MAX HORKHEIMER: PHILOSOPHICAL PARERGA (1945-1949)
Fragments on the fate of the late subjects of late capitalism.
Translator’s Note. In the post below, I’ve included translations of a limited selection of fragments authored by Horkheimer between 1945 and 1949. I have also restricted myself to fragments most likely written by Horkheimer alone, though arguably all should be read as part of his collaboration with Adorno, and at least one was written to fulfill Herbert Marcuse’s plan for a relaunch of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS) that unfortunately never occured (see: “Human Experimentation”). This selection excludes several translations of fragments that will be published in a forthcoming dossier by the Critical Theory Working Group (CTWG) on Horkheimer’s work on the ‘Dialectical Logic’ through the 1940s, as well as translations of excerpts from Horkheimer’s correspondence with Adorno in the same time period (1945-1949) on possible themes for the planned second installment of their Dialectic. Additionally, there are a number of fragments in the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv [MHA] in notebooks from 1947-1949 that have never been published at all, and many of which I lack the skills or will at present to decipher from the heavily crossed-out notes written in overlapping lines beginning at different angles of abbreviated and rushed Sütterlin script by one or more parties on cocktail napkins and scratch paper. I’ve accordingly tried to follow more strict rules for citing my sources in the MHA. The rest of the fragments can be found in the volumes of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, primarily volume 12 (1985). Whoever wants a PDF scan, almost complete, of MHGS, Bd. 12, just let me know!
In the short introduction that follows this note, I try to make the case for reading all of these fragments together under the title Horkheimer assigned to some of them in late 1947: Philosophical Parerga.
James/Crane—5/29/2025.
P.S.: Apologies for writing so many of these ‘series’ backwards and only arriving at satisfactory introductory notes later on, but to use a turn of phrase Adorno does in a self-defense that I have come to enjoy very much, I am both incapable of behaving otherwise and in any case feel I am in the right.
Translator’s Introduction—The Parerga: Problem or Paradox?
Vitam impendere vero.
To devote one's life to truth.
Juvenal, Satires, IV. 91.
—Schopenhauer’s Epigraph to Parerga and Paralipomena [VI]
In a letter to Löwenthal dated November 13th, 1947, Horkheimer gives the following instruction in a list of his and Adorno’s activities drafted for an updated report on the ISR’s research since 1944: “‘Philosophical Parerga’ are called those of my pieces of work which did not go into the Fragmente.”1 The name is adapted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s title for Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays (1851), an early and lifelong influence on Horkheimer’s conception of philosophy (see his letter to Rosa Riekher, 7/14/1920—translated here). In his 1850 preface to the book, Schopenhauer assigns the Parerga and Paralipomena—Parerga: additional supplements ‘beside’ the work; Paralipomena: supplementary materials ‘omitted’ from the work—a paradoxical position relative to ‘the systematic works’:
These additional writings, delivered subsequently to my more important and systematic works, consist partly of a few essays on a wide variety of special topics and partly of isolated thoughts on even more diverse subjects, all brought together here because, largely due to their subject matter, they could not find a place within the systematic works; some, however, merely because they came too late to claim their rightful place there. Above all, I had in mind here those readers who are acquainted with my systematic and more comprehensive work, for perhaps they too will find here some desired elucidation. But on the whole the content of these volumes, with the exception of a few passages, will be intelligible and palatable even to those lacking such acquaintance. Nevertheless, the reader familiar with my philosophy will be at an advantage, because it forever casts its light on everything I think and write, albeit only from afar; as, on the other hand, it itself receives some further illumination from everything that emanates from my mind.2
This paradoxical position is presented in fourfold aspect: (1) a few individual essays contain a wide variety of topics and a wide variety of fragments contain different individual subjects; (2) some of the ‘supplemental’ texts could have been included in the systematic works but simply arrived to late to claim their rightful place, while others were seemingly excluded by necessity of their subject matter; (3) the texts were written for readers acquainted with the systematic work who seek further illumination, but equally to be read by readers who lack any acquaintance with the systematic works whatsoever; (4) the texts are described both as a source of light for “everything I think and write” in the systematic works (“albeit only from afar”) and as satellites which merely reflect the light of the extant systematic works and will themselves require “further illumination from everything that emanates from my mind” in systematic works in the future.
There is one crucial difference between Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Horkheimer’s: the latter’s have a co-author. Horkheimer’s Parerga were written as materials for his ongoing—at least through 1950—theoretical collaboration with Theodor Adorno on an open-ended Dialectics-project. What Adorno writes in the conclusion of his ‘Dedication’ of Minima Moralia to Horkheimer applies equally to Horkheimer’s Parerga:
The composition took place in a phase when, bowing to outward circumstances, we had to interrupt our work together. This book wishes to demonstrate gratitude and loyalty by refusing to acknowledge the interruption. It bears witness to a dialogue interiéur: there is not motif in it that does not belong as much to Horkheimer as to him who found the time to formulate it.
The specific approach of Minima Moralia, the attempt to present aspects of our shared philosophy from the standpoint of subjective experience, necessitates that the parts do not altogether satisfy the demands of the philosophy of which they are nevertheless a part. The disconnected and non-binding character of the form, the renunciation of explicit theoretical cohesion, are meant as one expression of this. At the same time this ascesis should atone in some part for the injustice whereby one alone continued to perform the task that can only be accomplished by both, and that we do not forsake.3
Following Adorno’s ‘Dedication,’ I propose two additional paradoxical aspects under which the Parerga should be read given their status as documents of a dialogue interiéur—namely, that they (5) constitute the continuation of a work only two can accomplish but by one alone and (6) strive to do justice to the theoretical comprehensiveness of a shared philosophy by expressing the injustice of its interruption through renunciation of theoretical cohesion. Taken together, these six paradoxical aspects provide, I argue, the perspective from which the Parerga ought to be read.
