lack of historical understanding of the present, which led him to bizarre hypotheses where clear theoretical knowledge was possible. He was blind to the historical dynamics of his time and hence to the way to his goal; therefore, even his most magnificent analysis, the genealogy of morals and of Christianity, for all of its subtlety, turns out to be too crude. But this prophet of Epicurean gods and of the pleasurableness of cruelty freed himself from the coercion to rationalize. When the will to cause suffering ceases to act “in the name” of God, “in the name” of justice, morality, honor, or the nation, it loses, by means of insight into itself, the terrible power it exercises so long as it conceals itself from its own carrier on the basis of ideological denial. It is taken up into the economy of real-life conduct for what it is and becomes rationally masterable. What turns it into a culturally destructive force is not the sublation of ideology and its basis, in other words the transition to a better society; rather, it is the unleashing of aggression which is presently reproduced and repressed for social reasons by the bourgeois authorities themselves, for example in war and national mobilization. Nietzsche himself cannot be thought of as an executioner, unlike many of his followers. His inoffensive existence stems from the deepest knowledge of psychic connections that may ever have existed in history. Nietzsche's precursors in the analysis of egoism and cruelty—Mandeville, Helvétius, de Sade—are as free, like himself, of Freud's condescending tolerance toward the destruction drive which “unfortunately” happens to exist, and of his resigned skepticism, as they are of the loving Rousseau's ressentiment.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 109.
Horkheimer to Karl Löwith, 6/19/1937. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 566-567.
Löwith, “Sammelbesprechung von: Nicolai Alexandrowitsch Berdjajew, Das Schicksal des Menschen in unserer Zeit, Luzern 1935; Karl Buchheim, Wahrheit und Geschichte, Leipzig 1935; Hans Heyse, Idee und Existenz, Hamburg 1935,” in: ZfS V, 1936, S. 104 ff.
Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man. Translated by Denver Lindley. (First Modern Library Edition, 1965 [Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1955 [Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil. (S. Fischer Verlag, 1954)]]), 79.
(Horkheimer’s fn. 1) Siegfried Marck, Der Neuhumanismus als politische Philosophie. Der Aufbruch. Zürich 1938. (211 S.; schw. Fr. 6.— ; geb. schw. Fr. 8.-)
Horkheimer is referring to I.G. Farben, “the most notorious German industrial concern during the Third Reich.”
“the Great Elector”: [Großen Kurfürsten]. Wilhelm I von Brandenburg, Duke of Prussia.
On the hermetic significance of the ‘Lord of Opposites,’ see: Kearful, Frank J. “THE ROLE OF HERMES IN THE ‘CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL.’” Modern Fiction Studies 17, no. 1 (1971): 91–108. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26278898.
On Nietzsche’s influence on Thomas Mann during the composition of the Zuaberberg, see: Wessell et al., “Magic and Reflections: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and His War Essays.” Chapter. In A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, edited by Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell, 129–46. Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture. Boydell & Brewer, 2004. ; Wurmser, “Der schöpferische Agon — Thomas Manns Dialog mit Nietzsche und sein verborgener Prozeß gegen ihn.” In: Das Rätsel des Masochismus. (Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer, 1993), 522-562. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-97372-7\_14
The term “trans-oppositional” (übergegensätzlich) is an inheritance from Emil Lask, which was taken up in the work of Heidegger and, later, Nishida. See John Krummel, “Lask, Heidegger, and Nishida: From Meaning as Object to Horizon and Place” (2020), [link].
Quotation from the Hunter (& co). English translation of Horkheimer, “Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology” [1935], Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 164-165.; Horkheimer’s own citation to the original print in the ZfS: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Jahrgang IV (1935), S. 14/5.
Quotation from the Hunter (& co). English translation of Horkheimer, “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism” [1938]. Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 293-294. Horkheimer’s own citation to the original print in the ZfS: a.a.O., Jahrgang VII (1938), S. 32/3.
Cf. Horkheimer, “On the Problem of Truth” [1935]: “The possibility must be considered of whether, in such a process of corroboration, the individuals and groups struggling for more rational conditions might succumb completely and human society develop retrogressively, a conceivable possibility which any view of history that has not degenerated into fatalism must formally take into account. This would refute the trust in the future which is not merely an external supplement to the theory but belongs to it as a force shaping its concepts. But the frivolous comments of well-meaning critics who use every premature claim, every incorrect analysis of a momentary situation by the adherents of the cause of freedom as evidence against their theory as a whole, indeed against theory in general, are nevertheless unjustified. The defeats of a great cause, which run counter to the hope for its early victory, are mainly due to mistakes which do not damage the theoretical content of the conception as a whole, however far-reaching the consequences they have. The direction and content of activity, along with its success, are more closely related to their theory for the historically progressive groups than is the case with the representatives of naked power. The talk of the latter is related to their rise only as a mechanical aid, and their speech merely supplements open and secret force with craft and treachery, even when the sound of the words resembles truth. But the knowledge of the falling fighter, insofar as it reflects the structure of the present epoch and the basic possibility of a better one, is not dishonored because humanity succumbs to bombs and poison gases. The concept of corroboration as the criterion of truth must not be interpreted so simply. The truth is a moment of correct practice. But whoever identifies it directly with success passes over history and makes himself an apologist for the reality dominant at any given time. Misunderstanding the irremovable difference between concept and reality, he reverts to idealism, spiritualism, and mysticism. (...) While it is the duty of everyone who acts responsibly to learn from setbacks in practice, these can nevertheless not destroy the confirmed basic structure of the theory, in terms of which they are to be understood only as setbacks. According to pragmatism, the corroboration of ideas and their truth merge. According to materialism, corroboration, the demonstration that ideas and objective reality correspond, is itself a historical occurrence that can be obstructed and interrupted. This viewpoint has no place for a basically closed and unknowable truth or for the existence of ideas not requiring any reality, but neither does it conceptually equate a conviction with untruth because a given constellation of the world cuts it off from corroboration and success. This also holds true for historical conflicts. The possibility of a more rational form of human association has been sufficiently demonstrated to be obvious. Its full demonstration requires universal success; this depends on historical developments. The fact that meanwhile misery continues and terror spreads—the terrible force which suppresses that general demonstration—has no probative force for the contrary.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 199-200.
