Revised Collection—Schemata for the 'Dialectic' (1939-1944)

I. Domination of Nature & Social Domination & II. Spirit & Enlightenment (April, 1942); + Appendices with Preliminaries for and Companion texts to the 'Dialectic' (ca. 1939-1944)

André Masson. Meditation on an Oak Leaf. 1942

Table of Contents.

Translator’s Introduction.

§1. Authorship of the Schemata.

§2. Dialectical Constructions and Aporetic Conclusions.

Schema I. On The Relation Between The Domination of Nature and Social Domination.

Schema II. On Spirit and Enlightenment.

Appendix I. Key Words for “Mythos und Aufklärung.”

Appendix II. Sketches for “Mythos und Aufklärung.”

§1. On Mimesis.

§2. On the Question of the Boundaries of Demythologization.

§3. [Re: Capital and Proletariat]

§4. On Praxis.

§5. Hope in the Time of Fascism.

Appendix III. Horkheimer’s Stray Notes (ca. 1940-1944).

On the possibility of general statements and the thing-in-itself. (1940?)

Excerpts From: Handwritten Notes (ca. 1940-1944)

Idleness as characteristic of pre- and post-bourgeois eras (1942?)

False Conclusions (1940s?)

On the Genealogy of Myth (1941?)

The Self-contradiction of Logical Empiricism (1940?)

Parallelism between Paul Tillich’s Standpoint and Logical Empiricism (ca. 1940-1944)

Appendix IV. Löwenthal’s Memo on Tillich’s ‘Marxism and Christian Socialism’ (2/2/1942)

Appendix V. Ten Konzepte from the Encore (1944).

• Translator’s note: Reconstructing the Formation of the Encore.

Poetry and Morals.

No Path to Truth.

Jewish Character.

The Impossibility of Poetry.

The Enemy.

Consciousness.

Struggle and Non-Violence.

An Old-Fashioned Problem.

Physiognomy.

On The Psychology of Religion.

Appendix VI. On the Sociology of Art (1943/1946). Horkheimer (co-authors: Adorno and Löwenthal)

• Remarks on the Sociology of Biography and Mass Culture (1942). Löwenthal and Horkheimer.

Postscript: Horkheimer’s Letters on Dialectical Anthropology and Psychology (1939-1943).

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Translator’s Introduction.

While researching for the CTWG’s session on the Dialectic of Enlightenment last spring/summer, I stumbled across two typed manuscripts in the digitized part of the Horkheimer Nachlass (hereafter: MHA, for Max-Horkheimer-Archiv), which, to my knowledge, have not yet been published in German let alone translated into English: “Über das Verhältnis von Naturbeherrschung und gesellschaftlicher Herrschaft [Entwurf]” (3-page typed manuscript)—here, “Schema I. On The Relation Between The Domination of Nature and Social Domination”—and “Über Mythologie und Aufklärung” (13-page typed manuscript with handwritten corrections)—here, “Schema II. On Spirit and Enlightenment.”¹ I have provided links (see footnote 1) to the specific locations of the scans of the original manuscripts in the MHA, and have included my own translation drafts below. I want to thank J.E. Morain and other members of the CTWG for their feedback on some of the earliest drafts of these translations. Even after returning to these for a year, I can’t say I’m satisfied—particularly with Schema II.—so please let me know if you’d like to work on the texts together or if you end up translating them yourself! My hope in publishing them here is that these translations of the schemata will not be the last.

—James/Crane (4/17/2025)

[Revised 4/18—Added: Appendix I. Key Words for “Mythos und Aufklärung.”; Appendix II. Sketches for “Mythos und Aufklärung.”]

[Revised 4/19—Added: §5. Hope in the Time of Fascism., to Appendix II.]

[Revised 4/20-21—Added: Appendix III. Horkheimer’s Stray Notes (ca. 1940-1944); Appendix IV. Löwenthal’s Memo on Tillich’s ‘Marxism and Christian Socialism’ (2/2/1942); Appendix V. Ten Konzepte from the Encore (1944).]

[Revised 4/21—Added: Appendix VI. On the Sociology of Art (1943/1946). Horkheimer (co-authors: Adorno and Löwenthal)]

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§1. Authorship of the Schemata.

Though both are tentatively attributed to Adorno by the archivist(s) of the MHA, there are two significant problems with this inference. The first is that the sole reference I have been able to find to these manuscripts in any of the collected works and correspondence of either Horkheimer or Adorno is in the English translation of Adorno’s Letters to his Parents (2006). Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, co-editors of a number of posthumous publications through the Adorno-Archiv in Frankfurt (including the four-volumes of Adorno’s Briefwechsel with Horkheimer), identify both the three-page manuscript and the thirteen-page manuscript with the “schemata” for the ‘dialectics’-book in a footnote to one of two letters from late April, 1942, where Adorno claims that he and Horkheimer are intensively collaborating on the composition of the schemata: “Max and I are well into the schemata for our book…”; “Max and I are engrossed in drawing up the schemata for our new study.”² The second is that the same constellation of (a) ‘key words’—such as the problematic relation of ‘myth,’ ‘enlightenment,’ and ‘retribution’—and (b) references—such as the reference to “the discursive character of myth” in a specific passage in Bachofen’s Mutterrecht und Urreligion³—that the archivists elsewhere attribute to Horkheimer alone, as part of his notes for ‘Mythos und Aufklärung’ (the original title of the first chapter of DoE),⁴ are the constituent elements (down to the word, even to the page number of the references to Bachofen and Hegel) from which Schema II. is composed. (See Appendix I., below.)

§2. Dialectical Constructions and Aporetic Conclusions.

At least one of the ‘schemata’ lives up to its purpose as a point of departure for further dialectical construction: Horkheimer seems to use Schema I. for his outlines and drafts for the 1944 Columbia lecture series he would deliver under the title of “Society and Reason” [hereafter: S&R], which would, after extensive collective editing, be published as the popular ‘prolegomena’ (Adorno called it) to the Dialectic of Enlightenment as Eclipse of Reason (1947). In the draft manuscript for the second lecture of the S&R series, we find the following construction, in which the ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ of Schema I. are retained, but in reverse order of presentation.

Thesis: Organization of men and all hierarchical and therefore repressive social forms are immediately necessitated by the struggle of man against his natural environment. They are inevitable, stem from the very earliest cases, and consequently can be overcome only by a gradual process of necessary steps which may finally terminate in a truly rational order.

Antithesis: Repressive hierarchical relationships between men are prior to the domination of nature and the latter in its radical form is merely a consequence of [the former] or, as the psychologists would call it, a “projection” of intra-human features upon extra-human reality.⁵

Just as with the moment of ‘synthesis’ in Schema I., the only ‘synthesis’ in this draft of S&R lecture II is aporetic: “The domination of nature in human society is implemented as class rule. It is impossible to say which comes first. Self-preservation rebounds on the self.”⁶ Consistent with Horkheimer and Adorno’s repudiation of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis myth about the Hegelian dialectic as early as the late 1920s (Horkheimer makes a point to dispute this in a number of his lectures at the time), they still use something like the thesis-antithesis-synthesis construction in a handful of sketches through the early 1940s. The reason seems to be that the artificiality of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis construction is precisely what enables them to consciously ward off the temptation of synthetic conclusions, or the temptation to prematurely bring the dialectical movement of thought to an unearned ‘point of repose’ (see Adorno’s joint review of Jean Wahl and Walter Lowrie’s Kierkegaard books [1939]). As Horkheimer presents the aporetic gesture in a letter to Felix Weil (who had reached out with condolences on the occasion of the death of Horkheimer’s mother), dated 3/22/1946:

The conscious level in the existence of a human being is […] not the only one according to which our feelings for the individual are determined. Indeed, it's often not even the noblest. Our feelings are more likely to depend on behavior, on spontaneous reactions, on intellectual gestures that are only extremely difficult to represent conceptually.

While morality and will, in short, conscious traits, mark our relationship to the father, those more deeply embedded structures play the decisive role in our relationship to the mother. An additional factor, of course, is that in the final analysis we owe her the life that we so love. She embodies the giving, protective, domestic principle versus forbidding and demanding rivalry. Nowhere is this expressed more authoritatively than in Sophocles’ Antigone. An indescribably awful production of it is now playing in New York. In Sophocles, of course, the maternal principle does not appear in the living mother but in the sister. Nonetheless, this drama shapes for all eternity the opposition between the pragmatic, dutiful, and willful spirit and the unenlightened logic of the myth, which is now to be thoroughly destroyed.

When you’re here we should have a talk about this piece. There is hardly another example on the basis of which several basic characteristics of dialectic can be better studied—quite aside from the above-mentioned problems. Just as gloomy superstition, just as the spirit submerged in nature, just as myth on its own moves toward destruction, no less does inexorable enlightenment, unceasing progress, which only combats myth, tend toward fascism. In their most extreme intensification both collapse into one; as radical opposites they are identical. Liberation lies, theoretically and practically, in a movement in which both are given their due but without continuing to exist groundlessly next to each other.

Please excuse my digression into the field of philosophy. …⁷

The letter is a demonstration of the aporetic gesture: problems are converted into their own solutions through the conceptual comprehension of the limits of the concept—to “strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept,” as Adorno says in Negative Dialectics [1966].⁸ Here, this means developing a conceptual presentation of the non-/pre-/extra-conceptual ‘material principle’ through giving fuller determinacy to its opposition to the ‘conscious traits,’ including the concept itself, which arise in relation to the father. This is perhaps the most difficult moment of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic: the movement of the concept towards truth is the comprehensive measure of the unbridgeable distance between the concept and its object. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s pithiest formulation—the false is the index of itself and the true.⁹ If “[t]he concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was […], from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not,” then the concept only fulfills its concept in comprehending its own ‘becoming what it is not.’¹⁰ In Adorno and Horkheimer’s most famous formulation:

[D]eterminate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth.¹¹

In Schema I., we see this in the non-synthetic, mediating moment Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless describe as a ‘synthesis’: the univocal [einstimmige] concept of nature presupposed by the antithesis (“Social power-relations can be explained by natural ones.”) is the reflected form of the [social] domination for which the thesis (“The domination of nature can be explained by social domination.”) seeks a social explanation—but does so at the cost of opposing society to nature once more, for which nature takes its revenge. In another unpublished fragment from the notebook sketches for the ‘dialectic,’ titled ‘On the Relation Between Spirit and Nature’ [“über: Verhältnis von Geist und Natur”], Horkheimer writes:

The explanation of the spirit, whether as the subjective faculty or an objective power that rules the world, as the true being, as the creator or producer of the universe—spirit is at the root of all idealistic philosophy in its distinct kinds. While it thus means to [master] its ideal of blind nature, it loses its content, except for that of disinterested power, no matter how much it strives to take nature back into the mind as a phenomenon inherent to it, or to derive nature from mind. Spirit becomes its [own] element of power, the abstraction derived from domination under the name of spirit as the highest sovereign, and spiritualism posits nature as a universal being. In it, philosophy reverts back to pre-animism, to the most primitive mythology. Among philosophers, Schelling was the only one who knew this. …¹²

As Horkheimer formulates it in the concluding lecture of S&R (1944), the task a comprehensive grasp of this problem commends us to is, appropriately, a paradoxical one:

A person who is committed to short and precise definitions might now argue: in recollecting its natural derivation, does not spirit avow its identity with nature? To which it must be replied: this identity is tenable only insofar as nature in the form of human domination is set in opposition to nature inside and outside man. Once nature in the form of the human mind has penetrated this opposition and discovered itself behind the mask of the almighty self, the constellation of all categories concerned is changed. By this very insight self is seen to transcend nature. The same position is reached the moment man’s nature is provoked through the agency of spirit in reflection upon its precarious state, to confess its natural limits. Let me express this from the point of view of spirit. Spirit stubbornly persisting in its superiority and exemption from nature is not spirit. Spirit is adequately rendered only by disavowing the traditional hierarchical dualism, both in theory and practice. Nevertheless, any doctrine which, by omission of appropriate mediating notions of transformation, reduces spirit to raw nature commits a genealogical fallacy.¹³

With this, we have arrived at the opening problematic of Schema II.: mythical repetition calls enlightened man back to that mere nature from which he always seeks to escape with impotent hope. Or, to paraphrase Adorno’s Kierkegaard-book and his 1939 letter to Scholem on the Zohar: world-transcendent acosmism collapses back into the vicious immanence of the cosmos it banished for the sake of spirit; spiritualism undergoes an inversion to mythology. To conclude: while I have been unable to find direct (or indirect, near-match/-miss) references to Schema II. in Horkheimer and Adorno’s work as a whole, it is nothing less than a condensation of the basic dynamic of the Dialectic of Enlightenment itself.

André Masson. Will—o’-the-wisp. 1942.

Schema I. On The Relation Between The Domination of Nature and Social Domination.

Thesis: The domination of nature can be explained by social domination. Originally, people pursue their purposes in direct confrontation with nature. The savage, who nourishes himself on plants, must know all plants with great precision, delving into the subtlest of distinctions between them. The primitive hunter must distinguish the different kinds of wild game from one another, investigate their lives down to the last detail; for his life may depend on every nuance. In civilization, however, human beings always have only to do with others just like themselves. Each achieves his purpose by obtaining what he wants from the others. Nature is only useful to him as a secondary means in this play of his interests; he processes [nature]—and always only a very small part of it—in order to turn it into a commodity, one by means of which he can induce other human beings to give him what he needs. Nature becomes the means of the means. He has nothing more to do with [nature] directly as a purpose. Thus, he becomes completely blind to it. The domination of nature and its determinate forms can be explained by those of the social division of labor and, therefore, [social] forms of domination.

Antithesis: Social power-relations can be explained by natural ones. Imitation originates in terror. The face of a beast of prey, or its cry, immediately evokes the same grimace, the same noise, from human beings. With time, this natural mimesis takes on the function of disenchantment, or rather that of enchantment. Enchantment and disenchantment are equivalents. In making himself the threatening one, the threatened one seems to say: I am just the same as you, there is nothing you can do to me. This probably explains the totem, and the beginnings of language and linguistic presentation. (I am the Herr of Mum… Bum…!) The power of nature is therefore the first, and that of humans which opposes it the second. The next step would consist in the application of the terror learned from nature onto others, and the division of labor which results from this.

Synthesis: In the social domination of nature, the terror which nature originally instilled within human beings radiates back upon nature itself. Society originates where single individuals continuously repeat and make a profession out of the role of instilling terror, i.e. with the seizure of power as a regular activity in the tribe. This is, in all probability, also the origin of the division of labor. The more intensely this progresses, the more blind human beings become towards nature. Their relation to nature reflects the relation of human beings to one another back to them. However, this should by no means be understood in such a way that the barbaric forms of [social] domination correspond to the most barbaric domination of nature. Since the barbaric forms of society are based upon a lack of thorough organization of the [social] whole, the original relation to nature has not yet been radically eradicated within them. The most liberal forms of society are, to a great extent, also the blindest with respect to nature.

The thesis is Marxist insofar as it holds that all categories are derived from economic reality. It explains the domination of nature as a reflex of the coexistence of human beings. It is un-Marxist insofar as Marx, contradicting himself, derives the coexistence of human beings from natural conditions. Here, Marx was no critic, but positivistic naturalist. (This is [also] where the critique of the doctrine of primitive communism should begin.) The antithesis is Marxist insofar as it derives social life from the forces of production. It elevates the positivistic form of nature-conditionedness into a dialectical form. Its problematic consists in the fact that it makes categories such as domination appear to be natural in a certain sense. It construes the entire process from the horror before the first thunderstorm through the radio as a univocal [einstimmige] sequence of necessities. The concept of a calamity [Unheils] which has occurred in nature or society has no place in dialectics. To the extent it is situated at a historical point such as the emergence of wage labor, it is arbitrary and accidental. If we attribute truth to the antithesis, this can only occur in the sense that we consider the very unbrokenness [of history]—in the construal of which Hegel and Marx agree, and which has its real ground in the presupposed concept of nature itself—to be precisely that calamity, the origin of which then no longer has any place within such an unbroken course.

Accordingly, one could perhaps represent the synthesis in such a way that the univocal concept of nature, as that upon which the antithesis is based, is in turn the reflected form [Reflexionsform] of [social] domination, which the thesis seeks to explain as socially engendered.

André Masson. Invention of the Labyrinth. 1942.

Schema II. On Spirit and Enlightenment.

[I.]¹⁴ If enlightenment owes to myths all of the material it seeks to destroy, as a judgment on myths it remains under their spell. [The mythical realm is one of the endless repetition of the ambiguous:]¹⁵ repetition is the first attempt at articulation. The repeater, by identifying himself with the repeated, seeks to deprive it of its power over him, just as in the historical era the individual, by repeating that which is feared in the imagination, tries to absorb its threat. All calamity [Unheil] shall be atoned for by repetition. It shall be reduced to naught by those who’ve become like it through identification, but this is only achieved at the price of perpetuating the calamity. Myth knows no articulation of its moments except through retribution [Vergeltung]. Chaos is held in the suspension of its enormous scales. In myths, the order of the archaic earth through revenge becomes the schema for a cosmic order: coming-to-be is exchanged for passing-away. But enlightenment is the attempt to escape the process of fate [Schicksal] and retribution through exacting retribution on oneself. Enlightenment treats myths as the scripture of the One God does the speeches of the King of Babylon: myths are weighed and found wanting. Just as in myths everything that happens must atone for having happened, so for enlightenment everything that happens must give an account of its happening. By locating nature within history and history within nature, myths furnish deceptive justification for domination on the basis of the stars, and even interpret the stars as the rulers of prehistoric time. Retributive enlightenment holds fast to domination, for retribution is the principle of domination. Injustice [Unrecht] is nothing but the law [Recht], the insistence of that which is always the same [immer Gleichen]. Inexorably, repetition calls man back to that mere nature from which he always seeks to escape with impotent hope. As with the ancient Ionians, wherever myth and enlightenment collide, the mythical prepossession of enlightenment is evident—and which, in turn, makes itself even more unrecognizable to become even more inexorable… As Anaximander taught:

Where things come into being, there too they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and recompense to each other for their injustice, according to the [ordering] of time.¹⁶

The principle of immanence the enlightenment champions against mythical imagination nevertheless has something in common with myth. Just as measure for measure, guilt and penance are weighed, so the “order according to time” established by the enlightenment—it is tempting to understand it as the order of generations and their property relations—consists in the victory of that which is always the same. The skeptical wisdom which cannot conceive of anything new under the sun because all of the pieces of the whole senseless game have played out all of their moves upon the great board once and for all, because all of the elements have been given, because matter and energy are constant, and because humans are determined to preserve their lives by adaptation to the existing world—this skeptical wisdom reproduces the chimera it denies, the belief in a fate that ceaselessly restores what being has already been [was Sein einmal war] through retribution. Infinite progress is the never-ending toil of this restoration. Anything else is excluded: whatever cannot be reduced to the unity of abstract human labor. This is what immanence truly consists in, not the adherence to the boundaries of possible experience. Though they have yet to erect the boundaries of the experiencable [Erfahrbaren], myths are still of kindred spirit with the enlightenment. The images of myths always and only reinforce the inescapability of the present circuit of experience [Erfahrungsumlaufs]. The tendency of these images is not all that different from that of their imageless counterparts, general concepts—restricted to what positivism grants them—as abbreviations for what has already been experienced. Nothing is tolerated unless it defers to the right of the existing [Daseienden] by becoming equal to it, an equality under which everything is proffered up for disposal. This is the core of myth “exegesis of the symbol” Bachofen speaks of:

It [myth] unfolds in a series of outwardly connected actions what the symbol embodies in a unity. It resembles a discursive philosophical treatise in so far as it splits the idea into a number of connected images and then leaves it to the reader to draw the ultimate inference.¹⁷

That is, to understand their connection as one of ‘that which is always the same’ and to subsume them under the abstract unity of fate. But this is also the core of all enlightened quantifying, the rule according to which immanence is yoked together into a system. In the Phenomenology, Hegel recognized the essence of enlightenment in equivalence:

Different things are useful to each other in different ways, but all things have this useful reciprocity through their essence, namely, that they are related to the absolute in a twofold manner—the positive way, as a result of which they are in and for themselves, and the negative way, as a result of which they are for others. The relation to the absolute essence, or to religion, is thus among all utilities the most useful, for it is pure utility itself. It is the stable existence of all things, or their being-in-and-for-itself, and the pitfall of all things, or their being for others.¹⁸

At the same time, however, he preserved the repressive moment in the universal equivalence of the enlightenment: that all should be useful to all. Each one becomes guilty of the other, since all are compelled to become equivalent to the other, and, in so doing, do violence to their own being and favor those which possess universal utility. In the world of “pure insight,” Hegel discerns the features of the horde: the total comparability [Vergleichbarkeit] of everything individual through its usefulness for others implies the annihilation of the individual.