There are three possible objections to presenting the fragments below under the title Philosophical Parerga: first, that Horkheimer’s letter to Löwenthal in November 1947 was likely referring to the 1944 Konzepte in the Zugabe to Pollock’s Festschrift copy of the Philosophische Fragmente; second, that Horkheimer himself never collected the fragments under this title, and imposing a unity on them is a betrayal of either the virtue of archival modesty or the more authentic presentation these materials demand as miscellaneous jottings; third, that a number of the fragments below were written after Horkheimer’s letter to Löwenthal. To the first objection: Horkheimer’s letter to Löwenthal was likely referring primarily to the Konzepte appended to the 1944 Festschrift print of the Philosophische Fragmente. However, the letter would have been written after Horkheimer’s fragmentary writings from late 1944 (such as the ‘speculative memoranda’ to Adorno, one of which, from 1/11/1945, is translated here) through late 1947. That Horkheimer does not provide further specifications about which fragments, precisely, he means when he tells Löwenthal to title Philosophical Parerga “those of my pieces of work which did not go into the Fragmente” suggests at the very least that Horkheimer did not consider it particularly pressing to restrict “those pieces of my work” to a short, numbered list. To the second and third objections: without presuming to have Horkheimer’s own authority, the fact that Horkheimer so casually refers to “those of my pieces of work which did not go into the Fragmente” in general seems to indicate that any the fragments written prior to November 1947 could have been included under the title. Further, I would argue that Horkheimer’s choice of Philosophical Parerga as his title shows he considered them to occupy a ‘paradoxical position’ relative to his major works with Adorno comparable to Schopenhauer’s own Parerga and Paralipomena relative to World as Will and Representation, a role that the below fragments written after the fall of 1947 seem to fulfill—pending further archival discoveries which might exclude this categorization on the grounds of the fragments belonging to another project entirely.
The most serious objection, and which could be considered a fourth in its own right, derives from the second—namely, that presenting the fragments together under the title Philosophical Parerga is a betrayal of a more authentic presentation of their ‘miscellaneous’ composition. This objection should be taken seriously, primarily because it is one of the most pervasive errors in the reception of critical theory in the 1940s: the post-systematic interpretation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is true that the text published as Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947 still retains the title of its 1944 variant—Philosophical Fragments—as its subtitle, which indicates that, from the earliest stages of its conception, the ‘systematic’ character of the book was openly contested by the authors, as evident by its name as much as its ‘essayistic’ form. As I will have to argue at greater length in a later post, this contestation does not in fact amount to the abdication of systematic scope nor an a priori repudiation of conceptual comprehension. This interpretation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment falls prey to the critique of dominant a-conceptual tendencies in contemporary philosophy developed throughout its very first chapter: “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.”4 Even Adorno’s Minima Moralia “forgets neither the system’s claim to totality, which would suffer nothing to remain outside it, nor that it remonstrates against this claim.”5 What I propose instead is that Dialectic of Enlightenment be read as an ‘aporetic,’ even speculative, attempt to conceptually comprehend the limitations of the concept, reaching beyond the concept by means of the concept itself.
By way of conclusion, I will quote from Horkheimer’s manuscript for the final lecture of his series on “Society and Reason” delivered in 1944, during the final stages of the consolidation of the Fragmente, in which he reflects on the relationship between fragments and truth:
One of the crucial tasks of true philosophy is to plumb the layers of experience preserved in the comprehensive and constitutive concepts of our vocabularies. Philosophy has to deepen its sensitivity to the muted testimonies of language. Each national tongue conveys a message, embodying the thought-forms and belief-patterns rooted in the evolution of different peoples. It is the repository of the variegated perspectives of prince and pauper, poet and peasant. Its forms and content are enriched or impoverished, as the case may be, by the naive usage of everyman. Yet, it would be an error to assume that we could discover the comprehensive meaning of a word by simply resorting to the people who use it. Gallup-polls are of little avail in this search. In the age of formalized reason even the masses abet the decomposition of concepts and ideas. The man in the street, or, as it has become more fashionable to say, the man in the fields and factories is learning to use words almost as schematically and unhistorically as the experts. The philosopher must avoid this example. To the passion for lucidity gained in the course of truth’s progress, he must join a sensitivity to those traits of life which lie below the surface of available definitions. [...] He must not utter the words “man, animal, society, world, mind, thought” without recalling their twilight-zones and opacities. At no time may he take refuge from complexity by surrendering to the illusion that he can climb to a higher level of truth by simply insisting on the transparency of such ideas. Concepts and categories should neither enter nor leave his workshop looking clear-cut and freshly-shaven. This may serve to explain why some of my answers during our last discussions may have appeared cryptic. Some of you asked me—and in so doing you were entirely justified—what I mean by nature, self, mind, existence. Do “ego” and “spirit” exist, and so on? The tentative definitions I offered in my responses were intended to be simple abbreviations of my understanding of these concepts. Some of the deeper implications, it was hoped, would be found embodied in the explanations and illustrations presented in the course of the lecture. In my opinion a satisfactory philosophical definition of a concept can be supplied by nothing short of the farthest advance of the philosophical theory itself. Each concept must be seen as a fragment of an embracing truth, in which it finds its true meaning. It is precisely such building of truth out of fragments which is philosophy’s prime concern. I am compelled in this connection to recall the eloquent formulation of my great and all-too-soon departed friend, Walter Benjamin.
The ingenuity of Horkheimer’s choice of Philosophical Parerga is that the title renders Horkheimer’s individual parergon as supplements to the ergon, the work, as Adorno wrote, “we do not forsake.” If Horkheimer’s instruction to call his 1940s fragments ‘Parerga’ is interpreted as an instruction for reading the seemingly miscellaneous notes he produced throughout the decade, it is precisely their lack of obvious theoretical coherence that enables us to see every fragment in its intertextual integrity as more than it is. With this, the problems of the miscellany may be converted into the paradoxes of the Parerga. The task, in short, is to read each as as a fragment of an embracing truth in which it finds its true meaning and as a relay-point from which the pursuit of philosophy’s prime concern to build the truth out of fragments might resume.
Table of contents.
Horkheimer: Philosophical Parerga (1945-1949).