Horkheimer to Pollock, 8/25/1937. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 114-115.
Horkheimer to Marie Jahoda, 8/10/1938. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 140-141. Translation modified.
Horkheimer to Sternheim, 10/7/1938. In: MHGS Bd. 16 (1995), 495–497. Author’s translation.
[MHGS, Bd. 16 Ed. Note:] “In his letter of September 26th, 1938, Sternheim wrote: “Still, you do not believe in war. By the time this letter reaches you, the fate of Europe will perhaps have been definitively decided. Until a short time ago, I too was of the opinion—which, of course, I found in your last work—that war might be avoided by the passive resistance of the great democratic powers. Yet, I do not know whether reasons for prestige [Prestigegründe] in Germany have not become so strong that war is nevertheless unavoidable, and that the other powers cannot therefore turn back. In any event, we live here in an almost unbearable state of tension [Spannung] and the only thing one can do is try to continue to work in peace.” (MHA: VI 41.175) The work of Horkheimer’s to which Sternheim refers is probably the essay “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism,” in which Horkheimer pointed out the concordance of authoritarian and democratic states with respect to economic-political interests (ZfS VII, 1938, S. 32f.; HGS 4, S. 272f.), an assessment Horkheimer takes up again shortly thereafter in ‘The Philosophy of Absolute Concentration’ (ZfS VII, 1938, S. 386; HGS 4, S. 306).” In: Ibid., 497. Author’s translation.
Cf. Horkheimer to Erich Fromm, 9/16/1938: “Because of the political situation I can only confirm what I've already expressed in the telegrams. The theoretical considerations that for the past five years have repeatedly led me to the conviction that a war in which France and Germany find themselves on opposite sides is highly unlikely also are valid for the coming years. Obviously, such statements can't be made with absolute certainty but only with a degree of probability, even if they're theoretically as well grounded as these are. On the other hand, however, well-grounded views do exist so that they can be clung to not only in relatively peaceful times but even in crises. I can only indicate my main reason for believing this. You know what it is. In this period the interests of the major European states diverge on many issues, no less than they did before. But on the basis of the entire situation common concerns are becoming apparent behind which differences retreat, at least for the time being. In this regard what I have in mind are not only social issues but also specific economic, particularly industrial, issues. The current English and French governments would have to prepare for the worst if they were to start a war, regardless of the outcome. They aren't there to start one but to prevent one—and indeed, not just out of pure love of peace. I believe you will agree with me completely if you think about the problems that will emerge for Mr. Chamberlain or Daladier when considering the questions that even a victorious war would pose for the Western powers. European matters would not be less complicated for them then. I naturally know that an ‘industrial accident” is always possible. For now I haven't for a minute believed in one.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 139.
Horkheimer to Hans Klaus Brill, 10/13/1938. In: Ibid., 501. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to H. Honegger, 9/5/1938. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 138.
Horkheimer to K. & E. Goldstein, 11/19/1938. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 141-142.
[A Life in Letters Ed. Fn. 38:] “The disintegration of paper because of acid content as a result of the manufacturing process also affected the papers in Horkheimer's estate. The copy paper he used during the time of his emigration as well as the printed copy of this letter show signs of a very advanced stage of the illness he diagnosed.” In: Ibid., 406.
Horkheimer to Adolph Lowe, 11/25/1938. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 514. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Juliette Favez, 12/6/1938. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 518-519. Author’s translation.
Interpolation from the translation by M. Robertson, in: R. Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School (1994), 259-260.
Horkheimer to Heinz Jacoby, 2/16/1939. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 557-558.
To date (3/24/25), the author has been unable to find Jacoby’s “Die Verachtung des Menschen” in the digitized Horkheimer archive. However, MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995) contains several letters and excerpts from Jacoby on the topic I hope to translate shortly.
Horkheimer to J. Favez, 6/13/1939. In: A Life in Letters (2007), 152-153.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3 of The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London: Bohn, 1839), chap. 28, 304-5.
Horkheimer to J. Favez, 9/11/1939. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 628–629. Author’s translation.
Cf. Horkheimer to Katharina von Hirsch, 9/12/1939: “My paper to the publication of which you have encouraged me seems to be outdated and even partly refuted. The improbability of a war is one of its theses. I would really not believe in that possibility until the last moment, and I can still hardly believe it is true now. However, apart from the fact that the improbable has become a reality I cannot and will not yet change any of the views I am holding in that paper. I am certainly aware of the dangers that lie in vain dogmatism, and I am decided to remain as open as I possibly can to the historic developments. On the other hand, I cannot fail to take into account that, more than ever before, outward appearances are contradictory to the real essence of things.” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 157-158.