As everything is useful for man, man is likewise useful, and his determination consists in making himself a universally usable member of the troop and being of use for the common interest. As much as he looks out for himself is just as much as he must also give away to others, and as much as he gives to others is just as much as he is to look out for himself; or, ‘Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ But wherever he ends up, he is in the right place; he makes use of others and is himself made use of.¹⁹

The degradation of of the human being, which is designated as the repressive moment of the enlightenment by Hegel’s tone, cannot simply be dismissed as an invective from the idealist who insists on the dignity of human beings haughtily and from on high, since it is this idealist who, in the end, defends the concept of human dignity as the legacy of the enlightenment. Rather, Hegel recognized the inhuman [Unmenschliche] at the heart of the all-humanity [Allmenschlichkeit] of the enlightenment itself. In a jab at Robespierre’s être suprême, he calls the idea of the enlightenment “the void.” In other words: the abstraction which yokes the world together in complete and perfect immanence—”finitude”—and in doing so proclaims “the highest is nothing but finitude, indeed, it knows this finitude and the knowing of such finitude as the true.”²⁰ The “absolute” is stripped of all content until nothing remains but the mere unity of immanence. While the reduction to abstract unity erases [the obligations of] the injustice of the old inequality, of privilege, it fulfills them at the same time through, according to an expression of Kierkegaard’s, excision of the incommensurable.²¹ The injustice disguised in the exchange of equivalents even affects the logical form of the world ordered according to equivalents, abstraction. [Abstraction] is performed according to the dictates of value, which puts commodities into a universal relationship. The sole justice done to objects subject to abstraction consists in the fact the violence done unto them is also done unto the others they are equated with. But this justice is injustice, its consummation universal deprivation, integration into the system of comparability. The cost of the identity of all with all is nothing may be identical with itself, and the leveling domination of the abstract is domination in abstracto, concealed in the unity of the system, in pure immanence. This is the collusion of mythology and enlightenment. Subjection to nature [Naturverfallenheit] is subjection to those who prescribe the same measure, indeed to those who measure at all. But if in enlightenment, as in monotheistic narrative, the hand which reckons up the bill becomes invisible, the writing on the wall becomes all the more portentous.

[II.] Anaximander speaks of the measure between coming-to-be and passing-away, of guilt and penance, judged “according to the order of time.” At the dawn of Western thinking, he expresses the principle which Marx would denounce as the fateful necessity of bourgeois society: the unity of exchange [in] average labor-time.²² Life is unworthy of society, for the content of its utility is, in the end, nothing other than the empty time of labor, alongside of which the human species [Gattung] only co-exists, so to speak, parasitically.²³ This abstract time in which the bourgeois spirit necessarily conceives its world to express it as universal labor is nevertheless related to the mythical [conception of time]: as empty as the time of the Danaids and Sisyphus is the time of a humanity whose life is nothing but labor and toil. This can only mean, however, that the bourgeois world of abstract labor-time knows just as little of time in the true sense as do the myths of endless repetition. The ravaging time of myth and the abstract time of enlightenment are each of the kind that though nothing existing or remaining may be tolerated, still nothing changes.²⁴ Bourgeois society is prehistory in a literal sense, just as myths are pre-worldly. The “from now on” of the enlightenment, which decrees inexorable progress, is like the “from now on” of the myths, which links the endless repetition of natural process to the singular one of the saga. Here, as there, time is mere illusory semblance [Schein]. As cycle of guilt and penance, it withdraws into itself. Only in those notions that contradict the rationality of the law—the precipitate, if not the ground, of the nullity of time—, such as the statute of limitations on debt, is something preserved of time undistorted by labor. It is no coincidence that the critique of rationalism, above all Bergson’s, has found its true point of attack in the concept of time, without, however, having traced back the sickness in time to the very ‘productive life’ which Bergson brandishes against abstract time as its remedy. Law measures guilt and penance “according to the order of time.” This order reduces to non-reversibility, which makes it fate, the irrevocable, and which must be obeyed. Its rhythm is, however, the exchange of those equivalents which metaphysical speculation then conceived as cause and effect, in their supposed equivalence to one another. Spirit, which is responsible for the synthesis of the manifold under the form of equivalence, constitutes itself in the categories of law. It is these [categories] that determine “pure insight” itself, enlightened cognition. Judgment, cause, cognition, proof, corroboration, and, above all, the concept of the ground are expressions borrowed from the juridical domain and approximate legal notions.²⁵ The path of abstraction leads from the “discovery” of what constitutes right or wrong, what constitutes guilt or atonement, to the “jurisdiction of reason” [“Rechtsprechung der Vernunft”] over being [Sein] or non-being [Nichtsein].²⁶ This jurisdiction, however, entails injustice not merely against that which does not have being [das nicht Seiende], rejected because that which has being [das Seiende] deprives it of its would-be place in existence [Platz der Existenz], but also against existence itself [Dasein selber] so far as the latter fails to enter into the equivalence of cause and effect. The non-identical is discarded. What is not spirit itself is stretched across the procrustean bed of the system, which hacks off whatever transcends it and stretches whatever does not strive to fill it. The totality of the spirit is the supreme philosophical form of domination over human beings and nature; as domination, however, it is a mere natural relation and recoils into mythology. The unmeasured spirit, which tolerates nothing outside of itself, turns into fate. Its unbroken totality is the effigy [Abbild] of that blind nature against which it first measured itself and its dimensions. The mystical speculations, which absolute spiritualism thought through to the end, were well aware of the reversal [Umschlag] of their spirit into blind nature—namely, of spirit as judge.

No mysticism which dares to unravel the ‘mystery of faith,’ however deeply speculative its lines of thought may be, can escape the fate of producing a mythical rather than mystical discourse on God.²⁷

Like totalitarian rationalism, when confronted by the question of the ground of evil in a world which is nothing but spirit, Kabbalistic gnosis, which “devotes little interest” to the creation of the world in its actuality, interprets the Biblical history of creation as an allegory of something purely spiritual, the inner history of the Godhead—a conception drawn from Jakob Böhme and Schelling.²⁸ However, the mystical answer was more heretical than that of Leibniz, the Protestant. The finitization of God in the creation is not the ground of evil, but rather the infinitude of the spirit itself, upon which nature, having been banished from the realm of pure meanings, exacts its revenge, in such a way that the banisher comes to resemble the mere power of nature it banished.

From the hypertrophy of the power of stern judgment, which is holy in the bond of the the primordial potencies, the primordial evil was permitted to arise by God, independent and torn from that holy bond, as temptation and the power of punishment. This is the ‘other side,’ the demonic realm, which unfolds as a complete counter-world of destructive forces in parallel to that of the good. In the Zohar, ‘the left,’ ‘the primordial fire,’ or ‘the darkness’ often designate not only the power of stern judgment, the fire of scorn within God, but also that of evil, which, in the hidden dialectic through which the inward becomes outward, springs thence, falls away, becoming waste product, husk, shell.²⁹

According to this, evil would be the injustice into which the totality of the spirit recoils: the injustice of the judge. The fall into sin is in a sense remitted into the absolute, because the claim of absoluteness is the sin. Hence, the elective affinity of myth and enlightenment. It is no coincidence that the humanistic inaugurators of the enlightenment such as Pico della Mirandola were educated in the Kabbalah, nor that the later sects of Jewish mystics display a tendency to transpose their heresy into enlightenment. The old distinction between black and white magic is no longer sound: white magic is nothing but the reproduction of myths in the spirit of the enlightenment itself; the enlightenment whose domination of nature, as domination, always resorts to incantation [Beschwörung] when it encounters that which is not yet like it.

[III.] In the world of the enlightenment, mythology migrates into the profane. Myths are linked to determinate places and times. Through localization, roving demons are banished, and even, in a certain sense, brought under domination. But it is precisely in this manner that the world is demonized. In ancient Italy and Greece, there was no single spring or mountain which had not absorbed one demon or another. The distinction between enlightenment and myth lies in their respective approaches to exorcising demons; their similarity lies in their absorption of the demonic into existence. Now that all demons, down to the last and the least of them, have been absorbed into the existing world, the world has become seamlessly demonic itself. The disenchantment of the world is simultaneously its enchantment.³⁰ The concept of the fetish-character of the commodity which Marx used to designate the domination of things over human beings is no mere metaphor; rather, commodity-fetishes are the metamorphosed shapes of the old gods, the old surplus of the violence of judgment enforcing injustice in the exchange of equivalents.³¹ But the spirit which seeks to dominate the old domination only makes itself equivalent to it. The enlighteners, doctors of humanity, are medicine men in civilian dress. The homeopathic knowledge which enlightenment advocates has the character of privilege, and tends to increase rather than diminish through democratization. For the all-identical spirit, the organon of the enlightenment, is a privilege reserved solely for those who are exempt from manual labor and who, in whatever form, have disposal over the labor of others. The inscription above the Platonic academy—let none who are ignorant of geometry enter—, as much as the insistence of positivists on the mathematical formalization of logic, signify the cult of number in the service of the numerus clausus. The great french novels of the eighteenth century, Prevost and Laclos, laid bare the mythical character of the enlightened world which the system and the encyclopedia concealed: so abstract are the relationships of the human beings therein, so abstract their passions, as timeless and spaceless as their lives, as caught within never ending repetition, as dominated by unthinkable fear, as subject to nature [naturverfallen] in the very omnipotence of their own spirits, for whom the world has become an adventurous sequence of stations of intrigue just as one finds in the stories of the lives of heroes and demons of old.³² Merteuil and Valmont have taken residence in the labyrinth, but it has become so bright they can no longer spot the red thread by which Ariadne led Theseus to freedom. In the end, the labyrinth, which once only played host to cabals of the noble, has opened itself to all, all of us packed so tightly within it we no longer recognize it as labyrinth, let alone seek the way out. Intrigue is the form of mythical domination in the enlightened age, the democratic, and, with good reason, the bourgeois drama, in its attempts to break out of mythology, has repeatedly chosen the presentation of intrigue, which only disappeared as the last of these intrigues made domination immediate.

[IV.] What enables the spirit of the enlightenment to fall prey to the domination of nature whose domination enlightenment still pursues is nothing other than the subjectivity which seems to relegate myth back into its boundaries: the self. It is the heir of ancient Hybris, of rebellious defiance, which, blinded, becomes the victim of mythical powers, and which persists in the enlightenment as the reduction of all that has being [alles Seiende] to human orders. Just as the defiant hero is “right” to oppose myth only to fall for it by insistence on this right, so enlightenment falls to myth by insisting on its right—its actual right.³³ As mythical defiance succumbs to the nature whose violence it misunderstands because of its own likeness to it, so enlightenment falls into the mere existence [bloße Dasein] whose gravity it does not comprehend. [Enlightenment] aims to organize the world in sovereign freedom, but the will to such organizing is unfreedom, disposal over the world is the reverse image of adaptation to it, as is being perfected precisely in the sovereignty of the enlightenment at present.³⁴ The self that makes the hero who breaks with myth only to succumb to it, and the self in whose [sovereign] claim the essence of the modern, enlightened world has been discernible since the time of Petrarch, is itself the form of reflection of mere existence [die Reflexionsform des bloßen Daseins].

[Note:] For Petrus Pomponatius, one of the patriarchs of the modern enlightenment, who, in his Immortality of the Soul [1516], launched a first attack upon its substantiality and demonstrated that each of its acts is necessarily related to sensory representations and material objects, the principle of the soul, which nevertheless justifies its sovereign claim, lies in nothing other than its faculty for self-reflection, by which it elevates itself above the mere nature it is itself conceived to be. In accordance with this, the origin of the enlightenment would be the reflective, mirroring capacity through which the domination of self and the domination of nature are constituted in equal measure.³⁵

It is formed in the desire to dominate [mere] existence by becoming like it. The truth of the theory of adaptation is the truth of calamity [Unheil], which lies in the reflection of the human being on himself as nature but not within his nature as such. The self is the reification of the human being, which turns the life of others, and then its own, into its property. Logical identity and the unity of consciousness both imitate property. The self is that which is most mortal about the human being; it has always been mere ideology. The self is the attempt to make oneself as hard as the stones and as bright as the stars in order to unlock their hidden secrets and thus exercise the dominion which in prehistoric times was reserved for the dead, in emulation of them. For myth as much as enlightenment, however, this hardening at the same time involves unbounded transformability: enlightenment and myth are one in proclaiming that which is always the same as that which is always different. This is the mythical cipher of exchange that insists on abstract identity but realizes it only in the most violent metamorphosis of the one into the other. All myths are histories of such metamorphoses, just as they were once collected by Ovid. The postulate of that which is always the same agrees with the one which says: nothing should survive. Before its existence [Daseienden], where metamorphosis meets its boundary, comparability—and with it identify, defiance, self-positing—would fall away as well.³⁶ The quantifying tendency of all enlightenment, the dissolution of all qualities, turns the principle of the metamorphosis of substances into one another against mythology, and thereby reinforces it. The legacy of alchemy is the utopia of enlightenment. But this puts the enlightenment into relationship with the destroying of the myths themselves. In its insistence that the spirit of the self permeate and metamorphose all, enlightenment simultaneously asserts the nullity of that which is permeated as much as that which permeates. While nothing is supposed to stand firm before judicial reason [rechtsprechenden Vernunft], reason is nevertheless assumed to be incapable of truth. Philosophy becomes the blasphemy against philosophy, and advance into the boundless is coupled with insistence on the unsurpassable boundary of cognition. The answer of the Critique of Pure Reason is as ambiguous as that of the oracles it eradicates. For Kant, there was no being not open to cognition, but what is open to cognition is not being. Nothing of the old should exist, nothing which has not arisen from the organizing capacity of reason itself, yet reason is incapable of cognizing anything new because it is itself the legislator of the very nature it is supposed to cognize. But spirit, which installs itself as fate, is presented with the bill for world domination and pays with the abstractness of the self, until nothing remains but the “I think” which accompanies all of my representations. The equation of spirit and world is balanced in the end, but only through the reduction of each side to the other. In the fatal cycle of annihilation, enlightenment has become so much like the myths of old that it now prepares for itself the very fate it once prepared for fate.

André Masson, Il n’y a pas de monde achevé, 1942.

Appendix I. Key Words for “Mythos und Aufklärung.”

[typed manuscript in MHA 801]³⁷

[1.] Enlightenment as demythologization.

• “Disenchantment of the world” as a basic tendency of the Enlightenment [Grundtendenz der Aufklärung] (Max Weber Essays 535 f.).

• Myth as Error ([Hegel’s] Phenomenology ed. Lasson 352 f. // Stockton [x] 416 f.).

• Demythologization as the Enlightenment's consciousness of itself.

• Unity in the fight against images and animism from Xenophanes to Reichenbach.

• (Perhaps: it should not be secret. Entanglement [Verschränkung] of the anti-magical and the dissolution of everything that is not a pure determination of thought [reine Denkbestimmung]).

[2.] Myth is already Enlightenment.

• The anti-magical in the recording of the myths themselves (patriarchal element).

• Myths as a “system of philosophy”, integral and invariant understanding of natural facts.

• “Discursive character of myths” (Bachofen, 58).

• Bachofen's doctrine of myth as interpretation of the symbol (perhaps its critique).

• Complement to the rationality of myths: the mythical nature of the oldest rationality.³⁸

• Greek philosophy and Jewish theology.

• Contents of rational thinking from myth.

• Formlessness [Gestaltslosigkeit] of thought (Phenomenology. 351).

[3.] The core of myths: fate and labor.

• Indistinctness between salvation [Heil] and calamity [Unheil].

• Myths arising in natural relations [Naturverhältnissen].

• Creation narrative [Schöpfungserzählung] as a reflection of the principle of differentiation in nature [Reflexion des Prinzips des Unterscheidenden in der Natur] (conversation about Babylonian and Jewish creation histories [Schöpfungsgeschichte]).

• The patriarchal principle as the mediated and thus “determined” one.

• Formlessness [Gestaltlosigkeit] and nothingness. Concept of fate.³⁹

• Fate as a form of reflection of oppression [Reflexionsform von Unterdrückung] (not original).

• Images of fate as a reflection of labor (weaving).

• Labor-character [Arbeitscharakter] of myths.

• Myth: history transposed into nature.

• Nature which is always the same [immer gleiche Natur] as a form of reflection [Reflexionsform] of rhythmic labor.

• Excursus on rhythm (rhythm as a compulsion to labor and [rhythm] as as that which makes labor easier).

[4.] Mythical Enlightenment.

• (Perhaps starting from Hegel’s definition of myth as domination, Phenomenology 352).

• The mythical motif of retribution [Vergeltung].

• Enlightenment as retribution against myth (?).

• Labor, retribution, fate (introduction of the concept of equivalence as a prehistoric [urgeschichtlichen] one).

• (The problem of one-dimensional time. “Prehistory of the abstract.” [“Urgeschichte des Abstrakten.”])

• Enlightenment as ‘transformation’⁴⁰ of myth (perhaps the motif of defiance).

• Law [Recht] as a mediating category [Vermittlungskategorie] of myth, domination and enlightenment.

• Retribution, Corroboration, Proof (Kelsen's theory).

[5.] Enlightenment as Regression.

• The attempt to break immanence by insistence upon immanence.

• The calamity [Unheil] of abstract unity. Rope of Oknos.⁴¹

• Against polytheism.

• The tendency against fantasy, “experience”.

• On the history of the sensory organs.

• Theoretical concept of regression.

[End of manuscript.]

André Masson. Praying Mantis. c. 1942

Appendix II. Sketches for “Mythos und Aufklärung.”

Translator’s note: Sourced from MHA [801]⁴² and [805].⁴³ (Properly formatted archival citations forthcoming!)

§1. On Mimesis.

If mimesis really does essentially refer to the mode of behavior that precedes labor, then it is to be expected that the mimetic was already taboo in mythical times. There is much to suggest this: Imitation [Nachahmung] is considered childish and silly, and the concept of silliness [Albernheit] is actually the counter-concept [Gegenbegriff] of the labor-bound concept of the autonomous self: Imitation means not wanting to be yourself but someone else, not respecting the boundaries of the self, as it were. In the bourgeois world, this is considered a cardinal offense. Few adults will be able to resist a certain feeling of embarrassment when they see children imitating their teacher. This can be seen above all from the judgments about the figure of the actor—i.e. beneath the constitution of “autonomous” art—that are currently popular among the Volk. He is the pretender, the joker, the one who does not take life or himself seriously, not only, as one might think, because he hangs around and perpetuates the life of the nomad, but above all because he does not want to be himself. The perennial opposition between bourgeois labor and art may have its real ground in the taboo imposed on mimesis. But if that is the case and the mimetic forces really are of such a prehistoric force as we have reason to assume, then it is to be expected that they will continue to live on in a repressed form. The so-called mass phenomena underlying fascism are probably repressed mimesis. They acquire their destructive power because human beings no longer imitate nature in order to appease it, but rather imitation itself is put in the service of domination, that is, the mimetic faculty is put in the service of exploiters. This mimesis in its repressed and demonic shape has nothing to do with the survival of magical ideas. On the contrary, it rules wherever the wall erected against rapport with nature is particularly thick. Magical detritus of the astrology and fortune-telling type indicates, rather, the incomplete repression of mimesis. Perhaps enlightenment itself is nothing other than the process of repression of mimesis, and the mythical aspect of enlightenment is the shape which mimesis has assumed through being so repressed.

§2. On the Question of the Boundaries of Demythologization.

The notions of Mana and Manitou unite the ideas of the secret power of the unknown and of the excitation to terror. Worship is based on fear [Angst]. But worship is an uncertain means of protection. One is only free of fear when one has destroyed what one is afraid of: when there is nothing unknown anymore. This is precisely the path of demythologization. Demythologization is itself mythical fear become radical, and the pure immanence that is created in this way is nothing other than a taboo that has to a certain extent become universal. Nothing at all is allowed to be outside [draußen sein] anymore, because the mere notion of ​​Being Outside [die bloße Vorstellung des Draußen Seins] is itself the real source of fear. This is the true unity of myth and enlightenment. Demythologization can only be stopped by stopping the origin of the myth—namely by removing the shivers of fear [Schauer der Angst] before the unknown and the transcendent. That is actually our task. But it can only be tackled by eliminating the antagonism between the human being and nature in which this fear is initially grounded. The unknown becomes frightening only as something that is first reflected in its difference from the known, as the result of this separation. And it is probably this separation that points back to the most primordial relations of domination in the [history of the] world. If this were the case, then the abolition of domination [die Abschaffung der Herrschaft] would be the act which simultaneously eliminates the source of ‘myth and enlightenment.’

§3. [Re: Capital and Proletariat]

[…] In the end, even the consequential is finally dispelled as myth: the rulers believe in no objective necessity. In physics, it is replaced by the concept of probability. All connection and meaning is considered to be merely subjective; they take it to be just as arbitrary as the representation of power by and towards which they are compelled. The dominated, so their leaders attest, accept as inviolably necessary the development which makes them one degree more powerless with every decreed increase in the standard of living. As the means of subsistence required for the few hands needed to service the now enormously increased proportion of constant capital can be produced with a ridiculously small proportion of the labor-time which is at the disposal of the rulers of society, the enormous mass of the remaining surplus population is recruited into additional guard duty for capital, serving as the material for its grand designs in peace and as its fodder in times of war. They are fed as the reserve army of labor, or as reserves for the army proper. Immiseration [Verelendung] as the contrast of power and powerlessness grows without measure together with the capacity to abolish [abzuschaffen] such misery forever. A proletarian is nothing more than a surplus specimen in the eyes of the big union boss, who notes this while he himself is made to tremble in the face of his own liquidation. Such necessity, which positivism dismisses all too lightly, is an illusory semblance [Schein] that positivism itself reinforces in the forgetting of the concept. This [necessity] is no less of an illusory semblance [Schein] than the freedom of the self, which finally and necessarily takes on the configuration of discord and conspiracy of all those in power. This double semblance [doppelten Schein] within which humanity enlightened without remainder loses itself may be characterized by thinking as such, but cannot be resolved by thinking alone—for it emanates from thinking itself, which, in practice, has devoted itself to domination. Unwavering self-preservation adapts the human element to the ruled masses in which it perishes as human, just as it transforms the leaders of the masses into inhumans [Unmenschen], however well-intentioned they may once have been. Thinking leads to the realization that its own function, that of destroying mythologies in order to subjugate nature without limit, results in the enslavement of society, which has transformed the dull horror of prehistoric times into the precisely measured horror of the human world.