The Cry for Freedom (1945).6
Of the Origin of Truth (1945).7
Sociological Distinctions (1945).8
The Rational is the irrational (1945).9
End of the Individual (July 1945).10
Towards a Critique of The American Social Sciences (October 1946).11
The Fate of Revolutionary Movements (October 1946).12
Three excerpts from: Handwritten Notes (1947).13
Human Experimentation (ca. October 1947).14
On an idea of Paul Valéry’s regarding the expropriation of the inner life of human beings. (1949).15
On the powerlessness of the individual and the autonomizing of power in the economy of capitalism (10/18/1949).16
The Cry for Freedom (1945).
The reversal of the cry for freedom, revolutionary against feudalism, into the reactionary slogan of entrepreneurial initiative and monopoly exemplifies the dialectical law that in class society all institutions supposed to benefit the lower classes revert into means of domination. Examples: Law for the Protection of the Republic,17 Mann Act,18 immigration of contract labor,19 and yes, even trial by jury.
Of the Origin of Truth (1945).
As each historical form of life is overtaken and destroyed, its truth is freed. At first, it takes on the form of aesthetic semblance [Schein], memory, utopia. What was false, superstitious, and cruel in actuality rises from the grave as an image opposed to the actuality which usurped it. For example: the image of individual freedom after the decline of liberalism; that of the sorcerer and alchemist, himself an ambiguous resemblance [Widerschein] of the bloody Magus, to the magician, illusionist, enchanter of the circus. The truth is, so to speak, a product of putrefaction. Dying is its presupposition; death its origin. This is the justified core of Christian doctrine that the worship of the cross sought to obscure. The relation lends itself to more exact formulation by reference to the fact that the most sublime of perfumes are identical in native substance to musk. The distinction lies, as it were, in the slightest nuance of perception, in the nothing that makes all the difference after all.
Sociological Distinctions (1945).
The sociological demarcations of society into “lower classes, lower middle and upper middle classes, lower and upper upper classes” may certainly correspond to reality, but what’s more important is the function of satisfaction they fulfill in the psychic household of the sociologist.20 When you enter a restaurant accompanied by such an expert, some establishment where the evening dresses and diamonds sparkle and exorbitant sums are spent, where a first-class orchestra is playing and you feel simply grand for having come, you will immediately be informed that this is all just “middle middle class” with a smattering of “upper middle”—and no “high class” in sight. For those at the very summit are as gods seated above the clouds, a shroud through which no mortal gaze can penetrate. But what a luminary this sociologist must be to assign all of the elegant people around you their correct place on the social ladder and, in the process, ensure that one does not overestimate them. All due respect to the point of view which seems to penetrate even into those castles in the clouds, as accommodating of the average millionaire as the halls in which they reside. Things look differently from below, however; the image is determined by the two poles of social development. From here, humanity appears split into the strata of the system’s beneficiaries—the generals, colonels, and captains of exploitation—and the great army of proletarian existence—those who live in misery, with no other prospects for the future. The first strata is infinitely small in comparison, and the distinctions in it difficult to discern.
The theory which aims to change this situation considers the relative magnitudes of capitals extremely important, for crises and wars depend upon their proportions. In the sphere of production, any opposition [Gegensatz] can become socially significant. Consumption, however, directly mirrors the opposition between enjoyment and deprivation, hunger and satiety, which the more subtle formation of categories, whatever its objective justification, tends to blur. It is only if the simple, brutal fact of class division is maintained throughout all the complications of one’s concepts will they not become another ideological swindle. Simplicity and brutality, however, contradict the scientific refinement of the free-floating intelligence. The dialectical insight that in so rich a series of social strata from the uppermost to the undermost the mode of existence reverses from abundance into scarcity and finally into misery—this is too crude for them, and they remain at the level of nuances. These gentlemen themselves feel grand whenever the distinguish between “lower upper” and “upper middle” yet again. In reality, they can hardly contain their respect for the rule of wealth.
The irrational is the rational (1945).
In class society, the theoretical, abstract moment predominates in truth precisely because it has no power in society. The predominance of theory is always an expression of powerlessness. In theory itself, the spiritual—i.e., uncontrollable, irrational—elements necessarily acquire too much weight so long as reality, the empirical, is bad. Theory expresses the negation of reality only in the fantastical, romantic element within it; the rational is the irrational.
End of the Individual (1945).
In the present phase, there is no more division of labor to be found within the individual himself. His productive aspects have narrowed radically into one-sided, limited, specialist function. With this, it ceases to be an individual. In earlier epochs, human beings had to perform a broad range of activities: primitive man, for example, fabricated a variety of tools and weapons for bagging, preparing, dismembering animals, or with which he would till the earth, refashioning its products for cookware or clothing. At a later time, he may have been required to rule and ride, plan and fight, and the like.
Today society alone is such a subject, the collective which sucks all the functions from human beings until in the end only one—a rather impoverished one, as it were—remains, which that society then orders the individual to perform. He becomes completely alien to the objectified world, of which he only produces and comprises a particle.
In the past, each was in a certain way a whole world unto themselves, constituted by the manifold of their capacities and activities, modified by the specific idiosyncrasies of their performance and by the recursive effect this kaleidoscope of individual productivity would have upon their inner life. In a truly ironic sense there is today just one world, that of the collective, which produces and reproduces dehumanization and vacuity in perpetuity.
The objection that the individual of today is endowed with a vast number of skills and abilities previously unknown to humanity holds no water here. The servicing and operation of cars and radios, the performance of innumerable sporting activities, is a process within the sphere of consumption, and no longer has anything to do with the productive, creative aspects of human beings. In reality, this quantum of difference in consumptive processes adds up to nothing but an ever-greater oneness and tedium; the void all-convergence of each into the other.
Towards a Critique of The American Social Sciences (October 1946).