Horkheimer to Paul Honigsheim, 9/12/1939. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 634. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Grossmann, 8/9/1939. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 626. Author’s translation.
As Horkheimer’s ‘Regius’ describes his “monadological” method in Dämmerung: “Monadology: A philosopher once compared the soul to a windowless house. Men relate to each other, talk to each other, deal with each other, persecute each other, yet they do not see each other. But because people have ideas about each other, the philosopher explained them by saying that God had placed an image of the others into the soul of each individual. During the course of life and in the absence of impressions coming from the outside, this image would develop into a full consciousness of man and the world. But this theory is questionable. It is not my impression that man's knowledge of others comes from God. Instead, I would say that those houses do have windows but that they let in only a small and distorted segment of events in the outside world. But this distorting effect is not so much a consequence of the peculiarities of the sense organs as of the worried or joyful, anxious or aggressive, slavish or superior, sated or yearning, dull or alert psychic attitudes which constitute that ground of our life against which all other experiences stand out, and which gives them their specific quality. Here are two images that might serve as symbols for the degree to which people communicate with each other in capitalist society: annoyed because it was interrupted while playing with its friends, the child pays a visit to its sick uncle; at the steering wheel of his new convertible, the Prince of Wales drives past an old woman. I know of only one kind of gust that can open the windows of the house wider: shared suffering.” English translation in: Dawn and Decline (1978), 17-18.
Horkheimer, In: “[Discussion about the task of Protestantism in secular civilization] (1931).” MHGS, Bd. 11 (1987), 364-366.
Adorno. In: Ibid., 366-368.
[the doctrine of the individual as a relation relating to itself absolutely]: “der Lehre von dem absolut sich zu sich selber verhaltenden Einzelnen.”
Eugen Diederichs (1867-1930), neo-conservative publisher whose firm, Eugen Diederichs Verlag, published far-right ideologues like Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn, and which helped to foster proto-Nazi neo-romantic völkisch ideals of Germandom (particularly the Volksgemeinschaft) in the decades before the National Socialists came to power by granting these views—which not infrequently involved attacks on democracy, Jews, and socialism—the aura of high-cultural criticism and intellectual virtue. [Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900-1920 (Hanover, NH: Published for Tufts University by University Press of New England, 1986), 238-253. [link] “[F]rom 1913 onwards, Diederichs edited and published the journal Die Tat, which became an important clearinghouse for right-wing intellectuals associated with the ‘Conservative Revolution.’” [Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era. (Brill, 2014), 82.] EDV and Die Tat would be converted into a part of the Nazi publishing empire and mass propaganda apparatus in the 1930s.
[BW, Bd. II Ed. note] Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972) was Dean of Theological Faculty at the University of Göttingen from 1933 to 1945 and a trusted friend [Vertrauensmann] of the National Socialist government, as well as spokesman [Wortführer] for the “Deutschen Christen.”
On Hirsch and Geismar’s simultaneous uniformity in theology and difference in attitude towards National Socialism, see JRC Wright: “Hirsch and Geismar, both Kierkegaard scholars, shared a commitment to Gewissensethik which drew them together in the 1920s and attracted the criticism of Karl Barth and dialectical theology. Geismar's political views, however, developed differently to Hirsch's: by the summer of 1934 he was in open opposition to the whole National Socialist philosophy and government and consequently also to Hirsch's apologia for it. This comparison is an effective warning against the assumption that particular theological traditions determine particular political attitudes. In the cases of both Hirsch and Geismar their political views were politically motivated; their theology did not prevent, but neither did it produce, in the one case appalling blindness, in the other good sense. Different national and ecclesiastical traditions and perhaps differences of personality and temperament (…) were more important in the formulation of political views than common theological principles.” In: “Theologische Gewissensethik Und Politische Wirklichkeit: Das Beispiel Eduard Geismars Und Emanuel Hirschs. By Jens Holger Schjørring. (Arbeiten Zur Kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Darstellungen Bd. 7), Pp. 354. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck; Ruprecht, 1979. DM. 58.” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, no. 4 (1979): 512–512.
For a summary of Geismar’s highly conservative Kierkegaard interpretation, Peter Kemp: “Geismar was very critical of Kierkegaard’s attack on the Church, on the institution of marriage, and even (as in his notes from 1854) on the State, as well as Kierkegaard’s general “morbidity” and “hatred of life,” but he adopted Kierkegaard’s idea of the Christian Gospel as simultaneously God’s severe judgment on human life and God’s proclamation of his grace for sinners. However, he added that this judgment did not prevent the believer from trying his utmost to do good. And he ended his huge work on Kierkegaard with a very emotional appeal to the reader and a prayer to God.” In: “The Struggle over Kierkegaard.” Special Supplement, Journal of Philosophical Research (2015), 410.
In Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic [1933], Adorno reads Geismar’s interpretation of Kierkegaard in light of Hirsch’s influence, specifically on Geismar’s qualified defense of Kierkegaard’s dialectical “intellectualism” against Haecker’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s “subjectivism.” If, for Geismar and Hirsch, the power of Kierkegaard’s “intellectualism” is the near-solipsistic isolation of dialectical thinking to the individual self, since only this allows Kierkegaard “to isolate Christ's revelation from that of any other religiosity,” Adorno reverses the argument: it is precisely the strict immanence of Kierkegaard’s dialectic (“conceived as the movement of individual human consciousness through contradictions”) that historical reality breaks through into “the internally contradictory temporal course of the monologue” with violence:
“This is the proper place for the question that Theodor Haecker poses in his important treatise on Kierkegaard's concept of truth. He reproaches Kierkegaard for a subjective dynamic that, beyond its own tension, assumes no autonomous being given to man. Kierkegaard's “terrible error” is “that the starting point and ultimately everything is 'how.' For the individual commences with the 'what,' in a still weak, and just as distant 'how' the enduring, the dogmatic 'what' of faith, the supernatural seed, the content, that can only be just that, which alone corresponds to the supernatural faith of the person and which no human passion, however intense, can gain by coercion.” Kierkegaard is—Haecker continues—a “philosopher of becoming ... a spiritualist, that is, one who according to expectation and nature would be a philosopher of being.” However pointedly this takes issue with the basic organization of the philosophy, it does not do justice to the historical depth of its foundation. Kierkegaard did not, in neo-Kantian fashion, reconceive being as pure becoming. Being is supposed to inhere in becoming as its content, one that is of course concealed from the individual. Concealed being, enciphered “meaning,” produces dialectical movement, not blind subjective coercion. This raises Kierkegaard above romantic efforts of reconstruction that claim to be able to recreate ontology whole, phenomenologically. He prefers to let consciousness circle about in the self's own dark labyrinth and communicating passageways, without beginning or aim, hopelessly expecting hope to flair up at the end of the most distant tunnel as the distant light of escape, rather than deluding himself with the fata morgana of static ontology in which the promises of an autonomous ratio are left unfulfilled. This explains the preponderance of becoming over being in spite of the ontological question of origin. —The qualitative multiplicity of the being of ideas is transposed into the unity of immanent becoming. Croce's thesis that Hegel “only recognized contradictions and denied validity to differences” also holds good for Kierkegaard. The objectless dialectic subsumes all qualitative determinations under the formal category of “negation.” According to Kierkegaard's philosophy, dialectic is to be conceived as the movement of individual human consciousness through contradictions. Its “intellectualized,” essentially rational structure does not in truth conflict with its content. Geismar, drawing on Hirsch, has shown that Kierkegaard's “intellectualism” in the dialectical centerpiece, the doctrine of Christian paradox, is of a part “with the energy with which Kierkegaard wants to isolate Christ's revelation from that of any other religiosity.” The same evidence can be used to philosophically deduce the “intellectualism” from the condition of objectless inwardness, to which the theology of sacrifice itself belongs. Where the intuition of things is repudiated as temptation, thought holds the field and its monologue articulates itself exclusively through contradictions that thought itself produces. Reality finds expression only in the internally contradictory temporal course of the monologue, that is, as history. Kierkegaard conceives the choice of choice itself as historical, and its historicity is to guard against mysticism: “For man's eternal dignity consists in the fact that he can have a history, the divine element in him consists in the fact that he himself, if he will, can impart to this history continuity.” —The doctrine of a “real dialectic,” which contemporary Protestantism reads out of Kierkegaard and opposes to the idealist dialectic, remains unconvincing. Kierkegaard did not "overcome" Hegel's system of identity; Hegel is inverted, interiorized, and Kierkegaard comes closest to reality where he holds to Hegel's historical dialectic. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself conceives the dialectic exclusively according to the schema of internality. But in this schema he is continually confronted by history as it in truth is.”
In: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1933]), 31-32.
On the “Corsair” affair, see J. Lippitt and C. Stephen Evans:
“[I]n 1845–6 Kierkegaard became embroiled in a controversy with The Corsair, a satirical literary magazine that included cartoons mocking many of Denmark’s most prominent public figures. Initially Kierkegaard was spared this treatment, and indeed was on friendly terms with Meir Goldschmidt, a Jewish intellectual who was the magazine’s editor. However, after Kierkegaard (in the persona of one of his pseudonyms) goaded the magazine by attacking P. L. Møller, an aspiring scholar who wrote for The Corsair, Kierkegaard became the object of a series of nasty attacks, which included mocking his personal appearance. This might seem inconsequential, but all the main figures involved had their lives dramatically changed. Søren, whose chief recreational occupation had been daily walks around Copenhagen, in which he conversed with many people, taking what he called “people baths”, became reclusive, unable to endure the curious and sometimes jeering groups of people who stared at him. As a result, he gave up the idea of becoming a pastor, feeling a call to “remain at his post” as an author. Following the “Corsair affair”, Kierkegaard—who had intended the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to bring his authorship to an end—embarked upon a second, highly productive period of writing, the fruits of which include Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), Works of Love (1847), Christian Discourses (1848), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), Practice in Christianity (1850) and several more discourses.”
In: "Søren Kierkegaard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/kierkegaard/>.
What Lippitt and Evans leave out is the political context of the controversy—as M.G. Piety (2019) explains, The Corsair was a scrappy and short-lived left-wing political paper which advocated for the creation of a free republic, in contrast with even the most ‘liberal’ rival papers which were still united in a demand for constitutional monarchy. This, Piety convincingly argues, is the most likely reason that Kierkegaard describes the Corsair as “dangerous” in a reflection written long after the ‘Affair’ had ended. In other words, the Corsair, helmed by a Jewish intellectual and circulating critiques of the government and opposition parties with singular independence compared to its rival publications, was dangerous to Danish society. Bizarrely, after a digression about the traumatic effects of ‘adult bullying,’ Piety ends the piece by insisting that Kierkegaard still comes off the more sympathetic party in the controversy, even though, as the rest of the article explained, (1) Goldschmidt was forced to sell Corsair in 1946 and (2) even though the paper continued to run occasional attacks on him, Kierkegaard considered the post-Goldschmidt Corsair harmless. [ Link: https://pietyonkierkegaard.com/2019/11/25/more-on-the-corsair-affair/ ]
What not even Piety mentions, however, is that the true reason Goldschmidt was forced to sell Corsair in 1846 was due to the combined pressure of hefty fines and constant government censorship following his imprisonment in 1843 for publishing (or perhaps even authoring) republican-socialist criticism of the crown:
“This journal was a brilliant but reckless paper, representing extreme republicanism or socialism, and taking a strong stand against the crown, which had failed to grant the expected liberties. For this the government promptly condemned Goldschmidt to imprisonment on bread and water for twenty-four days, and to the permanent censorship of his paper.”