§4. On Praxis.

The practice connected to cognition of the naturalness of thinking would certainly bear the features of enlightenment. Thought that abandons the claim to domination and sees it as a deceptive reflection of natural relations could propose no other practice than one that insists on the expression of the truth without any reservation and negates the lie even in the veil of its utmost objectivity, whether as institution or as technology, in the hope that these relations, once they are no longer fetishized, might lose their power over the human beings who obey them because they must believe in them. Such an enlightenment would not so much indulge in ever-renewed raids against concepts as restore the concept as its very essence, by presenting the conceptless violence of social power today as the ground of the conceptlessness of its philosophy. It is not a question of bringing the enlightenment to a halt, but of freeing it from the fetters into which it fell by aligning itself with the world to which it had always been linked but which it nevertheless transcended precisely through identification. The enlightenment’s fall into sin [Sündenfall] is that moment in which the fetish character of the commodity, the universal social lie, took ahold of thinking itself, that thinking which alone could have unmasked this lie. Positivism is not enlightenment perfected, but the shape in which the allness [Allheit] of market and monopoly swallowed the enlightenment whole, making itself enlightenment’s equal. It is the moment in which the consciousness of the dominating practice of the enlightenment drove out that self-consciousness which alone could have restored the enlightenment against domination. This moment is, however, determinable by thinking as untruth, as error. Though the positivist manipulation of enlightenment, which underlies the public spirit of today, attempted to make the thinking in thinking superfluous, to install uninterpreted science as the authority of thinking, and to dismiss intentions as spooks, thinking, even in its reified form, as mathematics, machine, and organization, still remains thinking, and its supposed abolition [Abschaffung] is only its forgetting. Enlightenment which no longer enlightens itself betrays its principle and merely reproduces, on an ever-widening scale, the superstition of blind violence against which it once arose. The intentionless formulae of logistics don’t just resemble the content of prayer-wheeels externally, but, like the latter, restore unquestioned authority to its position—an authority which is nothing other than thinking itself, which conducts itself as such an authority precisely to the extent it is not a remembrance of itself [wie es nicht seiner selbst eingedenk]. The social tendency of monopoly, which completes such enchantment of the spirit, has at the same time demonstrated the untruth in reality—the raising of which to a concept is the task of theory today.

§5. Hope in the Time of Fascism.

[ad. Conclusion:]⁴⁴ In so designating its boundary, the social critique of reason goes beyond it. The construction of the concept is fulfilled by means of Hegel’s specification of Kant’s transcendental dialectic, which, in demarcating a narrow, contradictionless region of experience for reason, breaks through its confines precisely by virtue of the contradiction involved [in this gesture of demarcation]. The hopelessness of the fascist era is both the despair of hope and the dissolution of hope as poor semblance [schlechten Schein] in the face of the immediate possibility of realizing that to which hope vainly clings.⁴⁵ Enlightenment eradicates mythology to the point it becomes it, and so ultimately eradicates itself, thereby calling myth in its most horrific form up to the brink of the abyss, where the right word, the hardest and the easiest to say, may make it disappear.

[Bacon dreamed of the many things…]⁴⁶

André Masson. Meditation of the Painter. 1943

Appendix III. Horkheimer’s Stray Notes (ca. 1940-1944).

On the possibility of general statements and the thing-in-itself. (1940?)

[sourced from: MHA Na [800]]⁴⁷

There must be some matrix or ground transcending experience in order to make some generalization of the kind that event A generates event B. Universal propositions must be de jure not de facto grounded in the objective connectedness of events. There must be something more to causation than constant conjunction, if scientific explanation has cognitive meaning. Otherwise all historical data may be accidental runs of events. If past events are not evidence for future ones, science is blind, all is luck. [The] probability that not all [alleys]⁴⁸ are blind ones is the epistemological ‘cash value’ of such categories as substance. […] He introduces into the events his personal feelings, supplied by his own introspection, his inner life. “Descriptive science”

Excerpts From: Handwritten Notes (ca. 1940-1944)

[sourced from: MHA Na [800]]⁴⁹

Religion: Messianism or Spiritual Hygiene? Religion as spiritual hygiene: this is an adjustment, and a very harsh one—because it is an adjustment to modern pragmatism. This is one of the many renaissances in our day. Was not the religious man far more neurotic? The way is—simply—the one to follow truth—to believe what we think is adequate to our knowledge. What is the connection between Messianism and—spiritual hygiene? Perfectionism may be a symptom of neurosis but it depends in whom. Was Flaubert a neurotic? And should we not resist this spiritual hygienic attitude—as soon as somebody tries to do something—perfect?

Individual and Group Society. Danger is not ‘intolerance of the individual’ but his passing his responsibility to groups and collectivities. The individuals who’ve outlived liberalism are already wiser in group society, and the next, higher stage of humanity is the group.

On the rights and wrongs of protecting the homeland against ‘foreign infiltration.’ Naturally developed society (tribe) is homeland. In the name of protecting the homeland, it is opened up to others (the law [Recht]); injustice [Unrecht] begins with its manipulation. This belongs to the “dialectic of enlightenment,” for which all these measures are objective. This becomes clear in later epochs. The Parisian shoemaker sees his homeland “overrun by foreigners.” That he must tolerate this is a function of bourgeois tolerance and legal relations, just as much as is the later (in monopolism) or earlier (under the guild system) cruelty in the rebuke of the foreigner.

Positivism: Break Between Cognition and Action. Positivism has destroyed the bond between cognition and action, [it] blinds to blind reality.

On Marriage. Marriage—otherwise women (and men) would never go to work. In-bedded in America: the women keep control.⁵⁰

On the Relation Between Speaking and Writing. Leave metaphysics to the experts, expressing oneself otherwise is a luxury. “Create what’s right!” One is always more stupid in writing; in speaking there is tone, presupposition. Writing has long been the work of experts. (Philosophers and their norms, for example! Each one makes you more stupid than the last.) Dialectics is the attempt to overcome such restrictions. But the business is concluded: what is there to say, this is simply how it must be done. Only the artists who “teach” literature become so blind to the fact of its abstract consumption.

On Puritan Social Critique. The critique of society sub specie rich and poor (Mr. Müller, Lynd) came to be puritanical, a kind of duty—without any insight into the motivation of truth: beatitude [Seligkeit]. (To admire “art” in opposition to America: the ego of a puritan romanticism.) One isn’t even allowed to admire the latest model of Ford car: as if one’s enjoyment of it wasn’t precisely the critique.

On the Relation Between Spirit and Nature. The explanation of the spirit, whether as the subjective faculty or an objective power that rules the world, as the true being, as the creator or producer of the universe—spirit is at the root of all idealistic philosophy in its distinct kinds. While it thus means to [master] its ideal of blind nature, it loses its content, except for that of disinterested power, no matter how much it strives to take nature back into the mind as a phenomenon inherent to it, or to derive nature from mind. Spirit becomes its [own] element of power, the abstraction derived from domination under the name of spirit as the highest sovereign, and spiritualism posits nature as a universal being. In it, philosophy reverts back to pre-animism, to the most primitive mythology. Among philosophers, Schelling was the only one who knew this.

On the Relation of the Freudian Method to Positivism. Though Freud’s method is based precisely on such insight, it is not concerned with the logical structure of judgments but only their psychological function—he does not drive his own insight to the point of contradiction with positivist logistics.

Enlightenment as Mythology. Enlightenment = mythology—because of the leveling of the new. The new is not just the center [die Mitte] (Christ) nor just the future (socialism), but always also what is special (the unique individuals in the present).

On Mimesis. It is not just Jewish history, but also beauty (Garbo) which compels us to mimesis. But from all of this we ought not conclude that what is expressed, the imitated, is the good. Only regression (imitation)⁵¹ is bad. Liberation is the good. Love is no inherent good either, but explaining it away as “emotional”⁵² is both important and incorrect.

Key Words.

• Christianity: as religion of reason, enlightenment.

• Thinking: what significance can it have today?

• History (true topic: horror)

• History (interpretation of meaning, justification, rationality)

• Sociology of Art

• Positivism (pros and cons)

• Religion (attempts at explanation)

• Language: source of truth.

• Reason (correct, adequate form)

Idleness as characteristic of pre- and post-bourgeois eras (1942?)

[sourced from MHA Na [805]]⁵³

Since the time of the Renaissance, writers have cursed idleness. But the world ushered into being by Bacon and Machiavelli has, in its logical course, returned to mass unemployment—for which ‘industriousness’ is prescribed as the ‘cure,’ just as it was in their day. Now the most industrious people have taken the initiative to make fascism a reality in order to cure us of the evil of idleness. Perhaps there is a chance humanity will return to the ascetic, monastic life which has been so thoroughly discredited. Humanity was meant to make the earth an abode worthy of the Epicurean gods, and it was capable of achieving this. First, of course, total rearmament will be attempted.

False Conclusions (1940s?)

[sourced from MHA Na [819]]⁵⁴

The ruling order is affirmed in the dull precision of the expert. Thinking operates within the demarcated boundaries of its field of expertise and does not wander astray into the totality. This kind of good will rejoices in succeeding at its discrete task, and remains oblivious to the social relations to which his success contributes. The expert cannot therefore tell whether his will is good or bad. Because he’s done something good, he finds everything good. He commits the reverse mistake of the rebel who concludes the badness of the whole from a single instance of injustice. Yet both mistakes are not equally false. It is logically permissible to conclude the badness of the world from the existence of a single evil, but to conclude its goodness from its privileges is a fatal blunder.

On the Genealogy of Myth (1941?)

[sourced from MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985)]⁵⁵

To me it seems the deepest root of myths lies in social constraint [Zwang der Gesellschaft]. That which is feared becomes that which is worshipped through identification with it. Whoever is summarily condemned in American court is condemned twice over in the feelings of the spectators, however sorry for the condemned they might be. This is mythical. Durkheim with his social constraint (contrainte sociale), as well as Freud and Caillois with their explanation on the basis of psychological conflict—no doubt they are right, but still too formalistic. Mythological representations are the product of the assimilation of individual thought into that of the community, which, in turn, is determined by domination. Obedience is performed in and through myths—be it obedience to the collective or the force of particular rulers.

—Don’t get bogged down by ‘science’! Don’t just seek to ‘explain’ myth, but express the truth.

The Self-contradiction of Logical Empiricism (1940?)

[sourced from: MHA [819]]⁵⁶

There is no need to concede much to the philosophy of logical empiricism. It asserts that there is no philosophy aside from science, and claims to restrict itself accordingly. For them, however, science consists in activities that generate predictions. Predictions are the purpose of science. But where are the predictions of logical empiricism? This doesn’t concern the energy-saving mathematical practices which their logistics offers to the various branches of scientific activity; for these may indeed contribute to generating predictions. Rather, the question at stake is: how are the statements logical positivism pronounces on physicalism, science, poetry, metaphysics, and so on, as it approaches philosophy with, ‘verifiable’? Above all, the question at stake is: from where does it get the right to criticize anything? Even the assertion of the logical positivist that the most abstruse concern [Sorge] of the metaphysical speculator revolves around a pseudo-problem leaps beyond the rigid framework of logistical pedantics. Is this supposed to be a prediction? Is this supposed to mean that the speculator generates less relevant insights than the logistical verificator or falsificator? All critique of positivism, if it does not consist merely in barbaric suggestions for abbreviating thought-procedures, can only appear as groundless insults from the standpoint of the positivist himself. Of course, his logic of language condemns him to silence whenever the question of the actual [Wirklichen] is raised. When he speaks [of it], he devolves into contradictions—and contradictions are not his concern. One need only remind him of this. At present, even the most modest of real insights no longer take the form of predictions. “You’re a scoundrel” could be understood as a prediction, but when you’re a scoundrel at the appropriate—that is, appropriately large—scale, you need not show it. My diagnosis does not require the confirmation of future acts, nor even past ones. It follows from the cognition of social reality, and of your position as an accomplice within it.

Parallelism between Paul Tillich’s Standpoint and Logical Empiricism (ca. 1940-1944)

[sourced from MHA Na [800]]⁵⁷

The pre-established harmony of Tillich’s standpoint with logical empiricism: everything which cannot be demonstrated according to “established procedure” is myth. From this, he deduces: the unconditioned can only be thought as a symbol. A symbol can become something believed, be it as a symbol (Cross). Through such impoverished “knowledge” [“Wissen”] (not a single sentence to be taken literally escapes the philosophy which seeks God) they think their logical, fundamental doctrines are true, like the positivists with their probabilistic logistics. Enlightenment = theology: the proposition that the true is mythological is mythology itself. Intentionlessness of truth.⁵⁸ Tillich elevates the theology of the symbol above the judgment of Jewish law. One must not leave the Männer Gottes out of the discussion, but some things must still be asserted. Before Tillich, we are completely naive. We seek after truth directly, we believe what we say. So as he says—it all comes down to who is “serious.”

André Masson. Heraclité. 1943.

Appendix IV. Löwenthal’s Memo on Tillich’s ‘Marxism and Christian Socialism’ (2/2/1942)

Letters on the occasion for the memorandum.

[Excerpt from: Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 2/3/1942]⁵⁹

Yesterday night there was another one of Pollock's religious festivals with Tillich and Löwe. He wanted me to give him some suggestions for a discussion of an outline of Tillich on Marxism and religious Socialism. I had only half an hour's time to formulate a few remarks. They may interest you and I am therefore enclosing them there. You need not have Tillich's outline since his recipe has been known to you for many years.

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 2/11/1942.]⁶⁰

Thank you for your remarks on Tillich’s outline on Christian Socialism. I agree very strongly. I would like to amend some of your remarks but this would really take hours and I want to postpone this until the day I am longing for as much as you are. [...] Please continue to be on guard until this day will come.

Re: Tillich’s Outline on Marxism and Christian Socialism.

[sourced from: MHA Na [538]]⁶¹

[Re: I, 1.]⁶² The question is: what, exactly, about ‘religious socialism,’ as Tillich understands it, is Christian? The concept of pre-history [Vor-geschichte],⁶³ which must still have decisive significance for Marxism today, is unbearable for Christianity. For Christianity, salvation [Heil], once concrete, cannot just be thought away by any theory or in any one individual life; for Marxism, salvation is only the promise which resides within the theory and the individual, it has no existence of its own. However, when religious socialism appeals to the Jewish tradition, it is essentially compatible with Marxism. Accordingly, Tillich is quite right to emphasize the concept of the prophetic so strongly. He could of course have begun somewhat earlier, for instance with Noah. The thought of the covenant God makes with Noah belongs to the same sphere of non-fatalistic optimism well known to Marxism. Redemption [Erlösung] is in principle possible for both the Jew and the Marxist. Of course, for both something active must be done in order to attain it. One does not ‘have it in pocket.’ Human beings have to take care of their own history: Noah has to observe the law and perform the circumcision, Abraham has to sacrifice his son, and the [Jewish] people have to realize the morality which the Prophets have to proclaim. In each of these cases in Jewish history—in distinction from Christianity—the model, the “Vorbild” (in the ambiguous sense of the word [viz., “prototype,” “pre-image”]), cannot be taken from out of the actuality of the past without being taken further itself, but must rather be developed dynamically—as it were, ‘read from the future.’ Perhaps one could say that what the covenant between God and man means for the Jew could signify a covenant between extra- and intra-human nature [ausser- und inner-menschlichen Natur] for the Marxist. (Incidentally, the latter is already present in the lamb-and-wolf utopia of the Prophets.)

[Re: I, 2.] What does ‘the unity of theory and practice’ actually mean? In the last instance, it means that human beings are responsible for their own history. Everything that has to do with determinism, fatalism, and inevitability [Zwangsläufigkeit] has nothing to do with Marxism, insofar as it is more than just a diagnosis of tendencies. Marxism is never just a diagnosis of tendencies. The concept of the “counter-tendencies” [“Gegentendenzen”] in Marxist theory shows at every point that things could go differently. This concept of the unity of theory and practice is also known to Judaism. Why Tillich refers only to Christianity here, as the section heading shows, I am not quite sure. Conversion [Umkehr] and repentance [Buße] are the practice of the Jewish religious theory of the Prophets. Human beings must become conscious of themselves, of what it is that they have done.⁶⁴ (They have a false “class consciousness.”) Incidentally, the masses to whom the Prophets speak are not getting along so well socially or economically. That one must become clear about one’s true interests—the role of consciousness—is something that prophetic Judaism shares with Marxism. Yes, even the motif that Tillich rightly designates as “dehumanization.”⁶⁵

[Re: II, 1.] The accusation of immanence leveled against Marxism is just as old as it is false. It does, in fact, apply to bourgeois relativism, however, as well as the “new philosophy of relativism”⁶⁶ some crypto-Marxists have reduced Marxism into. What Tillich says in II, 2, lines 1-2, is quite correct. But: the “living”⁶⁷ Marxism of which Tillich speaks in IV, 3 is only unlocked [aufgeschlossen] by its opposition to any ‘immanence.’ When Marx says that in every social order, the features of its downfall and the contours of a new order are already present, and when he recognizes in the new order the transformed features of the previous one—this only applies up to the first stages of a classless society. Because of this, Marxism is a negative theology. Marx made the most excruciating effort to provide no account whatsoever of all the positive features of that future humanity, and so referred to his theory as “critique.” The awe which is expressed in Kant’s words about was aus dem Menschen gemacht werden könne is shared and intensified by Marx and the Prophets. (They are “Jews” or “Intellectuals”; “religious intellectualism,” one might say.)⁶⁸ That’s how little ‘immanent’ Marx’s anthropology is, something which is also evident from the fact that with regard to what he said of what remains the same about humanity between prehistory [Vorgeschichte] and history proper [eigentlichen Geschichte], only the most general of formulations are used—God only knows how important they are for the “school” of Marxism, but for Marx at any rate do not constitute what is decisive: for instance, formulations such as “the confrontation between human beings and nature,”⁶⁹ “development of human productive forces,”⁷⁰ and so on.

[Re: III, overall.] The division of Marxism into various branches (scientific, philosophical, sociological, and economic Marxism) is wrong. To speak in theological terms, it’s an old trick of the devil’s to lure Marxism out onto the black ice [Glatteis] of the “disciplines” and then remove one hunk of it after another. This is not Tillich’s point of view, of course. Nevertheless, it must be stressed: Marxism does not wish to replace philosophy or the systems of the individual sciences. Marxism is no world-system.⁷¹ It represents the concerns of the human being in an inhuman world. This includes polemic opposition to the so-called “various ways of considering” [Betrachtungsweise] so-called “social phenomena”; it critiques the procedures of the social sciences (‘humanities’ and ‘social sciences’),⁷² and therefore one cannot make it out to be the object of critique and debate as if it were its own opponent. It has no interest in providing better “explanations,” nor a better ‘economics,’ ‘sociology,’ or ‘philosophy.’ There is no “Marxism” at all, only Marxists whose practice it is to have a theory that changes practice.

(At present, Marxism actually has it easier than before because, as Pollock has made clear in his remarks about state capitalism, it becomes increasingly obvious that it is sheer and utter nonsense to separate so-called economic from so-called political factors. It is all the same, and it is all the same horror.)

[Re: III, 2 and 3.] “Distortion” [“Verzerrung”] and “restriction” [“Beschränkung”] aren’t good criteria because they prejudge a norm and universal standard—precisely that which is unknown to the dialectical perspective. This remark doesn’t signify a relapse into relativism, but only a renewed and even more stubborn indication that no positive content can be read out of the concept of time not yet fulfilled [dass aus dem Begriff der noch nicht erfüllten Zeit… keine positiven Inhalte abzulesen sind], i.e. from the negative theology of Marxism, relative to which something in the present could be “distorted.” The present is subject to critique, and thus to change; but a polemic which looks as much like scientism as this one, which speaks of “restriction” and “distortion,” really still belongs to the mode of “immanence”-thinking against which Tillich so rightly struggles. — L.L. 2/2/42.

André Masson. Werewolf. 1944.

Appendix V. Ten Konzepte from the Encore (1944).

Translator’s note: Reconstructing the Formation of the Encore.