At the very least until the 1920s, there existed a distinction between American research on society [Gesellschaftsforschung] and European, particularly German, theory of society, as between individual science and philosophical conception of history. By contrast, neither “Social Research” nor “Social Science” can be said to be guilty of imperialistic tendencies; they don’t seek to conquer their place in the sun of the intellectual division of labor. In the concert of the disciplines, they know exactly how to play their part and follow the rules of the special-scientific game, even when both these rules and the division of labor itself become the object of social sciences. Just as the natural sciences, their tasks are on the whole predetermined by changing social need—there, on the grounds of the resistance of nature, here on the grounds of the increased complications in the administration of human beings. Accordingly, for the social sciences as well, the clarification of their methods of procedure in order to increase the reliability of their results is what marks their progress along the path before them. Even if not as consciousness of having renounced them, the memory of philosophical intentions is still alive in American social sciences. The idea that their theme is even now the identity of human society and justice, the contradictions which spring from this, and their eventual reconciliation—this lies as far from the mind of the modern social scientist as the category of essence does the modern physicist.
The logical ground of this condition is illuminated by the history of the concept in bourgeois thinking. It is the secularized element that remained after the mythical world of the gods was transmuted into the realm of eternal ideas when Aristotle made the basic forms of thinking into the object of ordered contemplation. From that point on, the concept separated into subject and object of logical understanding. The concept, the Existenzform of truth, became object of the concept, yet without this objectification—the concept entering into opposition with itself, the self-reflection of the Seinsform of truth—itself entering into reflective consciousness. The great Aristotelians like Thomas forgot that, in opposition to sensory perception, thinking does indeed have the capacity to turn back upon itself, and to thereby grasp through material things themselves the universal that is essential to them and into which they come of their own accord—but this process of reflection does not become the essential content of philosophy. Despite all theological implications, the disputes over the nature of the concept remain divorced from theological doctrines proper, and since these alone answer the question of the being and essence of the truth, there remains an unresolved contradiction between the dialectical approaches of the Scholastics and their doctrine of the otherworldly Logos in eternal self-repose, which results in the disintegration of Scholasticism.21 German mysticism, which begins with Meister Eckhart […]22
The Fate of Revolutionary Movements (October 1946).
In individual historical periods, the good clearly opposed itself to that which exists [das Bestehenden] in the form of a determinate religious, political, or social movement. In such times, the disintegration of once-dominant forms of life had progressed far enough to reveal their universal despair, but not, however, far enough to draw out of those groups with immediate interest in the New the intellectual force to comprehend it, to help bring it to victory. The good therefore confronted that which exists as historical violence, as Christian love against idolatry, socialist economy against private exploitation. In the course of such times, the old was unveiled as petrified opposition to universal humanity, and adherence to it as blind and narrow-hearted—as if the veil had been torn. The decision which began in the yearnings of consciousness took flight, becoming the higher principle, the progressive movement.
The movement itself, however, has a fate of its own. In the beginning, though it still existed in a state of exclusivity, within the singular souls of a community of individuals with shared insight, it was nevertheless inclusive of humanity as a whole. The Evangelists of the Gopels preached no crusade, nor the philosophy of tolerance, nor the wars of nations. Only to the extent the principle wins political Prägnanz and, in the end, power, does it cease to freely comprehend within itself the bad and the limited, the barriers of society, to overcome them outside itself; only then does it allow itself to be inwardly limited by the bad and the limited without. It takes on the spiritual and intellectual form which necessity impresses upon it. In so doing, the revolutionary principle restores the divorce of human beings from one another as a fixed boundary of thought, and thereby enters into antagonism with itself. From the heights of the actuality-comprehending idea, it sinks, down into the self-justification of injustice, adapting to its incarnation and forms a murky unity with the realities of Christendom dripping with blood, the exploiting nation, the bureaucratic police state. The truth is engulfed in oblivion.
This course of events has—in party factions and sects, the great and the small, whether social, philosophical, artistic—repeated with such frequency that it could be considered a natural law of history, just as the discoveries of youth are subjected to reality-testing in order to be put into practice in one’s private existence. But this bourgeois-materialistic interpretation condescendingly seeks to blame the ideality of the principle for being too lofty or misanthropically seeks to blame the egoism of human nature for being too base—both of which amount to the same thing. Measure [Maß] and measured [Gemessenes] become blurred. Cold self-assertion in society can then be hypostasized into true nature, so far as the idea of the better is mutilated, neutralized by the business-as-usual of culture. Idea and actuality, theory and practice, only seem to exclude one another because they have been reduced to a common denominator as parts of a fixed categorial framework; though immediately identical under the static logic of the superstructure of the division of labor, they only ever touch one another externally.
Priests and bankers, the man of the spirit and the man of commerce, administer the functions of a single order in equal measure, though each takes care to set aside the shares due to God or in stocks for themselves. Just as churches and stock exchanges are constructed in different locations on one architectural plan, in the end the concepts of each betoken abstracta of one petrified ideology. Indictment of the right aspiration of youth indicts the badness of adults. It is both condition and consequence of the process it presumes to explain. In the beginning of the movement, however, the Idea is no mere Ideal. For the revolutionary, theory and practice are not two exclusive categories in the same logical order; the revolutionary is as little a Manichaean in politics as they once were in faith. What truly attainable eternal bliss was for Christianity, what happiness for all was for the revolutionary upheavals of the past, is what the real possibility of unsummable abundance was for socialism—namely, the ground of its existence [Daseinsgrund]. These grand ideas held themselves potentially present and were therefore radical. Only when goal and means interlock in even the smallest steps taken upon the path do the false and the true state of things part from the other as fire and water; only in the face of reconciliation does the courage to be irreconcilable arise.
This principle, necessarily co-posited in each thought, goes by the name of ‘Truth,’ though it has no general definition. It enters into appearance as negative, as resistance against that injustice which befalls the particular through its subsumption under a particular universal. Logical and social violence are inseparable, their reciprocity unrelenting. In each historical situation, however, the overcoming of this injustice, which forms the content of the principle, is differently determined. Just as physical pain is ruled throughout by the thorn against which it writhes, the truth of that which exists [die Wahrheit des Bestehenden] appears as its negation. The world which must be overcome finds expression in the political, artistic, theoretical forms of the spirit which resists the powers of suggestion of social and extra-social nature; it is betrayed by the subject who obeys it.