In: “GOLDSCHMIDT, MEÏR AARON:,” entry in the republished 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia by Isidore Singer and C. H. Bjerregaard. [link]
Eric Przywara (1889-1972), Jesuit theologian of German-Polish origin and champion of a Christian Volk theology in the 1920s into the 30s against the threats of Judaism, Bolshevism, Americanization, capitalism, and the enlightenment. Przywara both preached against the Nazis as a distortion of the Christian imperium of the past and sought to collaborate with them on state-sponsored Catholic integralism. This has led to controversy in recent scholarship, which began with Paul Silas Peterson’s “Erich Przywara on Sieg-Katholizismus, bolshevism, the Jews, Volk, Reich and the analogia entis in the 1920s and 1930s,” (2012):
Abstract. While Erich Przywara’s philosophical theology, or theological philosophy, and especially his Analogia Entis (1932) has been the subject of some research, less is known about the broader cultural and political framework of his thought in the 1920s in the Weimar Republic and in the 1930s during the NS period. Here Przywara is presented in context of his unique religious, political and social milieu (for example, the turn from “cultural inferiority” to culture Catholicism). His writings on social, religious and political issues (for example, bolshevism), including his account of the analogia entis concept, are brought into relationship with his context and some of his contemporaries. Przywara’s reflections on the Reich are analyzed and his engagement with the popular Volk concept is also addressed in connection with his anti-Semitism.
In: “Erich Przywara on Sieg-Katholizismus, bolshevism, the Jews, Volk, Reich and the analogia entis in the 1920s and 1930s,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte (Journal for the History of Modern Theology) 19(1) (March 2012). [link]
For the connection between Przywara’s Christian Volk theology and his anti-Semitism (“so muß jedes Volk dieses Judentum auf die Dauer als so etwas wie anmaßenden Störer seines Volkstums empfinden” [1920]) and the conformity of his views of the pernicious influence of ‘bolshevism,’ which he associated with the spiritual corruptions of ‘Americanism’ and the Eastern Orthodox Church and argued was the result of a radicalization of failed ‘western’ ideas (of the Aufklärung) on ‘eastern’ soil where they didn’t belong [1931], see: Ibid., 132; 118.
Peterson’s article was attacked by John Betz, professor of systematic theology at Notre Dame; Betz accused Peterson of attempting to maliciously discredit Przywara in a translator’s introduction to a new English edition of Analogia Entis (Eerdmans, 2014), which Betz would maintain with little variation as recently as 2021:
Until recently little attention has been paid to Erich Przywara’s engagement with National Socialism, and understandably so. Subject both to the terms of the Reichskonkordat of 1933 and the censors of the National Socialist regime, Przywara’s own voice and opinions about the regime were effectively stifled, if not completely silenced. In recent years, however, one American scholar, Paul Peterson, has taken Przywara’s muted voice and lack of overt resistance to the regime as a sign of “collaboration” with it. What is more, Peterson has accused Przywara, along with Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, not only of fascist sympathies, but also of anti-Semitism. It is shown here, however, not only that Peterson’s conclusions with regard to Przywara are mistaken, but that they seriously misrepresent Przywara’s thought and unjustly impugn his character. The first point of this article, accordingly, is to defend Przywara against Peterson’s charges, specifically, that of his supposed fascist sympathy with the National-Socialist regime, just as I defended Przywara in an earlier article against the charge of anti-Semitism. The positive point of this article (and the preceding), however, which Peterson’s scholarship has fortunately occasioned, is to clarify Przywara’s actual cultural and political views, and thereby contribute to a more adequate understanding of his role in twentieth-century theology—not just as a respected Catholic metaphysician and philosopher of religion, but as a pioneer of Catholic dialogue with the modern world.