The following fragments were first published in Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 12 (1985) under the title “[Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe zur Dialektik der Aufklärung]” (“[Notes and Sketches for the Dialectic of Enlightenment]"), dated [1939-1942]. The reasons given in the editorial prefatory remark for the title and the dating are problematic for several reasons. First, the title: through the fall 1946 at the earliest, the title of the book now known as Dialectic of Enlightenment (hereafter: DoE), published by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam in 1947, was still titled Philosophische Fragmente (or: Philosophical Fragments, hereafter: PF), later relegated to the subtitle of DoE. Furthermore, the use of the ‘Notes and Sketches’ title is misleading, since these notes come from an independent collection of their own, distinct from the ‘Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe’ in the PF, compiled as an additional manuscript appended to the PF in 1944: the “Konzepte als Zugabe zur Festschrift für Friedrich Pollock” [“Concepts as Encore to the Festschrift for Friedrich Pollock”], or Encore for short, which was the limited print of the PF made for Pollock’s 50th birthday on 5/22/1944. The full manuscript of the Encore is located in MHA [803], “Sammlung B.,” complete with a table of contents listing twenty separate Konzepte, ten of which are translated below.⁷³

Note: Of the other ten, one—”On the Problem of Needs” (1942), Horkheimer’s contribution to the ISR’s 1942 internal seminar on the topic—is already available in translation through Substudies. The remaining nine are slated for release in forthcoming CTWG dossiers on the ‘Dialectical Logic’ and ‘Sociology of the Racket’ projects the ISR core pursued through the mid-1940s.

The editors of the MHGS attempt to assign individual dates to each of the 20 Konzepte independently, and, moreover, assign to each the earliest possible date given its earliest identifiable variant in the form of a draft. However, the dates written (it is not clear when, or by whom—likely by Pollock in the late 1960s) on the Konzepte in “Sammlung B.” are inconsistent at best: about a third are dated “1939/40,” the second largest grouping “1942,” and the rest left undated. The editors of the MHGS adopt these dates whenever possible despite the fact that a number of these Konzepte are assigned different dates in other collections in the MHA, some as late as 1945, as in “Sammlung C. NY Notizen [I]” [MHA Na [803]]. Between “Sammlung C.” and “Sammlung A: ‘Aphorismen’” [MHA Na [802]], the latter of which collectively dates the fragments “ca. 1939-1944,” we find multiple drafts of nearly every fragment from the Festschrift, both the aphorisms of the ‘Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe’ in the PF and the Konzepte of the Encore. There is also the note which opens the manuscript for the Encore: “These concepts have not been looked through. They were eliminated from the ‘Notes and Sketches’ of the Festgabe for being too preliminary.” However, these Konzepte were indeed ‘looked through,’ and not just in the corrections Pollock later makes in ~1969 for a possible publication that never materializes. As the MHGS editors note elsewhere, Horkheimer uses the disclaimer that his notes are “not looked through” on other occasions in the 1940s in order to lower the expectations of his reader in advance, but this does not actually mean the material in question was not revised (as with his 1945 fragment “The Jews and the Oath”).⁷⁴

What do we actually know about the manuscript for the Encore? We now it was compiled in New York by both Horkheimer and Adorno in late 1943 through early 1944, potentially for the purpose of publishing it independently of ‘the book’ proper, as something like a working draft for future extensions of the PF. As Horkheimer writes to Pollock, in a letter dated 11/9/1943:

The aphorisms will be brought into a shape in which they can be published as examples of ideas which are to be incorporated into future chapters of the book. If that program can be fulfilled until [sic] my departure here, Miss v. M. can prepare at least the greater part of the stencils for the mimeographed issue during my stay in New York, and it will not be too much work to complete the volume after my return here. During my stay in New York, Teddie and I will make the necessary preparations for the chapter on anthropology. Our ideas on this topic have now taken such concrete form, there are so many notes on it (apart from the aphorisms which, as you know, refer mostly to this subject) that we should be able to conclude this chapter a short time after the publication of the mimeographed issue.⁷⁵

We also know that Adorno and Horkheimer began collecting a number of ‘aphorisms’ as early as the fall of 1942, and Horkheimer writes a letter to Löwenthal dated 10/31/1942 in which he apologizes for not sending “the aphorisms” after Löwenthal asked to see them again, citing the need for further corrections.⁷⁶ Together with the “Sammlung” in the MHA, these letters suggest that both (1) the aphorisms of the ‘Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe’ in the PF and (2) the Konzepte of the Encore were in fact two distinct sets of notes curated from the same expanding pool of notes (dating back to 1939/40) Horkheimer and Adorno began compiling in 1942, and that the distinction between the ‘Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe’ of the PF from the Konzepte of the Encore was first made in late 1943, when Horkheimer distinguishes the ‘aphorisms’ from the ‘notes’ with ‘ideas’ on anthropology: “[o]ur ideas on this topic have now taken such concrete form, there are so many notes on it (apart from the aphorisms which, as you know, refer mostly to this subject).” Between early November 1943 and Pollock’s birthday in late May 1944, the Konzepte are excluded from the manuscript that would become the Festschrift mimeograph for Pollock’s birthday. We also know that the Festschrift printing of the PF would be revised again in summer 1944, which would result in the ISR’s official, limited run mimeograph of the text of the PF in fall 1944.⁷⁷ In fact, as James Schmidt (2017) notes in his remarks on ‘the making and the marketing’ of the Philosophische Fragmente, the manuscript of the PF existed in three different ‘finished’ versions: (1) the copy presented to Pollock on his birthday on May 22nd, which served as the basis for the subsequent versions; (2) the extra limited print of “de luxe” editions (which were bound better, but presumably had the same contents as the non-“de luxe”) for ISR inner circle associates; (3) the ~280 copies for broader distribution later that fall incorporating the revisions which Löwenthal and Horkheimer began making together as early as June.⁷⁸

To summarize the above: the inconsistency of the dates assigned to the Konzepte in the various collections in the MHA can be explained by the multi-stage process of composition, which as far as I’ve been able to reconstruct it so far took the following course: (phase 1) Adorno and Horkheimer began with a much larger pool of notes (most likely including the ‘schemata’ of spring 1942 as well) in late 1942, following the ISR’s summer/fall ‘Seminar on Needs,’ so (phase 1) Horkheimer (perhaps Adorno as well) attempted to revise the pool through late 1943 and separate some of the ‘aphorisms’ from the rest of the pool of ‘notes,’ until (phase 3) Horkheimer and Adorno got back to work on the whole pool together in late 1943 and made the final revisions and exclusions that would result before May 1944 in separate manuscripts for (1) the aphorisms of the ‘Aufzeichnungen und Entwürfe’ in the PF and (2) the Konzepte of the Encore. In other words, it was towards the end of phase 2 and during phase 3 that Horkheimer and Adorno ‘looked through’ the whole pool of notes and aphorisms they had been writing since 1939 and accumulating since 1942 in order to decide which ‘have not been looked through’ and would need to be ‘eliminated from the ‘Notes and Sketches’ of the Festgabe for being too preliminary.’

This means that in winter ‘43 through spring ‘44, a division was made between three groups of notes: first, the “Notes and Sketches” for the Philosophische Fragmente; second, the Encore of Konzepte for the Festschrift for Pollock, an ultra-limited printing of a manuscript with a selection of fragments from the larger ‘pool’ excluded from the Fragmente; third, the remainder of the ‘pool’ of short notes (which would have included the strays such as “The Self-contradiction of Logical Empiricism (1940?),” “On the Genealogy of Myth (1941?),” “False Conclusions (1940s?),” and etcetera from the above appendix). This third group in particular was formed by default, and seemingly remained a nebulous mass of papers—likely not even gathered in a single location—until Pollock began sorting through Horkheimer’s archive and assigning titles and dates to “Sammlungen” A-D in the late 1960s. While some of the Konzepte from the Encore were evidently revised a number of times (as indicated by multiple extant drafts with various handwritten notes for correction, some of which were and some of which were not incorporated in later drafts of the same), these three groups roughly correspond to three levels of “looking through”: the “Notes and Sketches” were most extensively revised, by both Horkheimer and Adorno; the Konzepte of the Encore were partially revised, not just by Pollock in the late ‘60s but also by Horkheimer throughout ‘43, then in conjunction with Adorno in winter ‘43 to spring ‘44; finally the strays or miscellaneous fragments (the remainder of the larger pool) were the least ‘looked through,’ though the fact that some were originally handwritten and later typed suggests there was some ‘looking through’ around the time of their composition circa 1939/40-1942.

By way of conclusion, I want to make three proposals:

1. That the collection of Konzepte be titled the ‘Encore’ to reflect the independent manuscript in which they were collected by May 1944.

2. That the ‘Encore’ be given the collective dating of ‘1944,’ not only because of the inconsistency of the dates assigned to the individual Konzepte across several collections in the MHA, but also because we know Horkheimer and Adorno were revising various notes and aphorisms from the broader pool as early as 1942, and likely made last revisions to the Konzepte in late 1943 / early 1944. It makes as much sense to date the individual Konzepte by their first drafts as it would to do the same with the individual chapters of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

3. That the ‘Encore’ be attributed to the collaborative authorship of Horkheimer and Adorno, since even if Horkheimer himself originally drafted a majority of the notes (even of those which would become the ‘Notes and Sketches’ in the PF), these notes were drafted in the context of conversations with Adorno going back to 1939 and Adorno had a hand in their composition and revision through late 1943 / early 1944. The fact that this last proposal has to be made at all is proof that Adorno’s correction of a critic in a letter of 6/2/1949, which Noerr himself quotes, has still not been internalized, even if it has been noted in passing:

Dear Max, I am enclosing copies of two crit­ical comments sent to me by their author, Karl Thieme of Basel. I immediately corrected the nonsensical contention that I am the author of ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism.’ People seem unable to resist the temptation to keep us apart, although I wrote to Thieme in February that Dialectic of Enlightenment is ‘the joint work of Horkheimer and myself, to the extent that every sentence belongs to us both.’ Warm regards, Teddie.⁷⁹

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Contents.

Poetry and Morals.

No Path to Truth.

Jewish Character.

The Impossibility of Poetry.

The Enemy.

Consciousness.

An Old-Fashioned Problem.

Physiognomy.

On The Psychology of Religion.

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Poetry and Morals.

In the literature of the bourgeoisie, the author’s outspoken tendency, his respective thema probandum, was to a large extent superficial. Often enough, his reactionary or progressive attitude, his conscious conviction, contradicted the spirit of his presentation. Think of [Balzac’s] Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes [1839-1847], in which the bigoted moral of the restoration appears more as a sensation which seasons and flavors the adventure than it manifests as a belief—as wistful as the Ave Maria in [Karl May’s] Winnetou [1875-1910]. The positivism of [Flaubert’s] Salammbô [1862]—it’s hard to say whether its Carthaginian horrors serve more to delight or disgust the European reader—is already prefigured in the style of [Voltaire’s] Candide [1759], which has a thema probandum that is truly humane. Their prototype is the “divine Marquis.” The adventures of Leonore and Castellina in [de Sade’s] Aline et Valcour [1795] are no less piquant than those of his Justine [1791] and Juliette [1797]. And yet the moral is reversed. The Hymn to Vice outlines the plan for the evolution of the same individual and social developments as the Justification of Virtue, and it makes negligible difference for the presentation whether the author hands the laurels to the monster Noirceuil, as in Juliette, or to Karl Mohr’s spiritual twin Rompa-Testa, as in Aline. Externality of morals isn’t just evident within the same œuvre. The analysis of vice, the psychology of perversion, the demonstration of the connection between atheism and crime are no more passionately pursued in the works of the Marquis than in those of his antipode, De Maistre. The bloodthirsty proposals of Saint-Fond’s, that terrible minister from Juliette, already largely correspond with the social ideas cultivated by De Maistre’s company. The speeches of Saint-Fond could very well have been delivered on that first Petersburg evening over the river Neva while supping in the palace of the minister. The Hymn to Order and Criminal Justice, where one meets, here, the President of Parliament, Prince, and Minister, and there, the Knight, Count, and Senator—exactly the same characters—is the same speech to the letter, except that in the counter-revolutionary De Maistre, the bloody intent is not, unlike with Marat’s funerary orator, relieved by subsequent orgy as an aphrodisiac of fantasy, but reserved for some sinister practice. The opposite moral covers the same content in both cases as a thin rationalization, and it seems as if the ethical and pedagogical intention in literature merely served as shield for the presentation of the extraordinary, the gruesome, as the conscious does for the unconscious.

Because this externality, this lack of substantive connection, is aesthetically untenable, the renunciation of the thesis was a concern of great literature long before the novel without plot or point, long before the symbolism and objectivity of Flaubert. Scientific literature wanted to emulate bourgeois science and politics, sticking strictly to the given, as Machiavelli once did—dedicating his statesmanlike treatises to democracy and its sworn enemies alike, all according to the needs of the moment, without thereby detracting from their value whatsoever. Of course this has not been as easy for literature. Kleist’s novellas have that neutral positivity as their highest aim, and yet every word breathes insurrection against the collective. Only today, at the end of this process, in the mass literature of the best-seller, has the last remnant of this sentiment once distinctive of the work of art yielded to considerations of the most film-ready version. A new sentiment creeps in—the spirit of the public. As with the enlightenment’s reversion into positivist philosophy, the objectivity of art which first sprang from resistance to the pressure of public powers has been brought into complete and perfect harmony with them. The artist simply presents life and, just like the learned expert of today, relegates any reflection on it to the frivolities of debate clubs, vague speculation, and idle chatter. The distinction between the genius and the man of success, between Joyce and Werfel, lies in the fact that the former consciously erases all traces of tendency and thereby blocks the power of that which exists from entry into the work of art in the form of opposition, while the latter delivers himself over to the powers that be and incorporates the moral into his routine.

The path followed by the bourgeois trades in general is reflected in this development. The moral represents a goal, the meaning and purpose of the whole. But this is first socially determined in anonymity, by means of the pressure of the market and, subsequently, by the conscious organization of monopoly. The individual, however, is consigned to work, and to allow this meaning and purpose to be given to them from without. Everyone should stay in their lane, keep to their machine, build their bridges, research their hormones, fill their fuel tanks—be a “specialist.” The path and vocation of society as a whole cannot be assigned to any one sphere, with the exception of the country estates of the top rackets, the secret cabinets of the industrial associations, and the golf courses upon which the course of the whole world is decided. Artists should to stick to their paint and poeticizing. They may even depict the highest spheres of society, so long as they do so in the service of some racket, and in a respectful or progressive tone. If nothing else will do, then with the precise degree of malice some party or trade association may find useful in its struggle with the other rackets. Only theory is intolerable. Art must therefore merge into theory completely if it would rescue that minima moralia for which it exists.

What appeared throughout the eighteenth century as a moral tendency within poetry and, in the end, would be excised from it, was originally one with poetry’s essence. The work of art illuminated actuality with a light it did not borrow from it. Rather, it made eloquent the secret of actuality itself. In this its true character was revealed: it judged the judge. Only in its decline did the vocation of the work of art to express what actuality is back to it, to pass verdict, become independent and external to the work of art as a ‘moral,’ as a ‘tendency.’ The great endeavors of the great authors not to bother with such trifles and remain true to the thing itself stems from their intimation that artistic presentation and verdict were, in origin, one and the same. They sought to bring the decline to a halt by renouncing ‘the moral’ as inartistic, and, therefore, as untrue. The separations which have been introduced by the enlightenment and its progression cannot, however, be repealed in art any more than other areas. They are inexorable; they compel recognition. Wedekind, Sternheim and Brecht sought to do this splitting justice by deliberately detaching the moral from the context of the action, and cynically announcing this as such. But through this severing of artistic connections, which was impossible in any event, these same connections were supposed to be rescued. These artists consciously did what occurred half-unconsciously in the works of the Marquis and Balzac. When the moral is announced in this manner, it gains in lucidity, but not in depth. Depth still only comes from the now-lost unity, something which the seemingly ‘realistic’ substance of modern poetry is a more faithful witness to than the artistic tendency which fails to pass over into the content itself. Actuality is better illuminated and condemned through the events portrayed in a work than the moral it aims to impart. However, in being detached from the substance of the work of art, reflection doesn’t just become more ideological. It also becomes sharper. Conscious, reflected morals, which, in the extant division of labor, fall within the remit of philosophy rather than art, at least seem to shed their ambiguity, and any attempt to return to ‘the concrete,’ ‘the whole,’ can only be romantic and reactionary. This path leads to the artificial revival of mythologies, and even to the clearance sale of culture—precisely what the romantic and the reactionary wanted to avoid. The ethics of Aristotle is both more restricted and more universal than the tragedy of Aeschylus; the practical philosophy of Kant is both more pedantic and more liberal than the poetry of Goethe. Today, what matters is imparting the secret affinity of the work of art to nature, through which the spell might be lifted, to the philosophical concept, which, in its abstractness, is still in the service of the spell to this day.

No Road to Truth.

For Schopenhauer, the forms of intuition of space and time bar the subject from cognizing the thing-in-itself. Only by breaking through the principle of individuation—that is, in death—will a person catch a glimpse of the truth. In the very same instant, however, their light is forever extinguished. But this doctrine may also be applied to the living. Language is the means of cognition. But language doubles the world. In becoming its own medium, language becomes either means of domination or image [Bild]. But the image lies, and the means of domination will be overthrown. The instrument of language thwarts the very purpose for which it exists: cognition. Here too, the light is snuffed out the very moment there is something worth illuminating. The endeavor of Kabbalah, and Jewish theology overall, to make the word the truth unto itself is indeed wiser than idealism, but agrees with the latter so far as it makes subjective consciousness or objective spirit—in any case, the instrument—into the thing itself. Both fall victim to a peculiar fetishism.

Jewish Character.

The greatest defect of the Jews is: that they have not exercised rule for thousands of years, that they have always been dependent on the protection of others, however rich they may have been. That is why they find it so difficult to comprehend that the condition of all culture until now has been repression, intimidation, and injustice. They want to live in peace and security, to have opportunities for advancement and development, and they hold the world’s ruling caste responsible for having created or failed to create the social conditions for these things. They demand the impossible.

The distinction in character between Jew and gentile lies in the coldness and detachment the exercise of iron discipline has given to members of the “ruling class”⁸⁰ and, ultimately, to all of those who have been free in actuality. The Jews were not free; they had not overpowered nor suppressed. What history has allotted to them has slipped through the meshes of its net, for otherwise it would not exist.

They are utopians. In terms of consciousness, they seek to assimilate to everything gentile and deny the lack of experience upon which their mission to do so rests. But their essence, formed by history, belies them. The discord between their being and their speaking, their individual and historical impression, is expressed in every one of their features. It is also the guarantee against complete betrayal. They must bear witness to the impossible, whether they wish to or not.

The Impossibility of Poetry.

Art rests on mimesis; it imitates, even when abstract. But only the formative arts [bildende Kunst] can truly do so. Poetry finds refuge in the excuse that the fantastic figure its language calls forth depicts the essence of things. It would be surrogate for the formative arts. With this, it shamefully conceals its true claim, if it has not forgotten it altogether. It would that it were itself illustration [Abbild], and the formative arts only its independent, reified element in extension: the formative arts as petrified language. The word, and not the image [Bild], has the vocation of hitting upon the thing itself; the image, however well fashioned, always misses its mark. Music too is only its element adrift, nearer to the word than painting or sculpture, so closer to truth, but, precisely in its highest manifestations, only impotent effervescing. The separation of the arts from one another is as little reversible as that of art from science. We lack the key to sublate it. Neither the abstract consciousness of the ground of this separation nor the false concretization of the separated in the total work of art carries us one step further. Philosophy can do little more than express this.

The Enemy.

In the spirit of the Christian world order, all actions had to conform to one maxim: do nothing which endangers your eternal salvation. It was egoism for the other side. Whether the medieval human being acted accordingly, it’s difficult to make out today. To draw the conclusion from the biographies of some earlier popes who, following their election to the papacy, tried, horrified, to escape their office out of concern for the salvation of their souls—this conception, at least, does not seem entirely incorrect.

In more modern times, it is also the case that all actions are to conform to one maxim: do nothing which endangers your income. It is egoism for this side. The bourgeois human being can only be understood by his dogged commitment to this egoism. The whole of his upbringing aims to teach him to hate himself if he acts differently. For this would make him weak, pathetic, mad.

The transformation of the heavenly into the earthly egoism has brought with it the wonders which are to be boasted of in this present era. One must not fail to appreciate the tremendous progress made in the step from superstitious to worldly egoism. Once made, every thought which wasn’t in the service of advancement became ideology. Calvin was the executor of a social upheaval in comparison to which even the totalitarian one of the present appears to be less invasive. Nevertheless, this upheaval too designates a transformation of the anthropological structure. Hitler laughs at nation, race, Volk. In the same instant the Völker eradicate one another, the illusory semblance [Schein] of their substantiality disappears. Hegel would have said that they refute each other: dialectics in practice with “whistling bombs.”⁸¹

The prehistory of humanity, in which we stand, has completely robbed the human being of its mythological and philosophical cloaks. At the end of the world, it reveals itself to be that which it has by now become: as blind to all except the narrowest of purposes—as enemy. This and this alone is what the powerless and the animals have always known humanity to be.

Consciousness.

Human beings fear death more than animals: they have a concept of it. But what is consciousness for, if not to liberate! Confronting death, animals are engulfed by an all-powerful fear. They have no consciousness to shield them from it. Human beings ought to die more easily than animals, out of a sense of decency, so to speak, just as one endeavors to be better than mere drive: on a hot day, the thirsty child gets the first drink, while the mark of the more experienced is taking their own thirst less seriously. What matters here is not the domination of one’s own nature—human beings are certainly accomplished enough at this already. Education provides the inner, science the outer techniques in the struggle against all that threatens us. When it comes to displays of courage, today’s human beings run convulsively before each other’s canons, their fear of death well suppressed. What is needed is not domination, but the gesture of gentle renunciation which arises from that consideration the weaker who lack such a clear perspective of the whole might otherwise be forced to forego. Through consciousness, human beings must be made capable of this gesture before death.