Three excerpts from: Handwritten Notes (1947).
On the Dialectic of Religion. Dialectic: Christ is, in fact, more resigned than a Jew. No utopia. But isn’t resignation, the submission of one’s person to nature and death, the very course of utopia [Gang der Utopie] that shines forth in those who submit freely and willingly? (Dialectic of reflection.)
Determinate Negation and Truth. […]23 Apropos dialectics: one must establish the relationship between (a) the process of progress in the concept through determinate negation (the method of dialectics—against positivism, towards truth) and (b) the truth itself. Perhaps this relationship is completely inexpressible—in any case it is pure ‘infinite process.’ But even if the dialectic is not closed [abgeschlossene]—it is ‘total’! (Role of constellation.)
On the Injustice of the Order of Private Property. The injustice of the system of property ownership is well illustrated by The Spendthrift [Der Verschwender] (by [Ferdinand] Raimund) [1834].24 The subordinate [viz., Valentine] helps himself afterwards. He has, so to speak, a contract with his Lord—so long as he has money—but the Lord has none with him. The subordinate can even become rich if, indeed, he has the “skill,” be it only of flattery—but the Lord has only the surplus.
Human Experimentation (ca. October 1947).
Ad aspera.25 Seek no novels—“enough thrill.” (The ‘essay’ of the novel disappears.) The reduction of the human being to the animal through suffering is the difference that makes the act of ‘human experimentation’ worse than ‘the usual vivisection,’ one might say. But there’s no one left over to say this. Wherever suffering begins, there’s no longer any difference. At most, the one who holds onto reflection might still have hope. Besides: the reduction of the animal to lifeless matter is an order of infinity, such that the difference comes out to zero: infinite [+] or [-], zero remains itself.
On an idea of Paul Valéry’s regarding the expropriation of the inner life of human beings. (1949).
In a book of Paul Valéry’s,26 written primarily for those who possess no system of their own and keep their distance from political parties, there is a hypothesis about the developmental direction of the present. Just as the representations of natural consciousness of the fixity and opacity of certain objects have been outstripped by technology, the basic concepts of the human being could all prove so conditioned. This applies to qualities themselves. Whether a block of wood is transparent depends upon the strength of the rays at one’s disposal; what once concealed itself from the eye now presents itself on sight, at a glance, for new and improved methods. Distinctions between core and surface become blurrier, and one day we will discover “that the expression ‘inner life’ referred solely to the condition of the classical, so-to-speak natural means of production and reception.”27 The relative isolation the ego required in order to flourish has thus been thoroughly broken.
[The voices, images, and sounds which once determined the most blissful thoughts and feelings can not only be reproduced by technological means today, but synthetically produced. It’s only a matter of time until the more traditional way of expressing oneself will be viewed as a crude method of trying to influence others by consciousness, and, if need be, be replaced by more inconspicuous and reliable methods of doing the same. The ego is left exposed. Valéry resorts to the following analogy:]28 when a watch in its owner’s pocket is caught in a magnetic field, the pace at which it ticks is altered without its bearer becoming aware of the cause. In the future, the course and content of consciousness will be directed and distracted in the same manner without the knowledge of its bearer either. The effects of intoxicants and other poisons of the soul are well-known; such crude chemistry will be overtaken by radiation physics. The self-identical ego, the soul, will be expropriated: the morals of peoples the calculated outcome of electrical machinery. The delusion of the paranoiac becomes reality.
[Valéry himself, with the final result now in view, has connected the techniques of demagogues and leaders of peoples to the physical laws of action-at-a-distance. In fact, the effect of each method is equally blind and equally controllable. Economic and political domination over human beings continues in apparatus-mediated controls; thinking is immediately replaced by machinery, actions by effects, and human beings by things. If Valéry’s clairvoyance failed to notice that in this transition to action-at-a-distance, direct action—that is, violence, pain, and fear, always play a part in this constellation, then this is because he …]29
[…]30 Valéry himself says that the techniques of the founders of religions and the leaders of nations are the precursors to soul-manipulation through the physics of action-at-a-distance; the technique of modern demagogy is certainly just as controllable and blind as the technology of electric power-steering. The domination of human beings by the economy continues in apparatus-mediated controls. Anthropology is inverted: thinking is immediately replaced by machinery, actions by effects, and human beings by things. This hypothesis—even if it is understood that, in the transition to action-at-a-distance, direct action, i.e., violence, pain, and fear, will always be part of the social constellation—offers a precise description of the tendency of all culture in the age of mass-leadership: the approximation of pure technology. This course of events is evident in all areas. The replacing of conscience by psychotherapy is no less a manifestation of this process than the replacing of morality by the apparatus of advertising, which models human beings according to its patterned cut-outs, from instilling the same respect for field marshals as for vacuum cleaners to the pleasure of seeing the shattered bodies, the spectacle for which our children cheer at animated films. But the reason for this process resides neither in Freudian theory nor electrical engineering of projection machines, but only in the social whole in which both find application subjecting human beings to new practices of cultivation. The course of the historical education of humanity once consisted of breakthroughs in commercial and industrial revolutions; now in their organization into national opposing teams. Advancement in technology makes these power blocs autarchic and, at the same time, compels them to enter into a deadly contest with each other—all the more deadly as long as the true reasons for this do not rise to consciousness. Society becomes a monstrous warmachine. But its potential for success is immediately endangered if each and every part does not function without incident. Even if that should mean poverty.