In: J.R. Betz (2021), A Study of Erich Przywara’s Engagement with National Socialism: A Critical Response to “Historical Criticism”. Modern Theology, 37: 567-594. https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12642]
In “Once again, Erich Przywara and the Jews: A response to John Betz with a brief look into the Nazi correspondences on Przywara and Stimmen der Zeit” (2014), Peterson anticipates and directly addresses Betz’s (2021) ‘contextual’ defense of Przywara’s anti-Semitic remarks seven years earlier:
Abstract. In this article, I respond to John Betz (University of Notre Dame, USA) who has recently rejected claims that I have made about Erich Przywara’s antiSemitism and his relationship to Nazi era ideology. Although I admire much of Przywara’s theology and have great sympathy for the teaching about the analogy of being, in this article I address some of the problems of Przywara’s work. I address literature from Przywara on the Jews where he talks about the essence of “the Jew” as “restless” and “revolutionary,” and where he brings up the “wandering Jew” theme or claims Judaism is an “insolent disturber” of the (German) “folkdom.” Przywara’s rejection of “Jewish messianism” and his claims about the “basic tension of the Jew” are also addressed. I analyze his conception of the essence of “the Jew” as, among other things, a “rising will of destruction” and his claim that “Christianity” ultimately becomes the “enemy” of Judaism. Beyond these things, Przywara’s desire to “overcome” Judaism with the right “weapons” is addressed. I also draw attention to his rejection of “Jewish capitalism” and his justification of “the hatred towards the Jews in world history.” In addition to this, his use of ideologically charged Nazi terminology, such as “host-peoples,” and his support of Catholic integralism in Nazi Germany are addressed. Furthermore, Przywara’s remarks (to a leading Nazi representative and ideologue, Hanns Johst) on “the positive sense” of the German “movements” (i. e. National Socialism) in the 1930s are presented. I also show that Przywara”s work was praised by a leading representative and ideologue of National Socialism (Otto Dietrich). With this, I address the internal Nazi correspondences on the very influential German Catholic Jesuit journal titled Stimmen der Zeit.
In: “Once again, Erich Przywara and the Jews: A response to John Betz with a brief look into the Nazi correspondences on Przywara and Stimmen der Zeit” Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 21, no. 1-2 (2014): 148-163. [link]
Responding to “Once again,” in “Erich Przywara and “Catholic Fascism”: A Reply to Paul Silas Peterson” (2016), Aaron Pidel, a Jesuit theologian at Notre Dame, objects to Peterson’s “‘Catholic fascism’ hermeneutic” on the grounds of Peterson’s use of “selective associative evidence”:
Przywara’s political theology neither reveals an enthusiasm for NS-ideology nor constitutes a sycophantic bid to ingratiate the Catholic Church to Hitler’s government. Admittedly, Przywara does sometimes employ anti-Judaic tropes. However, if it belongs to antisemitism to consider Jews racially inferior, suspect them of nefarious plots, or deny them full cultural access, then Peterson is wrong in ascribing that prejudice to Przywara. The reasons for Peterson’s wrongheaded conclusions, I believe, are principally two: first, he depends on rather selective associative evidence; second, he reads Przywara’s against an internally undifferentiated construct called “Catholic fascism” rather than against the backdrop of either Przywara’s own metaphysical writings or those of Przywara’s Jewish contemporaries. I would like to reply by supplying for these deficiencies in three ways: first, by addressing the “affinity thesis” of Catholic complicity in NS and the associative evidence with which Peterson insinuates Przywara’s NS-affinities; second, by supplying the religious and philosophical background necessary to understand Przywara’s Reichstheologie as an attempt to chasten the Third Reich; thirdly, by showing how Przywara’s identification of the so-called Judenfrage as a religious problem tends, in its historical context, to quell rather than enflame antisemitic passion. Przywara’s thought, in short, deserves to be understood on its own terms rather than as typical representative of “Catholic fascism.”
In: “Erich Przywara and “Catholic Fascism”: A Reply to Paul Silas Peterson” (2016) [Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte, 23(1): (2016), 29.
Not to let the apologetics have the last word, Peterson triples down in “A third time, Erich Przywara, the Jews and Stimmen der Zeit: With a response to Aaron Pidel and a brief look into Przywara’s late letters to Carl Schmitt” (2017):
As has been demonstrated in previous publications, and as will be addressed below, in the 1920s and 1930s Przywara presented the essence of the Jews as “restless” and “revolutionary.” After World World I, he saw Jews and Judaism as the deep and dark force behind capitalism and communism, which he condemned, along with Zionism. The Jews, as he suggested, only cared about “wealth and glamour”. He clearly propagated an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The background of this theory will be addressed below. He also advanced a fundamental rejection of Judaism. Przywara claimed that “Judaism, in its final secret instincts, feels itself to be as the constantly chaos-creating and out of the chaos new-creating Creator-God in the world.” In his view, the Jews wanted to take the place of Christ and become God. He employed the “wandering Jew” concept in his writings while rejecting “Jewish messianism” in his Analogia Entis (1932). He propagated an essentialist concept of Jews, or, as he sometimes called it, the “basic tension of the Jew”. For Przywara, “the Jew” stood for a “rising will of destruction.” In his theology and social and cultural analysis, “Christianity” becomes the “enemy” of Judaism. For this reason, he provided a way of dealing with this problem (as he saw it) of the existence of the Jews in a Christian country. He wanted to “overcome” Judaism with the right “weapons.” Przywara not only abhorred “Jewish capitalism”, he saw “the hatred towards the Jews in world history” as essentially justified because of the Jews’ failure to convert. While Siegfried Marck claimed in 1929 that Przywara was promoting authoritarian themes in his philosophy of religion, Przywara himself condemned Hermann Cohen’s internationalism and his understanding of universal humanity. He saw the idea of a universal humanitarianism as a threat to Christianity. In this sense, he rejected the idea that all human beings, Jews and non-Jews, were equal. Przywara thereby opened the door to the exclusion and marginalization of the Jews, even if he did not call for violent persecution. He argued that Judaism was an “insolent disturber” of the German Volktum. At the same time, he created an ontological system that reflected his ideas of a hierarchical social and political order in philosophical terms. He also used the analogia entis theory in arguments for völkisch categories, and encouraged völkisch understandings of Christian identity. Like many others, he promoted Juan Donoso Cortés’s political theory (one of the forerunner’s of National Socialist ideology), advanced