Struggle and Non-Violence.

The revolutionary idea launches an assault on the injustice of existing society. Its ideal is less abundance than justice. None should have it worse off than others through no fault of their own. Human beings should govern their own lives through common resolution, and determine for themselves whether they would have more leisure or prosperity. The decisions should not lie in the hands of ruling cliques, but actually belong to those who will be governed by them, and the standing of those who execute the decisions should not be one bit better than the ordinary citizen, just one service to be performed among others. No class strata may exist in society upon whom the burden of society, the misery, the worry, the worst labor is foisted; the arrangement which has dishonored every society up to now, in which the hardest and most loathsome labor is also linked to a bad life, must disappear; so far as difficult and dangerous labor is not shared by all in rotation, or does not disappear with better conditions, it must be balanced by advantages which those who perform the more agreeable functions do not have. None should stand outside or below. Even if the most fantastical material conditions of existence were to be actualized for the majority, but for some individuals, however few, the senseless misery would nevertheless continue, membership in society would be a privilege, the whole of it a racket, and fear, lies, and crime would prevail within it.

The revolutionary idea is directed against class society itself. It would actualize in humanity that which indifferent nature cannot achieve: life and happiness for all. Consciousness is the organ of such actualization—today, as our longing, imagination, and goal; tomorrow as the incarnation of those compacts through which human beings will arrange their lives in common. Consciousness is the freedom of human beings to determine right life for themselves; whenever it denies this goal, it stands in ubsublatable contradiction [unaufhebbaren Widerspruch] with itself. Whenever power, greatness, and Übermenschlichkeit are regarded as values in themselves, they cease to be moments of a freer humanity and contain the proclamation of an eternal rage humans harbor against themselves. Thinking and domination are incommensurable. However, the negation of domination brings human beings into revolutionary opposition to that which exists, entangling them in the class struggle for the very power they would abolish [abschaffen]. The man of power and the conformist may win peace and admiration, he leads a productive existence; the revolutionary struggles in the stinking muck and mire of the opposition party or even of their sect. Participation in oppression and wickedness leads to harmony; the will to harmony to squalor and hostilities.

The teachings of the Gospels and those of other primordial religious [Urreligionen] sought to overcome the contradiction through non-resistance. They refused the acceptance of injustice, participation in it, without fighting it in practice. They proclaimed that justice, whether on earth or in wherever lies beyond, could not be actualized through violence. They took suffering upon themselves, but not the struggle for power. Naturally, the ecclesiastical hierarchy warped the original spirit of this passivity into the affirmation of its violence. Their theological representatives, together with the divinely appointed authorities, motivated the pact between the worldly rulers and the leaders of the church, the covenant of power against the powerless. They falsified, accommodated, mutilated the clear spirit of the word: to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, free the prisoners; not to kill, not to curse, not to arm oneself in defense—all of this, they claimed, was not meant to be taken literally. It had to be interpreted, deepened, restricted, and, when nothing else would suffice, be declared symbolic. Within the Book, wherein the program of peace, justice, and non-conformity to evil is announced in the very first pages, as only the pamphlets of the anarchists have since—today, the Sermon on the Mount would brand its author a fool or a criminal in the eyes of all—the blessed Fathers of the church quickly discovered precisely which words were to be taken literally in order to refit Christianity for the benefit of their bosom friends, military generals and prison wardens, the whip and the sword. If scripture teaches that violence is not to be resisted in kind, the priests did not, in fact, meet this violence with any other; instead they grounded, derived, justified, supported, and consecrated the violence of that which exists to the same extent it provided them with bread and honor. Their world-historical function was to prepare Christianity for the rulers who would have found it rather difficult to digest, to remodel it into the tool of domination. Nevertheless, the Gospel has preserved the revolutionary idea in the form of non-violence, however much the scribes and learned scholars of scripture sought to suppress it under woodpiles for pyres and gallows: the idea of the abolition of injustice.⁸²

The contradiction which resides within this idea between the fight for human conditions and non-violence has solidified in the present into a seemingly insuperable antinomy. Non-violence manifestly serves the world up on a platter for the most power-hungry states and cliques. It leads without the slightest hope to the contrary towards the victory of the very worst. On the other hand, participation in oppositional parties and movements, enlisting with one side against the others on the international or national front, means the promotion of domination, however modified in form. Power-politics recoils back onto its practitioners. Those states and parties which seem the better today will be the worse tomorrow. Practical struggle demands strict, hierarchical organization, the deferral of humanity, alliances with villains, the suppression of one’s moral reservations. It leads to the fellowship of allies such as Churchill and Stalin, Philip Murray and Lord Mountbatten. There seems to be no way out of the passive or active aid which each individual must now lend to heartless fate.

And yet, this antinomy leads astray. This antinomy is itself part and parcel of the worse actuality. The logic which would straightforwardly ground practice on the idea is less ironclad than it might appear to the members of the party. There is not so great a distinction between the student of the Bible who, martyred by non-violence in the concentration camp, is a testimony shining far and wide and the member of the party who, in the grip of the conquest for power, must look thousand-fold death in the eye every day—provided that both call actuality by its right name. Each bears witness to and for the other, to truth. Precisely because the mode in which they ground their individual existence is necessarily confused and fragile, precisely because the moment of their subjectivity is part of even the most self-evident moment of their cognition, they are drawn nearer one another. They both express the revolutionary idea. There is no path adequate to the profession of the truth except through the form of concrete resistance to injustice according to honest cognition. However little these forms are necessarily derived from the idea, only someone who concretely fulfills a single form expresses its truth. The tension between truth and practice is caught in constant flux, and the poles are transformed in the process. There are periods in which the presupposition of theory is subordination to the practice of the party, and others in which this would spell death for it. The expression of resistance, linguistic and extra-linguistic, is subject to history. Today, both the religious sectarian and the political fighter are bearers of humanity in itself, so far as they sacrifice the idea neither to powers of the world nor even to their own leaders, but rather keep its light for and against the world. Nothing is left to arbitrariness, and yet there is no recipe. Even the demand to speak the truth cannot be derived with any more surety than any other sacrifice. Only that the lie not be proclaimed is what the idea demands in unequivocal form, and even this refusal is enough to deliver them over to misery and persecution. The idea lights in the eyes of those who cannot be bribed by that which exists, peacemakers and fighters alike. That they bear within themselves unswerving trust in the possibility of the good, that they neither adapt their spirit to that which is unjust nor pray to that which is false no matter the cost—this is the sole guarantee that some day humanity will not only preserve the truth, but actualize it.

There is one degeneration of the revolutionary idea: susceptibility to the subordination of one’s own person. The idea negates the ruling order, the socially imposed contrast between happiness and misery. The idea negates power. Within the susceptibility to subordination of one’s person, however, lies the same feel for power which now drives humanity towards the slaughter-bench. The idea stems from the love of life. That this is cut short by others engenders this idea, as well as resistance in general. The organ for cheating others out of their happiness develops only where the blessings of existence have been perceived. Sheer existence, when it is not torn to shreds by hunger and cold, humiliation and hard labor, is itself a blessing to the very same heart which cannot be satisfied with anything less than paradise for humanity. Whoever is solely preoccupied with their own rights, who is always difficult to handle, who only ever has their own value in mind—whether out of principle or directly from malice—is the enemy of the idea, however zealously they propagate it. The faithful maidservant of a world now past who never watched the hand of the clock was nevertheless far ahead in her stupidity than the well-organized wage laborer who cleverly counted out each passing minute when it comes to the humility towards life without which socialism is only one new form of madness. Her naive willingness to work, her easiness to please, her fool’s sense of justice are the very elements which point to a better future. She is free of malice. The revolutionary idea is not inflamed by the excesses of those above, which it would see preserved, but by the the misery of those below, which it would see overcome. In view of the suffering throughout all nature, which must even outlast socialism, the bearer of the revolutionary idea does not set their interest on abundance—which, in the midst of horror, only ever grants a vapid happiness—but rather in the disappearance of the terror which is necessarily bound to the abundance of today. Non-violence resides within this idea no less than does the struggle.

An Old-Fashioned Problem.

In the nineteenth century, whenever her man is well off, the bourgeois woman lives a life of modest luxury. She accomplishes nothing anyone would ever pay for. In the mornings, she instructs the servant girl on what to order from the suppliers. Occasionally, she even cleans a room to show the servant-girl just how spotless it ought to be. The children have a governess. Afternoons are for shopping, tea, and other distractions. When the man returns to her every evening, he is astonished by her sadness, which increases and becomes more bitter with age. He fulfills his obligations, economically and sexually. A secret anger against the woman takes root in him. Most of the time, his anger is be assuaged or forgotten. But in crucial moments, it always returns, particularly when the woman—without grounds, of course—displays envy towards the younger women in his acquaintance. How ungrateful and narrow-minded! Why would he toil so, if not for her sake! Not for the children: they will receive a good education, and some day take care of themselves. So the man comes to resent his wife, quite unconsciously and obstinately, for all the aggravations of business.

And this is one of those self-activating mechanisms for chaining the affects, for numbing human beings towards one another; one of the mechanisms for establishing the equilibrium of civil society! In anger, the man identifies himself with the social apparatus which mutilates the woman as much as it mutilates him. On top of the barbarism of objective necessity, he adds the subjective thirst for revenge upon the victim. He misses that under her ignorance of the world, under her silly egoism, under those disfiguring marks by which the woman is marred by barriers foist upon her by such far-reaching social orders (as marred as the man becomes in enforcing them), something remains of that boundless claim which society otherwise smothers out of the child. Even in the most terrific spite into which her womanly bitterness, compounded by physiological factors, might intensify as years go by, there insists a lack of resignation before evil, against the boundedness of human power and transience. The hysteria of Art Nouveau is the antithesis of Stoic philosophy, that odious product of all bourgeois eras.

Instructions for men: never side with the baseness of reality against the unfulfillable dreams of the woman. In order to hate reality, which the woman tends to represent in her exasperation over the man’s failures in business, you must learn a hatred stronger than any of which either of you are capable. Never betray the unfulfillable expectations of her youth, for which you once loved her, even after they’ve recoiled into despair.

Physiognomy.

The decline of the bourgeois form of power, which was incarnated in money, is visible on the faces of its bearers. They look at the world in a humorless, angry, misanthropic way. They like others as little as themselves. Something of this has always been discernible in the bourgeoisie. There are even tells which betray that the love of the holy St. Francis was a legend from the beginning. If the oil paintings of Renaissance patricians betray the barbaric ruthlessness that proved so successful in the coming centuries, daguerreotypes and photographs of the nineteenth century show a building expression of anger and disgust. It is not necessarily tied to the possession, let alone exercise, of power. Think of the pre-war German officer. It is, however, in the face of the twentieth century salesman.

The pinched, pressed, and crushed expression of late liberals is connected with their waning influence. They have no other faith than success, yet have to run crying for help to the military and other powers at every turn. Their immediate domination is increasingly reduced to dismissing the accountants and letting the workers go. The majority of these Herren, to speak in the terms of their own ideology, have been ‘parasites’ for half a century, and have even suspected as much in secret. They bear the traces of their merely mediated domination in body and spirit. The emerging generation of engineers and directors already belongs to a different form of domination entirely.

On The Psychology of Religion.

From the mouths of their prophets, the Jews took up the teachings of peace, love, and justice. Though they may have grumbled, or even acted against, it, they honored this speech as human.

In Christianity, the Messenger [Verkünder] was lifted to God. What measure of alienation, hatred, and disgust the principles of Christianity must have aroused in the peoples of Europe if their teachers had to be thrust so far into the beyond or else be shoved aside in contempt! What dogged lust—which the metaphysical eternalization of evil in Christian theology still betrays! The charm of the Divine Comedy of Christianity is not the allure of heaven, but hell—as much in misdeeds as their punishment. In the deification of Jesus, one can still detect traces of the repugnance his teachings were met with among all who were not slaves. This could only be endured by inventing the devil. He is, so to speak, compensation for the immaculate conception. Since, for whatever economic and social reasons, Jesus could not officially be made Beelzebub himself, the role was assigned to a double upon whom the hatred Jesus himself perpetually kindled could be unleashed in all its fury.

For the Jews, however, who introduced Christianity to the Germans and the other wild tribes, no effort was made to double them, and they were immediately identified with the devil. Without any circumlocution, they are considered the God-with-us [Gottes-bei-uns] and experience all the roiling wrath unleashed from out of those Europeans into whom civilization was driven by the hammer blows of Christendom. Radiating out from the Mediterranean, anti-Semitism increased as it spread further East through Europe. In Germany, the devil bore Jewish features, and the Jews bore the stigma that was meant for love, for Logos, and for truth.

Freud, Reik, Samuel, and others saw much of this. Where they falter is the character of Christianity itself. The religious ground of anti-Semitism is not to be sought in the converted masses, but in Christianity itself. It deifies the civilizing virtues, the reverse side of mass alienation and demonization. However true the teachings of the Gospel may be in themselves, they are perverted by their religious conversion. The devil may have manifold psychological sources, but the lie from which he draws his eternal life-force is the deification of the Son of Man himself. This has significant consequences in the historical course of domination, both direct and indirect. Alongside the sword of Charlemagne, the coffers of the Jewish merchants—for whom, of course, the whole business has proven a bad one over the centuries—had a share in this. The horror of civilization stems from this: that it could only be bought with lies. Anti-Semitism in the last instance is not so much the veiled hatred of Christianity as the consequence of the fact that Christianity is itself this veil. The hatred of God is secondary; the true hatred lies in deification. The cross adored instead of abhorred is already the infamous, solemn vow sworn to the torture machines European history has so dutifully fulfilled. Ever since the cross was sanctified, every wood seems destined by nature to become the material for gallows and pyres.

André Masson. Emblematic view of Toledo. 1936.

Appendix VI. On the Sociology of Art (1943/1946). Horkheimer (co-authors: Adorno and Löwenthal)

[sourced from: MHA Na [805]]⁸³

Sociology of art. That science which investigates the interaction between art and the social life-process. It studies the dependence between the forms and subject matters of art works on the basic structure of society, just as it examines the meaning of art works for the sustaining and overthrowing of given social conditions. The social role of art varies from time to time. The same artwork will take on a new meaning for each succeeding generation, in each new historical period. A Greek temple has an appearance in classical Greece wholly different from that in the Christian Middle Ages, the Renaissance or in the Counter-Reformation. The sociology of ruins is quite different from the sociology of a sanctuary.

As a distinct cultural realm art is a product of the social division of labor. Among primitive tribes this rhythm, song and work constitute a continuous whole; singing is at once the expression and conciliation of the pain of toil. The first paintings were probably made to keep away the dead, whose spirits men dreaded. Even during periods of advanced cultural development, such as the Middle Ages, art was not dissociated from ritual and secular practices.⁸⁴ Religious paintings and cathedrals were not viewed aesthetically any more than furniture and clothes. The former served material or religious ends, not to mention social prestige.

The primitive expressions of art as attempts to mitigate the pain of labor and death by techniques of imitation and invention, are reactions of men to the compulsion of reality. This still holds true for the later stages of art.⁸⁵ Art works mirror the world in the light of man’s undiminished claim to unfold himself and to realize his potentialities;⁸⁶ they objectify those experiences which have not yet been set forth in everyday language or schematized.⁸⁷ In everyday life human reactions, thoughts and feelings are oriented by practical ends; in the last analysis, by the existing modes of production. Men perceive the world in terms of [categories]⁸⁸ enforced and born of current practical needs. An artwork, however, reflects reality in an alienated way, heterogeneous to the sphere of practical ends.⁸⁹ What appears as necessary and absolute in the practical world is revealed through art to be contingent and relative.

Not only are the critical literary works which appear some time before great historical changes antagonistic to the goals of the practical world, but even so are those works which were intended by their authors as glorifications of their own society. The tendency to be outspoken is only a single—and by no means the most important—element of an art work on which the sociologist of art focuses his analysis. The loving care devoted to the humblest detail, the delicacy with which things are looked at, the justice that is done even to the most insignificant, the amount of freedom left to the part in spite of its being integrated within the whole—every trait of this kind indicates the tension between the work of art and reality.⁹⁰ Hence the formal elements, just as much as the contents or outspoken theses of art works, have a sociological relevance.

Sociology of art is to be distinguished from psychology of art. Balzac, for example, was a royalist and many of his works contain an absolutistic credo. Yet his works, if for no other reason than the [magnanimity and]⁹¹ skill with which they portray the deep emotions of men from all walks of life, are just as liberal and democratic as the works of the republican Victor Hugo. Sociological analysis strives for insight into the objective relationship between art works and social reality. From this point of view, the psychology and the fate of the artist constitute only aids to sociological understanding.⁹²

Likewise, the association of art works with individual social groups is one of the tasks of the sociology of art. This task includes an examination of the style of art works, of characterizing views and thoughts; it is an investigation into what past and present strata of society particular artworks are in fundamental accord with. It is possible that sometimes an upper middle class artist produces lower middle class, aristocratic or proletarian work of art. Now this gathering together of detached facts into a single confirmation has its purpose insofar as without a sociological identification of the aforementioned thoughts and views there will be neither comprehension of the art work in question nor will the social reality of the art work be fully disclosed. What actually matters, however, is to grasp a new and unique formation of social elements in each work of art, a formation which helps to make the opaque reality transparent again and again.⁹³

The ultimate object sought for in sociological analyses of the artworks is the power of insight of the latter, the ability of artworks to make society intelligible. The historical effectiveness of art objects does not lie solely within this capacity of great works of art to give insight into social processes. Sociology of art is also concerned with the negative functions of the aesthetic. It shows that the independence of art from the world of practical ends is, for the greater part, only an appearance and discloses the agreement between art and social power in all its ramifications.⁹⁴ From the role of art as an hypnotic tool in the hands of the primitive sorcerer to its crafty use by modern authoritarian cliques constitutes, as it were, a history of the dark or sinister aspect of the aesthetic.⁹⁵ [The sociology of these ideological aspects does not merely refer to]⁹⁶ those instances in which art consciously serves some purpose but especially to the distortions of the world to be found in the aesthetic realm, such as are to be found in works reflecting the appearance of the world to different periods and classes. Thus art reflects the illusions necessarily conditioned by the situations of groups in the social process.⁹⁷ In these instances art has helped to consolidate the obsolete, to prolong injustice, and to usher in oppressions.

The social role of art is no more amenable to all-embracing principles of explanation than are other cultural phenomena.⁹⁸ Furthermore, the boundaries between philosophy of art, aesthetics (Kunstwissenschaft), and sociology of art are in many instances not to be sharply drawn with any significance. Fundamental even today for sociology of art are the great philosophical treatises; e.g., all of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, the writings of Spencer, Comte, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. Among the few works which are exclusively devoted to sociology of art are the book by M. Guyau, L’art au point de veu sociologique, who was a student of Durkheim, has played an important role. The works of Eduard Fuchs give [give extensive sociological analyses of whole fields of art.]⁹⁹ Mention should be made of the works of [Alois Riegel.]¹⁰⁰ To these should be added all general works in the fields of sociology and anthropology. – M.H.

Remarks on the Sociology of Biography and Mass Culture (1942). Löwenthal and Horkheimer.

[Excerpt from Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 2/3/1942.]¹⁰¹

I was very pleased with your telegram of February 2nd, and I am eagerly looking forward to see your article. Why have you not yet sent me the manuscript in its untranslated form? Reading this new study of yours means for me very much because it would substitute unheld theoretical conversations during 8 months, and because it is the first visible fruit of a way of living we have always dreamt of. (It is—to repeat it again—against reason, justice and (my) happiness that, so far, it is happening without me but with Teddie!) I am afraid the pages (on biography) I sent you give a very incomplete picture of the basic idea. It consists in a dialectical concept of the “empirical” findings, namely, that the heroes as well as the categories in which they are treated belong decisively to the realm of consumption: this reflects indeed the receptive state of mind of the masses and the unconscious admission that the sphere of production and active transformation does not offer any more opportunities (I can quite neatly prove this point by comparison of the biographical heroes in the same periodical 30 years ago, when they were industrialists, great bankers and representatives of real culture); but while on the one hand the collection of biographies represents just one more section of modern mass culture of which all of us have now no doubt a clear picture, this phenomenon also contains the dream of a future mankind who might center its interests around happiness not in the harshness of work and labor but in the enjoyment of sensual goods in the broadest meaning of the term. While, on the one hand, historical information for the masses becomes a cobweb of lies and of ridiculous accumulation of the most insignificant facts and figures, the same masses show by their very occupation with these people and with their ways of “consumption” a longing for a life of innocence in “consuming” (and a hate against the identity of production and death). From my own inner life I can deduct more and more how hateful the whole idea of production in the sense of permanent changes, transformations, incessant treatment of man and nature by machines and organizations must become to the unconscious and even conscious life of the majority. In a certain sense, the German biographies which I have studied in former years and this American material belong quite closely together. The first one falsifies history by an enchanting net of profound metaphysical and metapsychological phantasmagories; the second one is just the reverse and instead of taking history too serious, it takes it too funny. But: they both represent distorted utopias of a concept of man to which we stand in an affirmative way, namely, they both imply the unconditioned importance of the real, living and existing individual: his dignity and happiness. —I don't want to continue, but I guess you will understand in what direction this all leads.