In the Middle Ages, war was not truly essential. With the advent of absolutism and the nation-state, it became an economic necessity. In the 19th century, the means of war became an end in themselves, and, in the 20th, the functioning of the economy within the given framework came to depend upon more and more gigantic armaments. The dominant position of the hierarchies in the more developed countries launched them into a tempo of organizational, technical, and social developments that the champions of the less developed, under the pressure of starving masses, sought to achieve with a desperate violence. The economy still dominates human beings. The more labor the machine saves, the more dangerous the masses for whom it could provide. When an agent of a foreign power can level an entire city with a single time-bomb, every vacillating thought becomes a threat to communal existence. The demarcation between thinking and action upon which bourgeois humanity and its freedom of spirit have relied becomes blurred; the fact that one’s ego is driven out of its secret hiding places in the age of technology is only the reverse side of the process in which one’s mentality itself becomes external. Neither the relative autonomy of the Victorian Bürger nor the inhuman existence of the proletarian in the beyond of bourgeois civilization enabled us to see into its darker corners. There are no more islands. The irrational state of the world continues in the total rationalization of the human being. The development which Valéry anticipated in which electrical waves would act directly on the substance of the nerves instead of taking a detour via radio and film, sound and image, eye and ear, is so in step with the times that the corresponding inventions are long overdue.
On the powerlessness of the individual and the autonomizing of power in the economy of capitalism (10/18/1949).
One of the questions which has preoccupied me as of late relates to the simultaneous unstructuring and strengthening of economic power-positions and the increase in population. The old saying that under the given social relations the lowest of the social strata are the least inhibited producers of offspring has proven a special case of a more universal lawfulness: it relates to degrees of individualization. Throughout the 19th century, the degree of individualization roughly corresponded to positions in the hierarchy of labor and degrees of economically autonomous existence. Today, these are becoming blurred. Yet it is becoming even clearer that as the masses grow on the one side, power grows on the other. This power is by no means, as was still the case in the period of mercantilism, the attribute of a person, theirs for life, much as with the other, however transient, properties attributed to them; rather, with the increase of power, it has become autonomous to its bearers. Even though persons at risk of losing or being removed from their positions at the top can always—in this country at least—find some refuge on account of their prior membership (unless they prove unassimilable in esse), power is nevertheless no longer constitutive in them, such that it might lend an afterglow, or even nobility, to their person, even in the most refracted sense; power is hardened and brittle to the individual. At their core, the individual remains powerless and atomized.
But as the power of the masses grows, this growth does not translate into power for its individual members either. There are a number of reasons for why their autonomous consciousness as producers has been broken. The cost of one’s emancipation from once-denounced dehumanization is that the pain of its sting can no longer be felt in the society into which one was emancipated. The deepest ground for this, it seems to me, lies in the fact that, from an economic perspective, production is in large part considered artifice, luxury. The condition in which the social whole maintains its course without the interruption of horrible crises through the production of means of destruction instead of means of consumption (this extends to the machines for the production of the social apparatus of destruction, the means of production and consumption which are only necessary for the sake of stimulating it—in fact, the provision of means of consumption to auxiliary peoples [Hilfsvölker] is a constitutive moment of this economic process) spells the fundamental redundancy of all of its participants, and, at least in the sense of classical economics, of the vast majority of producers in general. Classical economics, an inheritance of the 18th and preceding centuries, posited that human dignity derived from labor performed for the satisfaction of real needs of others; and by virtue of this labor, one would become capable of satisfying their own needs. Self-consciousness and dignity in the modern sense were built on this. But today, the connection has been broken, and human beings have long since signed themselves over to the organizations of the state or to state-like organizations of industry, which, by their decisions, maintain and steer the process of production; production is no longer legitimized by the labor of individuals or the satisfaction of their immediate needs. Perhaps this development will open a path towards a condition of a more rational and universal process of decision-making, one based on the spontaneity of the whole. But this transition also contains the antithesis to what is right in itself.
The self-consciousness of the individual as producer is in the process of disintegration. One is supposed to imagine it has been revived as consciousness of the power of the consumer in consumption. Isn’t it true that as the masses increase in number, consumption becomes an overpowering force, a giant before the directors of society? But the degradation of consumption is asserted in the powerless of consumers. The fact that they are not, and for crucial reasons cannot be, effectively organized only scratches the surface of the problem. In a certain sense, the consumer is supposed to represent humanity [Humanität]. As a consumer, a ‘McCormick’ can still be reduced to the level of an unskilled laborer, if only because both of their households can and need to buy bread. But it is precisely because the consumer loses their unique force of impact as they increase in number that ‘the consumer’ increasingly serves the ideological purposes of rationalization. Even to reserve himself a seat in the popular theater during his upcoming visit to New York, the provincial will need some powerful connections (if not also appeal to the government or national corporations). The economic order of rank prevails in the slightest shades of difference along the scale of financial solvency and influence. From the ability to quickly procure seats in train cars and airplane cabins to diplomatic immunity, these hierarchical relations are asserted in a high degree of exactitude. The muses that cultured the cultured, once at the disposal of the relatively numerous strata of the upper middle class in the nineteenth century because of sufficient security and help in the household, have long since become the exclusive privilege of the pauci beati. Through the increased professional activity of women, the sector of loving concern around the sphere of immediate enjoyment and the dignity of the household, which once extended the field of one’s person, grows narrower and null. Less and less qualitatively differentiated initiative and fantasy enter into it. This function is taken over by the process of production—the same in which domination and destruction play the leading roles.
Though I am making a serious effort to correctly assess the significance of such processes in liberation from mythology and from literal slavery, I nevertheless must ask myself whether the reduction of the autonomy of the subject and its total disempowerment, which is as much like the Christian annihilation of human vanity as the giant is to the Golem, finally brings about the actualization of freedom or, to the contrary, makes it utterly meaningless. Day after day, the fragment in the Dialectic of Enlightenment titled “Critique of the Philosophy of History” seems the true description of the danger we face. Throughout natural history, the victory of one species over another has been marked by their overextension. Today, we are eyewitnesses to the outspreading of the human being as that of the most terrifying predatory race [Raubrasse] known to date. Whether it this will actually reverse into a higher kind of life or lead instead to the complete eradication of life remains to be seen. Perhaps we could be more indifferent about this if the prognosis were not identical with our judgment of the present and the decision of our own individual existence.
More on this series.
Forthcoming: “Rescuing the Rettung: On the conceptual reconstruction of Adorno and Horkheimer's writings on the unwritten sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment.”