an integral Catholicism in National Socialist Germany, and developed positive relationships to some forms of National Socialist religiosity (like Dietrich Eckart’s). Przywara himself mentions the fact that his Analogia Entis emerged in critical conversation with Johann Plenge, the self-proclaimed intellectual father of National Socialism. Przywara actually praised the idea of a dictator in 1936. He also advanced a Christian anthropology based on the foundational principle of command and obedience. While promoting an anti-communist political theory based upon religion, Przywara also developed a political theology which called for Catholics to die for the fatherland. In 1933, he was somewhat optimistic about the rise of the new political order in Germany. He tried to help the Reich learn some lessons from the Middle Ages and rediscover the true German religion of Catholicism. He liked to cite lines from Gertrud von Le Fort, like “Feindlos werd’ ich am Sieg” (I will be without enemies at the victory) or “Du Volk des Sieges” (you Volk of victory), and he developed his own his ideas like “Sieg-Katholizismus” (victory-Catholicism). He legitimized the political transition to a dictatorship in theological terms and promoted Carl Schmitt’s ideas. Przywara even encouraged his followers to think about the atoning blood of war. In the Third Reich, Przywara seems to have thought that there was “the positive sense” of the German “movements.” Some of these issues will be addressed below. Some of the racist theories and anti-Semitic ideas in the major Jesuit journal in Germany, Stimmen der Zeit, will also be addressed. These issues, along with the others that have been addressed in my previous publications, show how this important journal, and thus the German Jesuits themselves, made room for Catholic fascism at the outset of the Third Reich. Of course, it was not a leading organ of National Socialism. Nevertheless, it established a mediatory position between traditional Catholicism and fascist ideology after World War I.
In: “A third time, Erich Przywara, the Jews and Stimmen der Zeit: With a response to Aaron Pidel and a brief look into Przywara’s late letters to Carl Schmitt,” in Journal for the History of Modern Theology / Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 24/2 (2017), 203-206. [link]
In Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989 [1933]), Adorno criticizes Przywara’s ‘psychological’ reading of Kierkegaard in two passages.
In the first, Adorno criticizes Przywara's methodological supposition of a conflict between psychology and theology, or between the sickly Kierkegaard seeking to cure his weakness and the humble Kierkegaard seeking strength for the impossible in God, which all-too-conveniently exempts the rigorous doctrines of the theologian from the analytic thoroughness of the psychologist:
“Kierkegaard's category of the aesthetic encompasses disparate usages. However, it can no more be added up out of them than won from their abstract contradictoriness. Nor does Przywara's supposition of a disparate psychology suffice: “The Kierkegaard of contemporary philosophy of existence” is “a foreground that may be passed through into the Kierkegaard of Either/Or between psychoanalysis and rigorous religion.” This would amount to a shadow play of competing concepts in the gigantic mass of which the definite colors and form of the objects would disappear. The pompous conflicts of the universal never attain the real issue. It is to be reached only in the concrete cells of the dialectic, just as Kierkegaard's work itself develops them. The obscurity of the category of the aesthetic cannot be dissolved by a more inclusive method, but only through the critical inspection of individual phenomena.” [In: Ibid., 15-16.]
In the second, Adorno argues that Przywara's methodological supposition of a psychological pathology—specifically, of “sexual inversion”—in Kierkegaard’s authorship, and through which Przywara hoped to save Kierkegaard the theologian and man of faith from Kierkegaard the psychologist and invert, is not only a weak and artificial heuristic but, in fact, obscures the true nature of Kierkegaard’s ‘inwardness’ and ‘affect’ that the psychologistic reduction was supposed to solve:
“The contradictory elements in Kierkegaard's formulation of meaning, subject, and object are not simply disparate. They are interwoven with one another. Their figure is called inwardness. In The Sickness unto Death, inwardness is deduced as the substantiality of the subject directly from its disproportionateness to the outer world: “Well, there is no 'corresponding' external mark, for in fact an outward expression corresponding to close reserve is a contradiction in terms; for if it is corresponding, it is then of course revealing. On the contrary,” here—in the moment of despair—“outwardness is the entirely indifferent factor in this case where introversion, or what one might call inwardness with a jammed lock, is so much the predominant factor.” Where Fichte's idealism springs and develops out of the center of subjective spontaneity, in Kierkegaard the “I” is thrown back onto itself by the superior power of otherness. He is not a philosopher of identity; nor does he recognize any positive being that transcends consciousness. The world of things is for him neither part of the subject nor independent of it. Rather, this world is omitted. It supplies the subject with the mere “occasion” for the deed, with mere resistance to the act of faith. In itself, this world remains random and totally indeterminate. Participation in “meaning” is not one of its potentials. In Kierkegaard there is so little of a subject/object in the Hegelian sense as there are given objects; there is only an isolated subjectivity, surrounded by a dark otherness. Indeed, only by crossing over this abyss would subjectivity be able to participate in “meaning” that otherwise denies itself to subjectivity's solitude. In the effort to achieve a transcendental ontology, inwardness takes up the “struggle with itself,” on which Kierkegaard the “psychologist” reports. Yet no psychology is required to explain this struggle; not even the supposition—in which Schremf, Przywara, and Vetter agree—of sexual inversion, whether characterizing the work or the person. Mourning can be shown, pragmatically, to be Kierkegaard's central affect in the foundational nexus of his philosophy. Whereas the psychological factors under which Kierkegaard's philosophy developed are scarcely to be denied, his character expresses a historical constellation. From a historico-philosophical perspective, Kierkegaard, the psychologically solitary, is least solitary. He himself vouches for a situation of which he never tires of asseverating that he has lost reality. Even the extreme of solipsism falls within the boundaries of his philosophical landscape: “This that inheres in the individual is the only reality that does not become a mere possibility through being known, and which can be known only through being thought; for it is the individual's own reality.” In the image of the concrete individual, subjectivity rescues only the rubble of the existent. Subjectivity, in the form of objectless inwardness, mourns in its painful affects for the world of things as for “meaning.”” [In: Ibid., 29-30.]