[Excerpt from Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 10/14/1942.]¹⁰²

… I again went through your last child, the “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” and I was as happy with it as the first time. Since I was in the train, I did not have the energy to do it in a “thorough” way, that means, making annotations on the margin. I did not find anything essential which I would like to contradict. In some instances, I found that some most important points you make should be more elaborated in order to show their tremendous significance. I think here of statements such as the omission of social issues from the biographies. You mention this fact, it is true, as point one on page 26 and you again return to it later on, but I think you could here emphasize the great law of the prestabilized harmony between the mechanisms of the profit-system and its ideological requirements. The social issues are omitted because to mention them would prevent certain groups from buying the books and at the same time the omission is a function in the ideological apparatus. Furthermore, the omission of all really decisive issues impoverishes also the issues of which one can speak, in a similar way as we become poor entertainers in a party when we know that certain topics are tabu, even if we did not intend to mention them. Again I noticed that you lay too much stress on activity versus passivity, sphere of production versus sphere of consumption. You say that the life of the reader is scheduled and governed by what he gets, not by what he does. The truth is, however, that doing and getting has become identical in this society. The mechanisms which govern man in his leisure time are absolutely the same than those which govern him when he works. I would go so far as to say that till today the key for the understanding of the behaviour patterns in the sphere of consumption is the situation of man in industry, his schedule in the factory, the organization of office and working place. Consumption tends to vanish today, or should I say, eating, drinking, looking, loving, sleeping become “consumption,” for consumption already means the man has become a machine, outside as well as inside of the workshop? —I again thoroughly enjoyed the analyses on pp. 28-76. All I would have to say would be psychological associations of minor importance and, of course, for reaching theoretical considerations on the problem of mass society. Sometimes the language does not sound very familiar to me, so, when you speak of your own methods in a somewhat fearful and fussy way which, in spite of Lazarsfeld, could perhaps be done in a more superior tone. —I don't like it when you say that “something cannot be emphasized enough.” —The paragraph on pp. 66 and 67 which starts so elucidatingly, ends with a somewhat forced analogy. But this can show you that I really have only minor critical remarks. On p. 40 paragraph 2, you come very close to one of the deepest problems of modern biography in particular, and mass-culture in general. You say: “There is always a shortcoming in a biography: by picking just one individual out of the multitude of people and events… .” This picking out is often identical with a shortening of the objects. You will remember those terrible scenes in the movies when some years of a hero's life are pictured in a series of shots which take about one or two minutes, just to show how he grew up or old, how a war started and passed by, and so on. This trimming of an existence into some futile moments which can be characterized schematically, symbolizes the dissolution of humanity into elements of administration. Mass-culture in its different branches reflects the fact that the human being is cheated out of his own entity which Bergson so justly called durée. This is true for the heroes of the biographies as well as for the masses. The events and achievements which the biographies mention in the lives of heroes are the reified features under which, in reality, they suffered and by which they missed their particular happiness. Even the heroes are cheated and unhappy. The counter-trend in mass-culture is represented in the moments of escape from it. Since man's wakeful state today is regulated in all details, the real escape is sleep or madness, or at least some kind of shortcoming and weakness. The protest against the movies is not found so much in bitter critiques but in the fact that people go in and sleep or make love to each other. Every word they could say against the picture would already be in the language of the cinema. …

[Excerpt from Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 10/22/1942.]¹⁰³

Your remarks about the montage of a little story in the moving picture is especially revealing for me because it throws more light on my observation of the isolated and piecemeal sequence of hardship and breaks or of childhood and adult life. All this seems to be also tied up with the concept of lovelessness because the criterion of love is continuity and this is just the phenomenon which is never admitted. Mass culture is a total conspiracy against love as well as against sex. I think that you have hit the nail on the head by your observation that the spectators are continuously betrayed and robbed of real pleasure by sadistic tricks. This sadism has the special function to prevent psychologically and physiologically “Vorlust.” Take for example, the ballet scenes in Holiday Inn, one of the newest pictures where a couple starts dancing a minuet but as soon as this minuet develops to a more amorous situation and one could very well imagine that the dancing partners will end by kissing each other, the sweet and melodious music is suddenly stopped and replaced by jazz which almost verbally castrates the dancers. This fits very well together with elucidating remarks which Teddie once wrote about the connection of castration and jazz? I, therefore, would say that not the fact that people make love to each other in die Loges and Orchestras of the movie houses is the important feature; important and new, however, is the unbridgeable gulf between the sadistic stupidities and failures on the screen and the kissing and petting of the boys and girls while in former years the screen events could serve as a model or [stimulus] for some modest sensuous pleasures. Our poor friend Hallgarten once made the correct observations that the film stars of today are not any more and are not supposed to be any more: beauties.

André Masson. Emblem. 1942.

Postscript: Horkheimer’s Letters on Dialectical Anthropology and Psychology (1939-1943).

Re: Moses and Monotheism (1939).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Wittfogel, 7/29/1939.]¹⁰⁴

As for your two suggestions, I prefer the first.¹⁰⁵ The decisive factor is that the footnotes to the [essay] on the consolidation of Chinese class society will not be ready until August, and it is important to put out the issue as quickly as possible. Until just a few weeks ago, we still intended that the summer issue would appear separately. Given our lateness, it has become clear that only with a double issue can we excuse this delay to the subscribers. I am primarily to blame for this. My contribution, a causal work on “The Jews and Europe,” was only finished in the last few days; I could not tear myself away from other matters. The problem with which my time is occupied is the question: to what extent do the boundaries between determinate concepts, and, thereby, concepts themselves, need to be redefined today? In this connection, I am starting with psychology, which seems to me to be less and less of an independent sphere by any measure. By the way, have you seen Freud's new book [Moses and Monotheism]? This is precisely the kind of book we should criticize from our social-scientific standpoint.

The Human Psychology of Animal Psychology (1941).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Paul and Hannah Tillich, 7/19/1941.]¹⁰⁶

Why on earth are you in Gatlinburg? Such a nest is not even listed in my yearbook from the American Automobile Association, although it seems a few hamlets for rest can be found there even though they only have a few beautiful trees and a monument to General Grant. Has Paulus [Tillich] gone to zoology without my knowledge and is now studying a type of beetle that is particularly common in Gatlinburg? In that case, our activities in recent weeks would not be so different, as I myself have made a major effort to get my bearings with state-of-the-art science, working through several textbooks on animal psychology, animal aggregations and similar subjects. I realized that I could acquire very precise information on the learning ability of bacteria, worms, and mollusks, but the information on lions, tigers and hyenas, which interest me far more, was extremely sparse. I suspect this is mainly because predators can defend themselves against the experimenter more easily than earthworms, and because the scoundrels deliver them to the laboratories in large numbers for a few cents. There is, of course, a lot to read about dogs, which are less dangerous than the predators. Unfortunately, most of the information is only about their behavior during and after skillful torture. They open the throat, chisel into the skull, and commit other villainous acts—from which, though no knowledge about the animal soul is gained through them, very decisive information about the human soul can be extracted.

You ask me my opinion on world events. I am convinced that we both find it equally unclear and, in any case, cannot be happy. A clever man, I think it was Max Scheler, once said that the great politician himself cannot predict what he would do in a determinate situation. [...] But woe betide if Russia does not hold out somewhere and the setbacks come! The repressed, terrible resistance to the war, which has by no means been rationally overcome among the people, will then—when there is no longer any possibility of turning back against Germany—turn against everything that is even remotely connected with humanity. [...] All these are vague ideas and things have mostly turned out differently than we expected. The only thing that is certain is that, at least for the moment, an infinite amount depends on Russian weapons. Even after a German victory over Russia, great changes would certainly take place in Europe, not all of which would strengthen fascism. But any predictions other than sad ones for the present would be so bold that I dare not utter them. So all that is left for us is, unfortunately, a very passive, devilishly contemplative attitude of waiting, an attitude that does not allow us to be happy. For I cannot follow the part of our friends who, since the blessed Popular Front, [sided with] the holy warriors against the Russian dragon, only to now rediscover their Russian heart—[now] slightly veiled by false distinctions between Bolshevism and the Russian people. I have found it difficult to be happy about [such rediscovery] since those earlier times when Pavlov's laboratories with the experiments mentioned above had become the pride of Bolshevism. And especially in the periods when one could publish one’s enthusiasm in good European publishing houses, I was in a thoughtful mood. But perhaps fate will now change and our existence will acquire some historical content. Of course, I'm basically thinking about nothing else.

Morality and the Police (1941).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Pollock, 10/4/1941.]¹⁰⁷

I really enjoyed the newspaper clipping you sent about the Indian policeman.¹⁰⁸ Yes, it really is one of those microscopic events that illuminate the universe. When Schopenhauer once said that, aside from the honor of knighthood, it is venereal disease that differentiates the social condition of modern times from that of antiquity to the disadvantage of the former, the morality police would without a doubt be a result of this disease. The morality police are part of those marginal social phenomena, a precise analysis of which forms the basis for an explanation of social content. This policeman fell in defense of something whose introduction led to the extermination of his ancestors. The girl in Las Vegas, of course, divulged the mystery to you: she would like to go into an honorable profession. The misery of prostitution is the key to an honorable profession. Every Parisian young woman would have ratified the statements of her colleague from Nevada. That is the concrete meaning that Freudian theory, according to which culture is made possible by sublimation, has assumed in modern society. But that is all easy to say. Should one perhaps draw the conclusion from this that an honorable profession is something bad? Should one perhaps take a stand against profession, the division of labor, civilization? Is the price really too high? We must ask ourselves these questions very seriously. Puritanism is, of course, merely a terse expression for the increased discipline that became necessary in the more modern economy. The old clergy was sleepy, struck dumb, and prostituted, incapable of educating children and instructing adults, as one reads again and again in city government reports and, finally, in Luther. Prostitution is truly not one of the greatest evils, if the world in which it is doomed to misery may call upon God at all. That misery is, at the same time, a reminder that civilization could be introduced only by fire and the sword. I don't know whether one experiences things in this way when one shows up as a sociological observer instead of in complete seriousness. When the harsh light of the lamp, as you write, exposes the defective plaster of the ceiling and the old chest of drawers with a hot plate on it, it has for the actual interested visitor precisely the function of entirely exposing the only thing critical to his being there. But the harsh light of scholarship usually stops before this, since it would, of course, only bring to light what is hygienic and has no place here. Under certain circumstances it automatically generates the most beneficial lampshade. I'm entirely serious in thinking that the meaning of the apparatus of terror, for which we have civilization to thank, can even today be experienced on the basis of prostitution. It is most intimately connected with the blows under which one collapses in a concentration camp and that are always and everywhere meant for such as us (the connection of Jews and pigs in fascist thought has very deep significance). Of course, one may not directly equate fascism with terror at the beginning of the civilizing epoch. Rather, in fascism it is precisely those impulses that arose as world power and whose suppression was intended by religious power. Both things are true. Previous history is secretly determined by the rule that the suppression of impulses that are antithetical to culture is paid for with the power that they retain in class society. The Bible contains the following sentence: “Do not suffer a sorceress to live” (Exodus 22:18). (You'll perhaps remember that I once confronted Rabbi Horovitz with this.) The modern philosopher Hermann Cohen defends this teaching as follows: “In this matter, there is no wavering and no mutually conditional and limiting realization of opposites. Rather, the big question is the existence or nonexistence of the moral world. And the moral world is not left to angels, as per the Talmudic expression about the Torah. Rather, people must adapt to its laws and punishments. Therefore, the extermination of sorcery and of idol worship must be commanded.” Cohen is entirely correct. But Nietzsche is no less correct: “Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole somber thing called reflection; all these prerogatives and show-pieces of man: how dearly they have been bought. How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all ‘good things’!”

On the Orestes Complex (1941).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Fredric Wertham, 11/18/1941.]¹⁰⁹

You have given me real pleasure by sending me Dark Legend¹¹⁰ and “The Matricidal Impulse.”¹¹¹ I have read both works with the greatest interest and I have again become aware of the close relationship between our problems. I regret sincerely that due to the great distance between New York and California we are not able to discuss the problem of the Orestes complex personally. For I believe that it is scarcely possible to overestimate the import of your discovery. It seems to me that the conception of the Orestes complex is not only an essential contribution to an insight into prehistory-the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy—and in rectifying the Freudian thesis of the primal horde—it might also become a most important instrument for the understanding of the present. The National Socialist race theory and homosexuality both seem to be closely related to the Orestes complex. If I may trust my experiences with German youth, both facts are based on the over-attachment to the mother. This is most evident in the works of Wagner, which in their essence express everything that embraces the sentiments and imagination of the National Socialist world ideas. Think of the Wälsungenliebe of brother and sister, which shows fear and hate of the other kin [...]. Their beloved mother is dead: “Erschlagen der Mutter mutiger Leib” (There lies our courageous mother, slain), and the divine father becomes the sole friend in a hostile world. I don't know whether you have noticed that again and again the ravishment of the German Frau, sometimes even direct matricide is [one] of the deepest motives of Nazi anti-Semitism. Germany itself, supposedly having been ravished by the Jews, stands for the mother. In anti-Semitism there comes to life the idea of matricide and of the rape of the mother. Dark Legend is most helpful to me in my study of a number of hypotheses of social theories. Perhaps our mutual friend Adorno has told you already that we expect much for the clarification of some typical traits of Fascism from the analysis of certain sexual crimes of youths, though up to now we considered for the most part the crimes committed with little girls. We will, however, study Dark Legend in detail.

Anthropology Beyond Self-Preservation (1941).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Kurt and Eva Goldstein, 11/26/1941.]¹¹²

At present, as a preliminary exercise, I’m writing an article about reason [“End of Reason”]. The product will no doubt be rather “clumsy,”¹¹³ but it has given me the opportunity to survey the literature I need for a more extensive presentation. What has been called by the name of reason since antiquity seems to me a historical possibility for the human being—namely, the subordination of all existence to self-preservation. At the very least, this is true for the so-called elites. European reason, which has conquered the world in recent centuries, is nothing if not pragmatic. Profit in the liberal sense was only one form of this principle of reason; the direct domination of fascism is another. We are inclined to overlook the identity in principle because of the differences, because we have known the side of liberalism from the inside. Within the states, many independent economic subjects of relatively equal power confronted one another, and their self-interest was supposed to take effect in configurations of peaceful competition. Even then, the illusory semblance [Schein] would vanish as soon as one approached the fringes of society and caught a glimpse of exactly how such rationality worked in the territories and the colonies, down into the least and most powerless. In fascism, wherein such power is now held by the very few, the remaining rational considerations within the states disappear as well. Such meditations belong to a relatively external strata of anthropology. They concern the historical and social material. But they may nevertheless give us a sense for the method of posing anthropological problems. The anthropological question—what can the human being be?—does not refer to just any real possibility, but to the right one. In history to date, however, the ‘right’ one has always seemed so securely fastened to the purpose of individual or group-based self-preservation that any other perspective, every other direction for research, seems groundless in comparison. The historical dissolution of this connection is a step towards the self-illumination of anthropological research.¹¹⁴

Freud Beyond Psychology (1942).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 10/31/1942.]¹¹⁵

You certainly know what you should say about our relation to psychoanalysis as well as I do. Concerning our policy, I think you should be simply positive. We really are deeply indebted to Freud and his first collaborators. His thought is one of the Bildungsmächte without which our own philosophy would not be what it is. I have anew realized his grandeur during the last weeks. You will remember that many people say his original method was particularly adequate to Viennese sophisticated middle classes. This is, of course, totally untrue as a generality, but there is a grain of truth in it which does not do any harm to Freud’s work. The greater a work, the more it is rooted in the concrete historical situation. But if you take a close look at this connection between liberalistic Vienna and Freud's original method, you become aware of how great a thinker he was. With the decline of middle-class family life, his theory reached that new stage as expressed in Jenseits des Lustprinzips and the following writings. That turn of his philosophy proves that he, in his particular work, realized the changes pointed out in the [section] of the article on ‘Reason’ devoted to the decline of the family and the individual. Psychology without libido is in a way no psychology and Freud was great enough to get away from psychology in its own framework. Psychology in its proper sense is always psychology of the individual. Where this is needed, we have to refer orthodoxically to Freud's earlier writings. The set of concepts connected with Todestrieb are anthropological categories (in the German sense of the word). Even where we do not agree with Freud's interpretation and use of them, we find their objective intention is deeply right and that they betray Freud's great flair for the situation. His development has led him to conclusions not so far from those of the other great thinker of the same period, Bergson. Freud objectively absented himself from psychoanalysis, whereas Fromm and Horney get back to a commonsense psychology and even psychologize culture and society.

‘Human Anatomy is the Key to that of the Monkey’ (1943).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 1/13/1943.]¹¹⁶

It is a fact that most of the people who have been held in a concentration camp bear the traces of hell in their souls. We might say that some of the character traits, which now have developed into symptoms of madness, may have been recognizable even before the person had that terrible experience, but at that time they did not have that sinister aspect. Once a certain psychological quality has become clearly visible, we always can trace its roots back to the past, but we easily forget that it would not have struck us as something unusual if it were not for the new form which it has taken in the meantime. You will remember the observation that human anatomy is the key to that of the monkey? The meaning of that truth is that once we know man, we can discover his beginnings in earlier forms of life. Once Fascism had developed in European society, we now are able to find its hallmarks in earlier stages of human history, but it would be an error to say that, because of those traces, the development was a necessary one.

Anthropology: The Theory of Man In Antagonistic Society (1943).

[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Marcuse, 7/17/1943.]¹¹⁷

Since we have decided that here in Los Angeles the psychological part should be treated I have studied the literature under this respect. I don't have to tell you that I don't believe in psychology as a means to solve a problem of such seriousness. I did not change [one] bit my scepticism towards that discipline. Also, the term psychology as [I] use it in the project stands for anthropology and anthropology for the theory of man as he has developed under the conditions of antagonistic society. It is my intention to study the presence of the scheme of domination in the so-called psychological life, the instincts as well as the thoughts of men. The tendencies in people which make them susceptible to propaganda for terror are themselves the result of terror, physical and spiritual, actual and potential oppression. If we could succeed in describing the patterns, according to which domination operates even in the remotest domains of the mind, we would have done a worthwhile job. But to achieve this one must study a great deal of the silly psychological literature and if you could see my notes, even those which I have sent to Pollock on the progress of our studies here you would probably think I have gone crazy myself. But I can assure you that I am not losing my mind over all those psychological and anthropological hypotheses which must be examined if one wants to arrive at a theory on the level of present-day knowledge.

André Masson. Minotaur. 1942.

1. In:

MHA: Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 805 - Verschiedene Essays, Manuskripte, Entwürfe und Notizen aus dem Umkreis und bezüglich 'Dialektik der Aufklärung' (p. XI 6a - XI 16.1-17). (1942-1943). “Manuskripte und Entwürfe als Vorarbeiten oder aus dem Umkreis der “Dialektik der Aufklärung”: 1. Über das Verhältnis von Naturbeherrschung und gesellschaftlicher Herrschaft; [von Theodor W. Adorno ?]. Entwurf, Typoskript, 3 Blatt (S. 289-291); 2. Theodor W. Adorno [?]: Über Mythologie und Aufklärung. Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 13 Blatt (S. 292-304).

2. See Adorno to his Parents, 4/19/1942: “My dears, we are well, we are keeping our horses’ heads up, we are not at all afraid of planes (I find being treated as an enemy alien much worse!) — and Max and I are well into the schemata for our book (definitely: not about the Jews!). [fn. 4: i.e. for the Dialectic of Enlightenment. One three-page and one thirteen-page manuscript have survived in the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv (XI 7a.1 and 2).] It will be very fine if we are allowed to stay, and as far as the war is concerned, I do actually think that Hitler will be beaten! If only we might live to witness it!” In: Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents: 1939-1951. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. Translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), 92.

And again in the letter Adorno sends to his parents dated 4/24/1942: “Max and I are engrossed in drawing up the schemata for our new study.” In: Ibid., 92-93.

3. Mutterrecht und Urreligion is a 1927 selection by Rudolf Marx from Bachofen’s 1861 opus: Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur.

See: Mutterrecht und Urreligion: eine Auswahl, ed. Rudolf Marx. (Kröners Taschenausgabe; Band 52) Leipzig: A. Kröner, 1927; Stuttgart, 1954; 6th ed. 1984.

4. James Schmidt (1998) reconstructs the changes in the chapter’s title—from “Mythos und Aufklärung” [1942/43] to “Dialektik der Aufklärung” [1944] to “Begriff der Aufklärung” [1947]—as well as the development of its conceptual core as the progressive comprehension of ‘Enlightenment’ as a proper dialectical figure (which is what it is because it becomes what it is not) and the significance of the introduction of ‘magic’ for the myth-enlightenment concept-pair. In: “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Social Research 65(4) (1998), 807-838. Link: https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/3898

5. Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 653 - Vorlesungen: ‘Eclipse of Reason’; ‘Society and Reason’ (p. IX 36.6-12); (S. [6]).

6. See Horkheimer’s outline for Lecture II in: Ibid, [385]. Author’s translation.

7. Horkheimer to Helen and Felix Weil, 3/22/1946. In: A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson and Manfred R. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 238-239.