A timeline reconstructing the various stages of Horkheimer and Adorno’s oft-interrupted and sporadically resumed ‘continuation’ of their philosophical collaboration between mid-1944 and late 1949, during which they conceived and reconceived a general plan and individual themes for a second installment of their Dialectic. The report will conclude with a hypothesis for why the book remained unwritten given the shift in Horkheimer’s focus with the ISR’s re-founding in Frankfurt around 1950.
Other posts in this series:
Teaser: The Rapid Deactivation of the Subject (1944/45)
Teaser for a series on Adorno and Horkheimer’s preliminary sketches, mostly composed between 1945 and 1949, for their long-planned, but unwritten sequel to the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
“Preface [VII],” in: Arthur Schopenhauer. Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays. Volume 1. [1851] Translated and Edited by Sabine Roehr and Christopher Janaway, with an Introduction by Christopher Janaway (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life [1951], translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. (Verso 2005 [NLR 1974]), 18.
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]
In: Minima Moralia (2005), 16.
“[Der Ruf nach Freiheit],” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 298. Author’s translation.
“[Vom Ursprung der Wahrheit],” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 298. Author’s translation.
“[Soziologische Unterscheidungen],” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 302-303. Author’s translation.
“Das Rationale ist das Irrationale” (title by F. Pollock), in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 306. Author’s translation.
“[Ende des Individuums.]” Inscription (Leo Löwenthal): ‘Max Horkheimer.’ Dating (Leo Löwenthal): ‘July 1945.’ In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 318-319. Author’s translation.
“[Zur Kritik der amerikanischen Sozialwissenschaften (Fragment)] (1946),” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 319-320. Author’s translation.
“[Das Schicksal revolutionärer Bewegungen] (1946),” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 320-323. Author’s translation.
Sourced from: MHA Na [807]
“[Über die Dialektik der Religion],” from: “Verschiedene Notizen, 1947.” In: MHA Na [807], S. [92]
“[bestimmte Negation und Wahrheit],” from: “Verschiedene Notizen, 1947.” In: MHA Na [807], S. [91]
“Über das Unrecht der Eigentumsordnung,” from: “Verschiedene Notizen, 1947.” In: MHA Na [807], S. [98]
“Humanversuche,” from: “Verschiedene Notizen, 1947.” In: MHA Na [807], S. [90]
See: Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 10/3/1947: “Marcuse's visit has been very pleasant so far. The theses he wrote as a possible program for the Zeitschrift, particularly the second part, contain some of the best formulations on these topics I have heard for a long time. Since the publication of a Zeitschrift with the aspirations and about the same volume of the old one would involve not only too much of our common time but also too great a risk, we considered the possibility of a smaller periodical which would be exclusively devoted to the critique of culture i.e., of any work in the realm of the objective mind: books, periodicals, plays, movies, compositions etc.). Such a review would be much easier to write and also less risky. During the next few months each of us should probably write one article. This would give us an idea what effort it would mean and what the first one or two issues would look like. We thought you might be able to condense your German study on Biographies' for this purpose if you don't want to take a German bestseller of the day. Marcuse would write on Jaspers, Teddie on Koestler, and I possibly on a report on the German experiments on the human being which Marcuse will send me. All this, however, is very tentative and naturally you will be kept informed. The whole idea has the great advantage that the final decision on the periodical itself does not have to be made until several months later. — Up to now we have not discussed M[arcuse]’s personal matter. I think, however, that we should do what we can in order to help him make the transition to an academic existence and possibly with a partial participation in the Institute's work. Needless to say, on the other hand, that we shall not encourage him to give up his position in the government if it can be maintained.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 903-4. Emphasis added.
“Über Paul Valérys Gedanken der Enteignung des menschlichen Innenlebens.” Two variants. In: MHA [807]
MHA: Notes; datiert von Friedrich Pollock '1949/1950':; [2.] Über Paul Valérys Gedanken der Enteignung des menschlichen Innenlebens. Typoskript, 2 Blatt; … [4.] Über Paul Valérys Gedanken der Enteignung des menschlichen Innenlebens [GS 13, S. 652 - 655]:; a) Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 4 Blatt; b) Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 2 Blatt; c) Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 1 Blatt; d) Eigene Notizen, 3 Blatt;
Typed manuscript excerpted from a letter to Leo Löwenthal (10/18/1949). In: MHA [807]
Über die Ohnmacht des Individuums und die Verselbstständigung der Macht in der Ökonomie des Kapitalismus; 18.10.1949. Typoskript, aus einem Brief an Leo Löwenthal, 3 Blatt;
Gesetz zum Schutz der Republik: “Law for the Protection of the Republic.” Enacted in Germany, 1922, following the assassination of Walther Rathenau.