Adorno is referring to Emanuel Hirsch’s Kierkegaard-Studien. 3 Bücher in 2 Bänden: Erster Band: 1. Zur inneren Geschichte 1835-1841; 2. Der Dichter; Zweiter Band: 3. Der Denker. (Gütersloh; C. Bertelsmann, 1933).
See: Marcia Morgan, “Adorno’s Reception of Kierkegaard: 1929-1933,” in: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, No. 46 (September 2003) [link]; Heiko Schulz:
“Hirsch’s interpretation consistently ignored not only the late writings of Kierkegaard but also forged a most fatal bond to National Socialism, in which the risk character [‘Wagnis-Charakter’] of the relation to God in the leap to political decision was recoined for the fascist ideology, completely ignoring the despicable human implications.” (qtd. in: Ibid., 9.)
Adorno is referring to Theodor Haecker’s (1879-1945) influential translation of Kierkegaard's journals: Søren Kierkegaard, Die Tagebücher, Bd. I-II, selected and translated by Theodor Haecker, (Innsbruck, 1923).
In Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989 [1933]), Adorno will criticize Haecker’s influential interpretation of Kierkegaard on the grounds that:
(1) Haecker renders Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship harmless against “the apostilic claim”—or claim to be an apostle, not just a poet—that Kierkegaard’s geniality was meant to conjure away by, in fact, reducing Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous production to mere play of ‘various [poetic] geniuses’ [In: Ibid., 5, 11];
(2) Haecker rightly separates Kierkegaard’s psychology from traditional psychology but mistakenly equates it with contemporary phenomenology, which seeks to constitute ontology directly on the basis of an autonomous ratio, whereas “Kierkegaard's psychology (…) is aware that ontology is blocked by the ratio” [In: Ibid., 26];
(3) Haecker’s accusation that Kierkegaard’s concept of truth depends on a mere subjective dynamic of the dialectic falls short of the radical insight contained within Kierkegaard’s ‘intellectualism,’ as Geismer calls it following Hirsch, or, in Adorno’s terms, immanent dialectic [31-32, see above];
(4) finally, Adorno criticizes Haecker for a similar oversight with respect to Kierkegaard’s concept of God, for failing to see the power of what Haecker criticizes as Kierkegaard’s “gnosticism” or “spiritualism” of the bound incognito-God and the gnosis of the Christian who approaches, since, Adorno argues, Kierkegaard’s gnostic transcendence collapses back into a mythical immanence of the natural world. The dynamic begins when (a) God, understood in the gnostic image of God’s self-imprisonment in his own incognito, provokes a compensatory gesture in which the unrecognizability of God is, in its vacuity, made identical with suffering from “unrecognizableness in a purely human way,” and thus the gnostic moment yields to the mythical moment (b) in which God himself is subject to abstract fate, or to “disappear[] into that nature that is in truth precisely man’s spirituality” [In: Ibid., 113]. Kierkegaard’s radicalism lies in the fact that “through spiritualism—mythical thought gains power over Christian thought and, in spite of all talk of grace, draws Christianity into the graceless immanence of the course of nature.” [In: Ibid., 112]
Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1938). Translated as: Philosophy of Existence, by R. F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971).
Jaspers opens these lectures by referring to Kierkegaard’s irreducible Existenz in the exact language Horkheimer will condemn in Jaspers’ presentation of Nietzsche:
“What is called philosophy of existence is really only a form of the one, primordial philosophy. It is no accident, however, that for the moment the word “existence” became the distinguishing term. It emphasized the task of philosophy that for a time had been almost forgotten: to catch sight of reality at its origin and to grasp it through the way in which I, in thought, deal with myself—in inner action. From mere knowledge of something, from ways of speaking, from conventions and role-playing—from all kinds of foreground phenomena—philosophizing wanted to find its way back to reality. Existenz is one of the words for reality, with the accent Kierkegaard gave it: everything essentially real is for me only by virtue of the fact that I am I myself. We do not merely exist; rather, our existence is entrusted to us as the arena and the body for the realization of our origin.” In: Ibid., 3-4.
On Adorno’s ‘micrological’ method, from the “Selbstanzeige” to “Versuch über Wagner” [1952]: “The method of my book is micrological. There is no fundamental principle, no comprehensive analysis of the works, no summarizing or conclusions, but the book proceeds immediately to the observation of individual elements and is committed to the close interpretation of details and minute characteristics, which is directed towards an understanding of the whole... I hoped to push from the innermost elements of the aesthetic structure outwards towards broad philosophical and social connections, which otherwise would remain cultural chatter without substance.”
In: Baragwanath, Nicholas. “Musicology and Critical Theory: The Case of Wagner, Adorno, and Horkheimer.” Music & Letters 87, no. 1 (2006): (qtd.) 54. (Translation adapted from Barone's commentary to Adorno, ‘On the Score of Parsifal,’ 389)