8. Adorno. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton (Routledge, 2004 [1966]), 15.

Cf. Horkheimer (1946): “The dialectic is a method by which one can develop one thing from another, and [thereby develop] all categories. [However,] I would like to see a main theme [Hauptthema]: e.g., what can theory do in the present situation? What is its place? Or: how can one overcome the abstractness of the concept by means of the concept itself?” From: “MAX HORKHEIMER UND THEODOR W. ADORNO [Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik] (1946),” In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 12. (1985), 593-605. Author’s translation.

9. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947): “Thought thus becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing, and objectifying. All mystical union remains a deception, the impotently inward trace of the forfeited revolution. But while enlightenment is right in opposing any hypostatization of utopia and in dispassionately denouncing power as division, the split between subject and object, which it will not allow to be bridged, becomes the index of the untruth both of itself and of truth. The proscribing of superstition has always signified not only the progress of domination but its exposure. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature, as in prehistory, is calling to itself, but no longer directly by its supposed name, which, in the guise of mana, means omnipotence, but as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists. By modestly confessing itself to be power and thus being taken back into nature, mind rids itself of the very claim to mastery which had enslaved it to nature. Although humanity may be unable to interrupt its flight away from necessity and into progress and civilization without forfeiting knowledge itself, at least it no longer mistakes the ramparts it has constructed against necessity, the institutions and practices of domination which have always rebounded against society from the subjugation of nature, for guarantors of the coming freedom. Each advance of civilization has renewed not only mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that prospect depends on the concept. For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought—which, in the form of science, remains fettered to the blind economic tendency—it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured. Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, and even in the time of Vanini the call to hold back enlightenment was uttered less from fear of exact science than from hatred of licentious thought, which had escaped the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature’s own dread of itself. The priests have always avenged mana on any exponent of enlightenment who propitiated mana by showing fear before the frightening entity which bore that name, and in their hubris the augurs of enlightenment were at one with the priests. Enlightenment in its bourgeois form had given itself up to its positivist moment long before Turgot and d’Alembert. It was never immune to confusing freedom with the business of self-preservation. The suspension of the concept, whether done in the name of progress or of culture, which had both long since formed a secret alliance against truth, gave free rein to the lie. In a world which merely verified recorded evidence and preserved thought, debased to the achievement of great minds, as a kind of superannuated headline, the lie was no longer distinguishable from a truth neutralized as cultural heritage.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. [1947] Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 31-32. [Emphasis added]

10. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947): “The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself.” In: Ibid., 11.

11. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947): “The self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of negativity as redemption, are untrue forms of the resistance to deception. The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition. Such observance, “determinate negation,” is not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void. Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs.” In: Ibid., 18.

12. Horkheimer (ca. 1942/43). In: MHA 805 [link]. Author’s transcription and translation.

13. Horkheimer (1944). In: MHA 653 [link]. Author’s transcription.

14. The schema is divided into four sections by paragraph breaks, and each section develops a distinct, though interconnected, aspect of the problematic relation between myth and enlightenment as a unity of opposites, and in which the figure of ‘spirit’ will come to play a decisive role.

15. Marginal note insert

16. [(fn.) Diels Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: “Woraus die Dinge entstehen, in eben dasselbe müssen sie auch vergehen nach der Notwendigkeit; denn sie müssen Buße und Strafe einander geben um der Ungerechtigkeit willen nach der Ordnung der Zeit.”] (5th Ed., Vol. I, 1934.), 52.

Partially adapted from: Chris Kassam and Robbie Duschinsky. “Nietzsche and Anaximander on Being and Becoming.” Diacritics 45, no. 3 (2017): 100–116. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26776642.

17. [(fn.) J.J. Bachofen, Mutterrecht und Urreligion, Kröner Verlag Leipzig, S. 58.]

Bachofen:

Myth is the exegesis of the symbol. It unfolds in a series of outwardly connected actions what the symbol embodies in a unity. It resembles a discursive philosophical treatise in so far as it splits the idea into a number of connected images and then leaves it to the reader to draw the ultimate inference. The combination of the symbol with the explanatory myth is a highly remarkable phenomenon. In the Pamphilian grave painting the symbol in itself sufficed but not on the sarcophagus, where it seemed to require the support of the myth. In this combination the symbol finds the guarantee of its permanence. The myth restores the ancient dignity of the Orphic symbolism. To expound the mystery doctrine in words would be a sacrilege against the supreme law; it can only be represented in terms of myth. That is why mythology is the language of the tombs. As a rule the inscriptions are only statements of lesser importance; higher ideas inspired by death and tomb are expressed in the form of myth, aided by art. More and more the pure symbol is relegated to the background, while the myth becomes dominant. Gradually the entire mythology of the ancients enters into their tombs, so creating a drama that deserves our utmost attention. The treasury of myths, in which the ancients had set forth the earliest memories of their history, the entire sum of their physical knowledge, the recollection of earlier periods of creation and great tellurian transformations, is here employed to expound religious truths, to embody laws of nature, to express ethical and moral truths, and to awaken comforting intimations extending beyond the melancholy limits of the material fatum. Cloaked in mythical images, the content of the mysteries with their twofold physical and metaphysical significance is brought home to the beholder. Whereas heaven has descended to earth through the anthropomorphic vision of the divine, earth once more becomes heaven now that the myths have entered into the mystery and the human is traced back to the divine; in the lives of heroes valor and virtue are represented as the only means of transcending matter and achieving the ultimate reward: immortality. No longer an object of faith, the myth regains its highest dignity through its connection with mystery and tomb. The simple old symbolic faith, in part created and in part transmitted by Orpheus and the great religious teachers of the earliest times, is resurrected in new form in the mythology of the tombs. The later period created no new symbols and no new myths: it lacked the necessary freshness of youth. But with its more inward attitude it was able to give the traditional representations a new and transfigured meaning. Thus the myths, as Plutarch said, became images and shadows of higher ideas, and by their mysterious character inculcated a profounder veneration. They resemble those mimetic καταδείξει𝛓, representations in which the initiate beheld, as in a mirror, the more sublime truths of the mysteries. The whole composition suggests dramatized myth, and certain details are clearly modeled on performances of tragic works.

The static symbol and its mythical unfolding are the speech and writing, the language of the tombs. The higher meditations inspired by the riddle of death, the grief and consolation, the hope and fear, the foreboding and joyful anticipation, are expressed only in art. There is a profound reason for this. Human language is too feeble to convey all the thoughts aroused by the alternation of life and death and the sublime hopes of the initiate. Only the symbol and the related myth can meet this higher need. The symbol awakens intimations; speech can only explain. The symbol plucks all the strings of the human spirit at once; speech is compelled to take up a single thought at a time. The symbol strikes its roots in the most secret depths of the soul; language skims over the surface of the understanding like a soft breeze. The symbol aims inward; language outward. Only the symbol can combine the most disparate elements into a unitary impression. Language deals in successive particulars; it expresses bit by bit what must be brought home to the soul at a single glance if it is to affect us profoundly. Words make the infinite finite, symbols carry the spirit beyond the finite world of becoming into the realm of infinite being. Intimating the ineffable, they are mysterious as all religion by its very nature must be, a silent discourse appropriate to the quiet of the tomb, beyond the reach of mockery and doubt, those unripe fruits of wisdom. Therein lies the mysterious dignity of the symbol, which so eminently enhances the solemnity of the ancient tombs. Therein lies the spell of the mythical representations, which show us the great deeds of the primordial age in the muted light of distant melancholy recollection, and that is what lends them the aura of consecration characteristic of the ancient necropolises.

In: Myth, Religion, and Mother Right. Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. With a Preface by George Boas and an Introduction by Joseph Campbell (Princeton University Press, 1967), 48-50.

18. Hegel, (§561). In: The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated and Edited by Terry Pinkard. (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 327.

19. Hegel, (§560):

560. However, both approaches, the positive as well as the negative relation of the finite to the in-itself, are in fact equally necessary, and everything is therefore just as much in itself as it is for an other, or everything is useful. —Everything hands itself over to others, now lets itself be used by others, and is for them; and now, so to speak, everything puts up a good fight, is unaccommodating to others, is for itself, and, for its own part, uses the other. —For people, as the things that are conscious of this relation, it turns out that this is their essence and their stance. As he immediately is, as natural consciousness in itself , the person is good; as a singular individual, he is absolute; and what is other is for him; indeed, since, for him as a self-aware animal, the moments have the meaning of universality, everything is for his enjoyment and his delight, and, as he comes out of the hand of God, he walks the earth as if he were in a garden planted for him. —He must have also plucked the fruit of the tree of knowing of good and evil. In that he possesses a utility that distinguishes him from every other being, for, quite contingently, his good nature in itself is also constituted so that the excess of delight does him harm, or, instead, his singular individuality also has its other-worldly beyond in it, and it can go beyond itself and destroy itself. To prevent this, reason is for him a useful means for properly restricting this going-beyond, or rather, for preserving himself when he does in fact go beyond the determinate, for this is the power of consciousness. The enjoyment on the part of the conscious, in itself universal essence must not itself be, according to variety and duration, a determinate but rather a universal enjoyment. The measure thus signifies this determination, namely, that it is to prevent pleasure in its variety and duration from being cut short, which is to say, such a measure is determined as immoderation. —As everything is useful for man, man is likewise useful, and his determination consists in making himself a universally usable member of the troop and being of use for the common interest. As much as he looks out for himself is just as much as he must also give away to others, and as much as he gives to others is just as much as he is to look out for himself; or, “Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” But wherever he ends up, he is in the right place; he makes use of others and is himself made use of.

In: Ibid, 326-327.

20. Hegel, (§562.):

Of course, this positive result of the Enlightenment is for faith as much a horror as is the Enlightenment’s negative conduct towards faith. This insight into the absolute essence that sees nothing in it but the absolute essence itself, the être suprême, or the void—this intention that everything in its immediate existence is in itself, or, is good, that finally the relation of the singular conscious being to the absolute essence, religion, is to be exhaustively expressed in the concept of utility is, to faith, something utterly abhorrent. This, the Enlightenment’s own wisdom, necessarily appears to faith at the same time as shallowness itself and as the very confession of shallowness because it consists in knowing nothing of absolute essence, or, what amounts to the same thing, in knowing only this entirely banal truth about it, that it is only the absolute essence. Quite the contrary, to faith, what the Enlightenment knows as the highest is nothing but finitude, indeed, it knows this finitude and the knowing of such finitude as the true.

In: Ibid., 327.

21. “Tilgen”: In the sense of erasing or wiping out or paying off a debt, or: liquidate, amortize.

“Vergelten”: paying off or fulfilling, as in—repays, reciprocates, requites.

“excision of the incommensurable”: [das Inkommensurable wegschneidet]

Cf. Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic [1933]:

Along with melancholy, anxiety, and despair, passio is counted by him among the affects that, as ciphers, take the place of a blocked truth, yet at the same time give witness to the merely agitated subjectivity. Passio aims at the sacrifice of the self, whose passion is that of self-destruction: “If the individual is inwardly defined by self-annihilation before God, then we have religiousness A.” And passio is a subjective category: the natural urge of spirit, continually reconceived by Kierkegaard on the model of erotic inclination. Kierkegaard even intended to assure himself of the transcendental content of faith by the psychological content of passion. “But the highest passion in a person is faith,” thus the double sense of his concept of passio encourages misinterpretations, which are condensed, most drastically, in the title of Vetter’s book, Piety as Passion. This double sense is, however, dialectical. It is the old double sense of passio which, according to Benjamin’s formulation, constitutes the “high pass of mythology”: passion and sacrificial suffering. It is not accidental that Kierkegaard's “ethical” passion—from which he indeed thought he had “excised everything incommensurable,” had banished nature—requires such an opaque and equivocal determination as that of sympathy: “sympathy is an essential quality of man, and every resolution in which sympathy is not given its due, in which it fails to gain adequate expression, is not in the largest sense an idealizing; resolution.” The ambiguousness of sympathy is mythical. It is expressed, in Kierkegaard's “ethical sphere,” through passio, which as the passion of the intellect preserves its natural instinctual character. This instinct is able to articulate itself vividly. Its dialectic appears bound to the totality of “existence,” which the dialectic expiates altogether through annihilation. Its claim to totality, however, is bound to absolute spirit’s claim to domination. If this claim disappears, passion receives another dialectical form than that of atonement and complete annihilation. Passion may then fulfill itself in its impulses according to the rhythm with which it encounters them individually, without submitting to the rigid subordinating concept; the steps of fulfillment are transformed by it into those of reconciliation. It is Kierkegaard's second plan of the dialectic, the dialectic of the mythical itself, which reawakens in the depth of his philosophy and turns against a sacrificial mythology that could have “isolated” the plan but indeed not subsumed it in its paradoxies. If passion, as an all-powerful, infinitely insatiable natural power knows only its own destruction wherever it finds any satisfaction in the finite, then despair, previously passion’s demonic totality, lose its power over passion and the dialectical sickness unto death is transposed into the force of reconciled-historical life. It is not, as Kierkegaard's doctrine of total sin and total expiational sacrifice supposes, a “superficial understanding” that permits the assumption that “the doctrine of reconciliation is the qualitative difference between paganism and Christianity.” Reconciliation is the imperceptible gesture in which guilty nature renews itself historically as created nature unreconciled, it remains obsessed with its greatest gesture, that of sacrifice.

In: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1933]), 120. [Emphasis added]

And:

The sphere of the aesthetic, which Kierkegaard, employing the categories of his paradoxical system of existence, divides up into a traditional doctrine of art, the sensual immediacy of existence, the speculative deception of objective metaphysics, and the subjective how of communication—just to be able to discard it as discontinuous; this sphere, painfully furrowed by a subjectivity that leaves its traces behind in it without ever mastering it, receives its structure from images that are present for the wish, without having been produced by it, for the wish itself originates in them. This realm of images constitutes the absolute opposite of the traditional Platonic realm. It is not eternal, but historical-dialectical; it does not lie in perfect transcendence beyond nature, but dissolves darkly into nature; it is not imageless truth, but promises paradoxically unreachable truth in opposition to its semblance; it does not open itself to Eros, but shines forth in the moment of collapse—in the historical collapse of the mythical unity of unmediated existence; in the mythical dissociation of the historically existing individual. The figures that assemble themselves at this point carry marks of a suffocating objectless inwardness. Kierkegaard leaves no doubt that the origin of their luminosity is putrefaction; they often remain behind as monuments of a withered and alienated nature. But no matter how far behind, they are ahead of the living. Kierkegaard understood this better as a “psychologist” than as a systematizer of existence: “In every man there is a talent, understanding. And every man, the most knowing and the most limited, is in his knowing far ahead of what he is in his life, of what his life expresses.” By this lead of knowledge over existence, the knowing subject participates in truth through semblance, a participation which imageless existence, in its empty depth, never achieves. For the trace of truth becomes accessible to the wish that perseveres in the face of the merely existent; if the existent were cast off as contingent, the existence of inwardness would not offer truth, for inwardness knows no truth beyond its own life. Before the trace of truth, however, mere existence passes away. What Kierkegaard says polemically of speculative reason, which usurps the intellectus archetypus, characterizes positively that “aesthetic” deportment that asserts itself in spite of his doctrine of existence: “But for the speculating philosopher the question of his personal eternal happiness cannot arise precisely because his task consists in getting more and more away from himself so as to become objective, thus vanishing from himself and becoming what might be called the contemplative energy of philosophy itself.” Thus the autonomous self would have to “vanish” into truth, whose trace reaches the self by aesthetic semblance in the ephemeral images of which the self's mighty spontaneity is powerless. If the expansive self in its full dimension is lost in sacrifice, it survives in its transience by making itself small. It is possible that knowledge inheres in Kierkegaard's ethical abstraction, in the “exclusion of the incommensurable” that transcends mere sacrifice; that is, as knowledge of inconspicuousness as is maintained by the longing of the romantics for the “philistine”: “They who carry the treasure of faith are likely to disappoint, for externally they have a striking resemblance to bourgeois philistinism, which infinite resignation, like faith, deeply disdains.”

In: Ibid., 127-128. [Emphasis added]

22. “the unity of exchange is average labor-time”: [die Einheit des Tauschs ist die durchschnittliche Arbeitszeit].

23. [“Unwürdig ist das Leben der Gesellschaft, weil der Gehalt seiner Nützlichkeit am Ende selber nichts anderes ist als die leere Zeit der Arbeit, von der die menschliche Gattung gleichsam nur parasitär mitexistiert.”]

24. “devouring time of myth”: [hinraffende Zeit des Mythos]; “existing or remaining”: [Seiendes und Bleibendes]

25. [(fn.) Vergleich dazu den aufsatz Hans Kelsens in “Erkenntnis”…]

Hans Kelsen, “Causality and retribution.” Erkenntnis 8 (1939), 424–429. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00176050

Hans Kelsen (1941 [1939]):

If human laws derive their validity from the divine or universal law, it is because the divine, universal law, the inviolable law of causality, is only the projection of the human law, the legal rule, into the cosmos. This legal rule projected into the cosmos is inviolable because it is considered as the absolute will of a deity. It is the idea of natural law, in the sense of a natural legal order, that is formulated here. That this legal rule is the law of retribution is clearly expressed in the famous fragment which may be indicated as the counterpart to that of Anaximander: “The sun will not overstep his measures, (that is, the prescribed path); but if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Dike (Justice), will find him out.” The Erinyes are the well-known demons of revenge of Greek religion, and Dike is the goddess of retribution. The Orphics call her the “Inexorable,” “the judge of those who do not obey the divine law.” The significance for the history of scientific thought of the saying of Herakleitos lies in the fact that the inviolability of the law of causality, because of which the sun follows its path, is the compulsion of the goddess of justice, an obligation imposed by a legal rule, a normative necessity. The inviolability of the universal law does not consist of the fact that it is always observed; the possibility of the sun going beyond its measures is not excluded. The inviolability consists rather in the fact that violation of the law is always and without exception punished, because the universal law, as legal rule, is a norm laying down sanctions; this norm is, according to its tenor, a law of retribution, and as such, the unshakable will of a deity. The logos of Herakleitos is Dike, the goddess of inescapable revenge. The inviolability of the causal law, which is so contested in modern science, originates from the inviolability which myth and the natural philosophy which gradually evolved from it, attributed to the principle of retribution, as the substance of a divine and therefore absolutely binding will. The earliest natural science develops its natural law from this principle of retribution.

In: “Causality and Retribution.” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Oct., 1941), 540-541.

26. [2) cf. Husserl, Ideen zu einer Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Halle 1922, passim, insbesondere S. 223 und S. 281.]

27. [Fn 1) Gerhard Scholem, Die Geheimnis der Tora, ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar, Berlin 1936, S. 125.]

[“Keine Mystik, die das Wagnis unternimmt, das ‘Geheimnis des Glaubens’ zu enträtseln, kann, so tief spekulativ ihre Gedankengänge auch sein mögen, dem Verhängnis entgehen, statt der mystischen eine mythische Rede von Gott zu produzieren.”]

28. (fn 2) l.c. S. 108.)

29. (Fn 3) l.c. S. 119 f.)

[“Der Hypertrophie der richtenden Gewalt, die im Verband der Urpotenzen heilig ist, entsprang verselbständigt, aus jenem heiligen Verband losgerissen, das Urböse, das Gott zugelassen hat, als Versuchung und Strafgewalt. Dies ist die ‘andere Seite’, der dämonische Bereich, der eine vollständige Gegenwelt zerstörender Kräfte, zu der des Guten parallel entfaltet. Die Linke, das Urfeuer, oder die Finsternis bezeichnen im Sohar oft nicht nur die richtende Gewalt, das Feuer des Zornes in Gott, sondern auch jenes Böse, dasin der verborgenen Dialektik, in der das Innere zum Äußerlichen wird, aus ihm entspringt, abfällt und ‘Abfall’, ‘Schale’ wird.”]

Cf. Scholem:

Both as woman and as soul, the Shekhinah has its terrible aspect. Insofar as all the preceding sejiroth are encompassed in it and can exert a downward influence only through its mediation, the powers of mercy and of stern judgment are alternately pre­ ponderant in the Shekhinah, which as such is purely receptive and ‘has nothing of its own.’ But the power of stern judgment in God is the source of evil as a metaphysical reality, that is to say, evil is brought about by a hypertrophy of this power. But there are states of the world, in which the Shekhinah is dominated by the powers of stern judgment, some of which have issued from the sejirah of judgment, made themselves independent and invaded the Shekhinah from without. As the Zohar puts it: ‘At times the Shekhinah tastes the other, bitter side, and then her face is dark.’ It is no accident that an age-old moon symbolism should have risen to the surface in this connection. Seen under this aspect, the Shekhinah is the ‘Tree of Death,’ demonically cut off from the Tree of Life. While in most other contexts she is the merciful mother of Israel, she becomes at this stage the vehicle of the power of punishment and stern judgment. But here it must be stressed that these almost demonic aspects of the Shekhinah as 'lower mother' do not yet appear in the ‘upper mother,’ the third sefirah, which, to be sure, is a demiurge (yotser bereshith), but in a positive sense, free from the pejorative shading attaching to the term in the old gnostic systems. Strange and contradictory motifs are woven into a unique whole in this symbolism of the third sejirah, which as primordial mother of all being is particularly 'charged' with myth. Its structure is exceedingly complex, and here I cannot go into it more deeply.