See also: Otto Kirchheimer, “Legality and Legitimacy” (1932):
In Germany, neither the constitutional assembly nor the legislature ever decided to subject specific political groups to exceptional criminal laws on account of their political aims or convictions. At best, one can find a tentative starting point for this type of practice in paragraph 4 of the Defense of the Republic Act, which threatens a prison sentence of no less than three months to anyone who takes part in a secret or subversive organization aspiring to overthrow the constitutionally established republican form of government at either the state or the federal level. The real meaning of this law can only be correctly appreciated by taking into consideration its references to paragraphs 128 and 129 of the criminal code and to the idea of a constitutionally established form of government. Both references involve an attempt at formalizing this law with the aim of realizing a more effective legal defense of the Constitution without subjecting particular political groups to a set of exceptional laws. The notion of a party ”hostile to the political order” was defined in reference to the Constitution and a set of general laws valid for everyone; no attempt was made to defame a specific set of political views by legal means. So if the government wanted to persecute certain political groups on account of their activities (which was common enough given the intensity and depth of divisions among political parties in Germany), it was necessary to rely on the fiction that they were not being persecuted on the basis of their convictions but as organizations ”hostile to the political order.” In short, the government had to try to prove that concrete offences against provisions of the criminal law had taken place. Even this method of persecution was limited: its employment was impermissible against the organizational core of the political party, its parliamentary representatives. This organizational core was considered unassailable from the perspective of the law even when, as occasionally happened, an entire political party was declared an illegal organization and thus an attempt was made to prevent it from engaging in effective political work. Legislatures have never undertaken to develop legal distinctions between parties by referring to the contents of their worldviews and actions. For example, the December 1927 Prussian law that regulates the organization of local government expressly determines that ”an elected representative cannot be denied his seat on the basis of membership in a particular political party.” The constitutional right of every political party to participate in Parliament—along with all of its auxiliary rights, the most important of which is the right to wage a political campaign—was always preserved. As long as Parliament still functioned in a regular manner, the only thing that mattered for determining the legality of a party was whether it relied on illegal methods to gain political power. Since no constitutional or other type of legal norm insisted on the universally binding character of a set of specific social views, the ultimate political or social goals of a party were irrelevant in the determination of the legality of a party. Even the administration was generally required to respect these limits when pursuing political opponents. The federal courts occasionally failed to exercise these supervisory functions effectively, but such transgressions only took place occasionally against the Communist Party (KPD), and even then, quite typically, courts avoided the formulation of new legal principles. Instead, they preferred to rely on an extremely extensive interpretation of the category of treason that clearly overstepped the boundaries of the law.
Translated by Anke Grosskopf and William E. Scheuerman. In: The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. Edited by William E. Scheuerman. (University of California Press, 1996), 51-53.
The Mann Act, or the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, invoked the Commerce Clause to felonize the interstate transport or foreign trafficking of women ‘for immoral purposes.’
Also known as the “Asiatic Barred Zone Act.”
[MHGS Ed. Fn.] Under the Immigration Act passed in the United States in 1917, a labor contract made prior to immigration was—with few exceptions—compelling grounds for visa denial. This was encouraged by union fears that mass billing of cheap foreign workforces would apply downward pressure on domestic wages.
See: “Chap. 29.—An Act To regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the resistance of aliens in, the United States.”
Sec. 3. That the following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States: […] persons hereinafter called contract laborers, who have been induced, assisted, encouraged, or solicited to migrate to this country by offers or promises of employment, whether such offers or promises are true or false, or in consequence of agreements, oral, written, or printed, express or implied, to perform labor in this country of any kind, skilled or unskilled; persons who have come in consequence of advertisements for laborers printed, published, or distributed in a foreign country; […] The provisions of this law applicable to contract labor shall not be held to exclude professional actors, artists, lecturers, singers, nurses, ministers of any religious denomination, professors for colleges or seminaries, persons belonging to any recognized learned profession, or persons employed as domestic servants; […]
In: Sixty-Fourth Congress. Sess. II. (1917), 876-878. [link]
See Adorno to Horkheimer, 12/21/1944: “An idea came to me during that meeting which might be useful. The Berkeley study has shown that college students are more anti-Semitic the richer their parents are. On the reverse, the laboratory interviews seem to indicate that workers are more anti-Semitic the worse off they are, or at the very least the more they have to worry about their futures. The economic factor seems therefore to vary according to class. Perhaps something could be made out of this for Mr. Lloyd Warner, inventor of ‘the upper lower middle class.’” [link to author’s translation]
[Horkheimer’s Note:] Vgl. [Carl] Prantl, [Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, Bd.] III [(1867), Darmstadt 1957] S. 111.
[MHGS Ed. Note:] Manuscript breaks off.
The note opens with: “Mendelssohn schreiben / Dialektik schrecken [?].” Reference could not be determined.
See: Roger Crockett (1985):
In spite of all he has lost, Flottwell does not have to pay nearly the full penalty for his sins. On the contrary, his latter years will be spent in comfort. While he will not possess as much as he once did when he was too rich for his own good, he will nevertheless be able to live well and also engage in responsible philanthropy toward Valentin's family. His years as a spendthrift and his brief taste of abject poverty will serve him henceforth as an example and a deterrent to any such future behavior. In modern judicial slang he has received a slap on the wrist. Considering the Biedermeier ideal of contentment and the golden mean, Flottwell is better off now than he was before. From the restless life of an impulsive spendthrift whose wealth and frenetic lifestyle did not translate into true happiness, through a brief sojourn in poverty, Flottwell has arrived at a safe middle ground. He has descended from the hill on which his life, like his ancestral castle, had lain in ruin to join Lottchen, Karl, and Raimund's other redeemed mortals in the figurative "Tal der Zufrie-denheit," as the Alpine cowherds sing the Biedermeier admonition: "Zufrieden muß man sein" (HI, 454). In contradiction to Fate's decree, Flottwell's "Ich" has not freed him from the tyranny of his vice, which would surely have doomed him to die a beggar, nor has his salvation been free of supernatural intervention. Despite his stated intention to free his mortal protagonist "von allen Schicksalsketten," Raimund seems to have been unable to free himself from his dependence on an ever-watchful providence. Thus he has permitted Cheristane and Azur to circumvent the decree by methodically ignoring it and hiding the transgression behind the veneer of the Doppelgänger. Despite an apparent weakening of the supernatural frame and a greater concentration on the human level, Raimund has actually given us nothing significantly different from his earlier magic plays. He has certainly slackened Flottwell's tether and allowed him to stray closer to perdition, but Azur's final appearance in the moment of despair is merely another Baroque deus ex machina. It is an assurance that although man strays, the spirit world is ever on guard to save him from himself and give him a second chance.
In: “Raimund’s Der Verschwender: The Illusion of Freedom.” The German Quarterly 58, no. 2 (1985): 184–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/406986.
‘Ad aspera’ is a play on the Latin phrase “Per aspera ad astra” (“through suffering to the stars”), meaning “to suffering,” most likely: through the stars to suffering.
Horkheimer’s fn.: Regards sur le Monde actuel (Paris, 1931)
Horkheimer’s fn.: “l.c., S. 84”
From “4a)”, missing in “2”
The manuscript of variant [2.] breaks off here.
The manuscript continues in [4a)]