In: On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism. Translated by Ralph Manheim. (Schocken Books, 1965), 106-107.

30. [Die Entzauberung der Welt ist zugleich deren Verzauberung.]

31. In full: [“Der Begriff des Fetischcharakters der Ware, mit dem Marx die Herrschaft der Dinge über die Menschen im bürgerlichen Zeitalter benannt hat, ist keine bloße Metapher, sondern die Warenfetische sind die verwandelten Gestalten der alten Götter, der alte Überschuß der richtenden Gewalt, die im Tausch von Gleichem gegen Gleiches das Unrecht durchsetzt.”]

32. (fn 1) Cf. Heinrich Mann, Einleitung zur deutschen Ausgabe der Liaisons [Les Liaisons dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos].) [Schlimme Liebschaften. Translated with an essayistic introduction by Heinrich Mann, published in 1905 as Gefährliche Freundschaften, than in 1920 by Insel-Verlag in Leipzig.]

33. [“Wie der trotzige Held gegen den Mythos “recht hat,” um ihm gerade durchs Bestehen auf dem Recht zu vorfallen, so verfällt Aufklärung dem Mythos, indem sie auf ihrem Recht—ihrem wirklichen Recht—besteht.”]

34. “will to such organizing”: [das Einrichten-Wollen]

35. [Ed.] Cf. Hegel’s brief description of Pomponatius in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “Pomponatius was one of the most remarkable of these Aristotelians; among other subjects he wrote in 1534 on the immortality of the soul, and in so doing he showed — following a practice which was specially in vogue at that time — that this dogma, which he believed as a Christian, was according to Aristotle and reason incapable of proof. The disciples of Averroes alleged that the universal nous, which is present in thought, is immaterial and immortal, while the soul as numerically one is mortal; and Alexander Aphrodisiensis also maintained its mortality. Both of these opinions were condemned in 1513 at the Council of Benevento, under Leo X. The vegetative and sensitive soul Pomponatius asserted to be mortal (c. VIII. p. 36; c. IX. pp. 51, 62-65): and he maintained that it is only through thought and reason that man partakes of immortality. Pomponatius was summoned before the Inquisition; but as cardinals protected him, no further notice was taken of the matter. …”

36. [“Vor seinem Daseienden, an dem die Verwandlung ihre Grenze hat, würde auch die Vergleichbarkeit und damit die Identität, der Trotz, die Selbstsetzung hinweggenommen werden.”]

37. MHA: Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 801 - “Dialektik der Aufklärung” von Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno, Bd. 1 (p. XI 6.1 - XI 6.2a). 1939-1946. […] 2. Aus der 'Dialektik der Aufklärung'; Kapitel: 'Begriff der Aufklärung':; […] 2c) Gliederungspunkte zum Kapitel 'Begriff der Aufklärung', hier noch mit dem Titel 'Mythologie und Aufklärung', Typoskript mit eigenen Ergänzungen von Max Horkheimer, 3 Blatt; (S. 119-121)

38. As is typical of Adorno and Horkheimer’s practice of composition at the time (see the reference to the ‘Booklet’ in their 1939 discussion here), the author(s) of the ‘key word’ papers refer to various different colored ‘booklets’ or small notebooks. Here, the reference (which could not be identified at this time) is to: (Blue Booklet 1)

39. The author(s) refer to: (Red Booklet 64/66). Could not be identified at this time.

40. English in original.

41. Griffiths (2016), for Oxford Classical Dictionary:

Ocnus (Ὄκνος, ‘Hesitancy’ personified), a proverbial figure made famous by *Polygnotus' Underworld mural in the Cnidian leschē (club-house for the citizens of *Cnidus) at *Delphi (Paus. 10. 29. 1). The painter showed him seated in *Hades, plaiting a straw rope which an ass, behind him, ate up as fast as he could weave it; presumably, since for the Greeks the future lies ‘behind’, the allegorical point was that chronic indecision can lead only to futile consequences (though Pausanias was told by the locals that Ocnus, in life, had been a hard-working man whose wife spent all his money). It may also be relevant that ‘donkey’ (ὄνος) is the Greek for windlass; as if winches ‘ate’ rope. His eternal labour recalls that of the Danaides (see danaus); he looks like a popular moralist's humorous, scaled-down version of the great criminals in hell.

42. In:

MHA: Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 801 - “Dialektik der Aufklärung” von Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno, Band 1 (p. XI 6.1 - XI 6.2a). 1939-1946. […] (2.) Aus der 'Dialektik der Aufklärung'; Kapitel: 'Begriff der Aufklärung':; 2a) Typoskript mit deutschen Titel 'Mythos und Aufklärung', 53 Blatt (2 Exemplare); 2b) Entwürfe und Teilstücke, Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen von Theodor W. Adorno, 11 Blatt; 2c) Gliederungspunkte zum Kapitel 'Begriff der Aufklärung', hier noch mit dem Titel 'Mythologie und Aufklärung', Typoskript mit eigenen Ergänzungen von Max Horkheimer, 3 Blatt; 2d) 'Zur Frage der Grenze der Entmythologisierung', Entwurf, Typoskript mit eigenen Ergänzungen von Theodor W. Adorno, 1 Blatt; 2e) 'Aufklärung mythisch', Entwurf, Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen und Ergänzungen, 1 Blatt; 2f) Entwurf des Anfangs des Kapitels 'Begriff der Aufklärung', 1 Heft, 16 Blatt, davon 8 leer; 2g) Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno: Eigene Notizen zum Begriff der Aufklärung, 12 Blatt;

43. See: Fn. 1.

44. [“ad Schluß:”]

45. Alternate formulation: “The hopelessness of today is both the despair of hope and the dissolution of hope as illusory semblance [Schein] in the face of the immediate possibility of realizing that to which hope helplessly clings.”

46. The end of the fragment leads directly into Adorno and Horkheimer’s conclusion to Chapter 1, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in the 1947 variant, Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history. As the instrument of this adaptation, as a mere assemblage of means, enlightenment is as destructive as its Romantic enemies claim. It will only fulfill itself if it forswears its last complicity with them and dares to abolish the false absolute, the principle of blind power. The spirit of such unyielding theory would be able to turn back from its goal even the spirit of pitiless progress. Its herald, Bacon, dreamed of the many things “which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command, [of which] their spials and intelligencers can give no news.” Just as he wished, those things have been given to the bourgeois, the enlightened heirs of the kings. In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed. From the power of things they finally learn to forgo power. Enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already attained, and the lands of which “their spials and intelligencers can give no news”—that is, nature misunderstood by masterful science—are remembered as those of origin. Today, when Bacon’s utopia, in which “we should command nature in action,” has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself. Knowledge, in which, for Bacon, “the sovereignty of man” unquestionably lay hidden, can now devote itself to dissolving that power. But in face of this possibility enlightenment, in the service of the present, is turning itself into an outright deception of the masses.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. [1947] Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott (SUP, 2002 [1987]), 33-34.

47. In: MHA [Na 800], [Über die Möglichkeit allgemeiner Aussagen und das Ding an sich], typescript 1 page. English in original.

The editors of the MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985) write: “The transcript of Horkheimer's handwritten note was probably made by Friedrich Pollock in the 60s, titled and assigned a vague date.”

48. In original: “allees”

49. In: MHA [Na 800], “Notizen, ca. 1940 - 1944”

Religion: Messianismus oder geistige Hygiene? Handwritten note, 1 page; English in original.

Individuum und Gruppengesellschaft. Handwritten note, 1 page; First sentence in English, second in German.

Recht und Unrecht des Schutzes der Heimat gegen 'Überfremdung'. Handwritten note, 1 page (two sides).

Positivismus: Bruch zwischen Erkenntnis und Handlung. Handwritten note, 1 page.

Über Ehe; über das Verhältnis von Sprechen und Schreiben. Handwritten note, 2 pages.

über puritanische Gesellschaftskritik; bürgerlicher Beruf als Brechung der seelischen Einzigkeit. Handwritten note, 1 page.

Eigene Notizen u.a. über: Verhältnis von Geist und Natur, Verhältnis der Freudschen Methode zum Positivismus; Handwritten note, 2 pages.

Aufklärung als Mythologie; über Mimesis. Handwritten note, 1 page.

'Stichworte'. 1 page, typed.

50. Attempt to translate apparent German pun—“Einbett” for “Einbett” (one bed) and “einbett” (embed)

51. English in original.

52. English in original.

53. [Folgen der Tüchtigkeit] (1942?), In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 315. In MHA as: “Müßiggang als Merkmal vor-bürgerlichen und nach-bürgerlichen Zeitalters.” MHGS Editors: “In addition to the present note, the folder originally contained versions of aphorisms on the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which were assigned to the corresponding pieces in the main collection of these aphorisms, ›New York Notes‹ [I], during the archiving of the estate. The date is probably 1942, based on the location.”

54. In MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985) as “Falsche Schlußfolgerung,” 325.

55. [Zur Genealogie des Mythos] (1941)?), In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 314. MHGS Editors: “The two paragraphs of this note are written on two separate, but connected, sheets of paper from a notebook. The order of the paragraphs cannot be determined with certainty based on the content, but the shape of the manuscript suggests the order presented here.”

56. Also: [Selbstwiderspruch des logischen Empirismus] [1940?], In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 312-313. MHGS Editors: “Based on its content, the note could have been written in connection with the essay ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,’ published in 1937. The sheets were found in the estate among the materials for ‘Authoritarian State,’ hence the [tentative] date of ‘1940.’”

57. Parallelität von Tillichs Standpunkt und logischem Empirismus. Handwritten note, 1 page., in: “Notizen, ca. 1940 - 1944”

58. See Adorno’s reference to Benjamin’s idea of intentionless truth in the Letter to Scholem on the Zohar.

59. Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 2/3/1942. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 257.

60. Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 2/11/1942. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 268.

61. “Zu Tillichs Outline über Marxismus und christl. Sozialismus.” In: MHA Na [538], 305r-309r. 5 page typed manuscript, with handwritten corrections.

62. Though Löwenthal did not send Horkheimer the ‘outline’ Tillich presented in the meeting with Adolph Löwe and Friedrich Pollock, these indices in the margins of Löwenthal’s typed manuscript seem to refer to the order in which Tillich listed his own theses.

63. Löwenthal’s emphasis.

64. Löwenthal’s emphasis: “Die Menschen müssen sich bewusst werden über das, was sie angerichtet haben.”

65. English in original.

66. English in original.

67. English in original.

68. Handwritten marginal note.

69. [“Auseinandersetzung des Menschen mit der Natur”]

70. [“Entwicklung der menschlichen Produktivkräfte”]

71. [Der Marxismus ist kein Weltsystem.]

72. English in original.

73. As listed in the ToC of MHA [803], those included here in bold:

[Collection B (MHA 803)]

[(43. - 62.) Collection B: 'Konzepte als Zugabe zur Festschrift für Friedrich Pollock'.] 64 Blatt;

43. 'Zum Problem der Bedürfnisse'. Typoskript, 6 Blatt;

44. 'Dichtung und Moral'. Typoskript, 5 Blatt;

45. 'Geschichte der amerikanischen Arbeiterschaft'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

46. 'Kein Weg zur Wahrheit'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

47. 'Zur Rechtsphilosophie'. Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 2 Blatt;

48. 'Strafgefangene'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

49. 'Jüdischer Charakter'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

50. 'Solidarität'. Typoskript, 2 Blatt;

51. 'Unmöglichkeit der Dichtung'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

52. 'Theorie des Verbrechens'. Typoskript, 14 Blatt;

53. 'Erbsünde und Kopula'. Typoskript, 2 Blatt;

54. 'Feind'. Typoskript, 2 Blatt;

55. 'Haupt- und Nebensatz'. Typoskript, 3 Blatt;

56. 'Bewußtsein'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

57. 'Kampf und Gewaltlosigkeit'. Typoskript, 6 Blatt;

58. 'Umschlag der idealistischen Dialektik'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

59. 'Die Rackets und der Geist'. Typoskript, 7 Blatt;

60. 'Altmodische Probleme'. Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 2 Blatt;

61. 'Physiognomik'. Typoskript, 1 Blatt;

62. 'Religionspsychologie'. Typoskript, 2 Blatt;

74. “Prefatory Note” to the “NY Notizen” (1945): “The ‘New York Notes’ summarized here form only a part of Horkheimer's notes, which Pollock later placed under this title. The reasons for the editorial separation of the other part are explained in the ‘Editorial Prefatory Note’ to the ‘Notes 1935.’ In addition to these earlier dated notes, a section entitled “On Vivisection” by Pollock has been eliminated. It is a letter from Horkheimer to Congressman Ned R. Healy dated March 22, 1945. It can be assumed that if the ‘Notes’ had continued to be worked on, this letter would simply have served as a basis for a final formulation. The letter is now reproduced in the context of the edition of the letters from and to Horkheimer. The remaining 'New York Notes' are dated: “The Jews and the Oath:” “May 1945;” “The rational is the irrational:” ‘February 1945;’ Memorandum: “January 11, 1945.” Horkheimer sent the note “The Jews and the Oath” to Adorno on May 12, 1945 and wrote: “My letter yesterday was completely fetishistic and inflammatory. That's why I dictated the enclosed pages for you, even though I don't have time. They have not been looked through and I know that you will excuse the shortcomings of the note given the haste in which it is written. There are quite old ideas in it. In local terms one would say that these functioned as a Frehm of Refferenz for a Rihörtschprotscheckt on se tschuisch Ohss.” “Not looked through” is of course not entirely accurate: an earlier version corrected by hand has been preserved.” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 303. Author’s translation.

75. Horkheimer to Pollock, 11/9/1943. In: MHGS Bd. 17 (1996), 498-499.

76. Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 10/31/1942: “That is also the reason for my not yet having sent the aphorisms. I won't give them out of my hands before having corrected some of the worst misformulations and at present I cannot devote any time to it. I highly appreciate, however, your wish to see them again.” In: MHGS Bd. 17 (1996), 366.

77. Schmidt (2017): “On July 24, 1944, Adorno let his parents know that “the big mimeographed book by Max and myself, which is now finished, looks good and will be for sale from the autumn...” In: James Schmidt, “The Making and the Marketing of the Philosophische Fragmente: A Note on the Early History of the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Part I)” (2017)

78. In: Ibid.

79. Adorno to Horkheimer, 6/2/1949. In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002 [1987]), 220.

80. English in original.

81. English in original.

82. “the idea of the abolition of injustice”: [den Gedanken der Abschaffung des Unrechts]

83. Drafted in 1943; published: Encyclopedia of the Arts, ed. Dagobert D. Runes & Harry G. Schrickel. Philosophical Library. New York. 1946. Translated into German by Hans Günter Holl for MHGS, Bd. 5 (1987), 360-363. Author’s transcription from the MHA, combining: Na [805], draft 13a) and publication 13b).

84. Alternate ending to the sentence in 13a): “... not altogether separated from profane and ritual use.”

85. Interpolated from 13a). Preferred to 13b): “Just as primitive artistic expressions are attempts to mitigate the pains of toil and death through their representation so does later art contain the reaction of men to the constraint of social reality.”

86. Stronger formulation interpolated from 13a).

87. Alternate in 13a): “They objectify experiences which are not yet prescribed to men by the mechanisms of inter-communication, and have not yet become schematic.”

88. Interpolated from 13a), preferred to 13b): “concepts.”

89. Interpolated from 13a). Preferred to 13b): “... reflects reality in a way strange to and different from the practical.”

90. Interpolated from 13a) Preferred to 13b): “The ideality and harmony of the goals toward which a musical composition or poem seeks to transfigure the world can be judged from the intrusiveness, the determined singleness of purpose, the tender attention to the momentary, the thoughtfulness attended each minute detail, the measure of freedom given the part which is nevertheless kept bound to all the other parts, – these are ever so many tugs which signal the tension between the art work and reality.”

91. Interpolated from 13a).

92. Alternate in 13a): “... ; psychology, even the fate of the artist himself herein, fulfills only an auxiliary function.”

93. Interpolated from 13a). Preferred to 13b): “What is decisive, however, is that these social elements unite in each work of art into a single structure which actually throws a new light on the present.”

94. Alternate in 13a): “Sociology of art, therefore, deals also with other functions of the aesthetic. It reveals, that the seeming independence of art from the world of practical ends is largely but illusory. It uncovers the complicity of art and the powers that be in all its ramifications.”

95. Alternate in 13a): “There is a history of the nightside of the aesthetic, as it were, from the role of art as a means of fascination in the hands of the primitive sorcerer to the cunning manipulations of art by modern totalitarian cliques.”

96. Interpolation from 13a). Preferred to 13b): “This dark side of the aesthetic extends not merely to…”

97. From: 13a), absent from 13b).

98. Alternate in 13a).: “As little as other cultural phenomena the social role of art can be brought under a universal formula.”

99. Interpolated from 13a), for the sake of clarity.

100. “Doorac [?] and Alois Riegl,” in 13b).

101. Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 2/3/1942. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 256-277.

See Horkheimer’s reply—Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 2/11/1942:

Your pages on Consumers Idols meet with my full approval. I have read them carefully and find some very original ideas in them which are definitely our own line. Of course, the pages you sent me give the impression of a beginning which will be followed by the most elaborate analysis. I think that the distraction from education (last line of page 8), though I would not call it “legitimate” education, and the topic of pseudo-individualization (on page 13) point to some of the most important phenomena. You will notice that I made the first topic one of the main points of the new article and I am happy about this coincidence. I also approve as most important of your statement that the average man in reality is not so bad as the reading material offered him and that he wants to see through the so-called events and situations. There are more points which I have marked as particularly significant and very few where I put question marks. I do not know how much of the article is ready. If you have not much more that could be printed, I wonder whether you would be able to give the pages I have seen a form in which they can be published as an article by itself, perhaps as a project. Of course we would have to omit the long lists. Will you write me what you think about it?

In: Ibid., 267.

102. Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 10/14/1942. In: Ibid., 340-342.

103. Löwenthal to Horkheimer, 10/22/1942. In: Ibid., 354-355.

104. Horkheimer to Wittfogel, 7/29/1939. In: MHGS, Bd. 16 (1995), 621-622.

105. Wittfogel’s contribution appeared under the title 'The Society of Prehistoric China', in: ZfS VIII, 1939, p. 138ff.

106. Horkheimer to Paul and Hannah Tillich, 7/19/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 99-102.

107. Horkheimer to Pollock, 10/4/1941. In: A Life in Letters. Selected Correspondence by Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Evelyn M. Jacobson and Manfred R. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 195-7.

108. [Jacobson & Jacobson (2007), fn. 29] A report on the burial of the only Native American New York policeman, who was killed during an attempt to arrest two sailors as they were entering a house with a Puerto Rican woman. In the ensuing struggle the policeman fell and was fatally wounded. He had been feared and famous in Harlem because of his “anti-crime crusade.” In a letter he had written three years earlier he had anticipated his death and challenged his colleagues "to live up to all that the department stands for or to die trying.” In: Ibid., 410.

109. Horkheimer to Fredric Wertham, 11/18/1941. In: Ibid., 201-202. On Wertham’s foundational role in the radical Freudo-Marxist “Lafargue Clinic” in Harlem, see Kevin Duong’s “Broke Psychoanalysis” at Parapraxis.

110. F. Wertham, Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (1941). Abstract:

The author, in non-technical language, presents a systematic psychiatric analysis of the life situation, the personality development, and the motivational forces that led to matricide by a 17 year old boy. The diagnosis offered is catathymic crisis, "a circumscribed mental disorder, psychologically determined, non-hereditary, without physical manifestations, and not necessarily occurring in a psychopathic constitution. Its central manifestation consists in the development of the idea that a violent act—against another person or against oneself—is the only solution to a profound emotional conflict whose real nature remains below the threshold of the consciousness of the patient." The author divides the catathymic crisis into 5 distinct stages: (1) initial thinking disorder; (2) crystallization of plan; (3) extreme tension culminating in the violent crisis; (4) superficial normality; (5) insight and recovery. An appendix of notes and references, a bibliography, and an index are given.

111. “The Matricidal Impulse: critique of Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet” (1941). Abstract:

Overattachment toward the mother can be transferred into a violent hostility against her. This phenomenon, called the Orestes complex, is clearly evident in Hamlet and in some cases of matricide. Matricidal murderers are usually very young, without previous criminal or delinquent records, hypermoral rather than immoral, excessively fond of their mothers, and only slightly interested in the other sex.

112. Horkheimer to Kurt and Eva Goldstein, 11/26/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 218-220.

113. English in original.

114. The letter ends requesting Kurt Goldstein to write for SPSS: “If you, dear Mr. Goldstein, could tell me something about these things, I would be sincerely grateful. If you were to put your idea of ​​an essay on anthropological books, including Scheler, into practice, you would not only give me but the whole institute great joy. I have taken your question in this direction as a purely rhetorical one, for you will know that our journal is always entirely at your disposal for your work. If the essay has already been started or even completed, it could still be published in the next issue, for which the editorial deadline is December 20th. This would be particularly nice because the overall character of this issue is philosophical, while the next issues will probably be devoted more to social science in the narrower sense.” In: Ibid.

115. Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 10/31/1942. In: Ibid., 366-367.

116. Horkheimer to Felix Weil, 1/13/1943. In: Ibid., 397.

117. Horkheimer to Marcuse, 7/17/1943. In: Ibid., 463-464.