Dämmerung Appendix I: Sketches for a Negative Metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse (ca. 1933)
Translations of two previously unpublished fragments on (A.) 'Negative Metaphysics' and (B.) The Materialist Conception of Time, with a Historical-Philosophical Introduction.
Appendix to a series of translations of texts for, from, or contemporaneous with Horkheimer’s Dämmerung. Notizen in Deutschland (1934).
Dämmerung I: Horkheimer's Weimar Journals (ca. 1920-1928)
Dämmerung II: Notes For Dämmerung (1926-1931)
Part III, with translations of previously untranslated aphorisms from Dämmerung coming soon.
Historical-Philosophical Introduction.
Late last year, I came across the following two fragments on metaphysics by Herbert Marcuse in the Horkheimer Nachlass (hereafter: MHA), which were collected alongside several published, though mostly untranslated, texts authored by Horkheimer himself—such as the Philosophical Journals (1925-1928), some unfinished fragments on sociology in a less literary, more scholastic form from the late 1920s—roughly spanning the period between the composition of Dämmerung (1926-1931) and its publication in 1934.1 To my knowledge, neither of these fragments has been translated into English, nor even published in German, before now. The first typescript, “Gedanken zu einer ‘negativen Metaphysik,’” is dated 6/12/33; the second typescript, “Abgrenzung der materialistischen Zeitauffassung von der philosophischen Tradition,” is not dated. Both are attributed to Herbert Marcuse alone, though attributing any one text composed by a member of the ISR’s circle from the 1930s—even through the early 1940s is—to a sole author is significantly harder to justify than has often been acknowledged in the reception of early critical theory. The date of the former suggests it was written around the time Marcuse first joined the ISR. Before discussing the fragments themselves, I will briefly reconstruct their probable context in Marcuse’s theoretical development in the early 1930s.
As Marcuse later recalls, the ascendancy of National Socialism in the early 1930s had forced him to give up any hope for an academic career in Germany: “there was no longer any point in a Jew and a Marxist taking a Habilitation.”2 Moreover, Marcuse’s Habilitation—Hegel’s Ontology and The Theory of Historicity (written 1929-1930, published 1932)—had been blocked by Heidegger. Already in his late 1920s writing on the ontology of historical materialism, Marcuse’s philosophical orientation had begun to diverge from Heidegger’s conception of existential phenomenology, a conflict which became particularly acute after Marcuse’s enthusiastic reception of the ‘concrete’ ontology of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, published in the MEGA(1) in 1932.3 As Mikko Immanen (2018) has recently shown through a study of Heidegger’s correspondence and Black Notebooks through the 1930s, Heidegger’s decision to block Marcuse’s Habilitation was well-motivated by a combination of philosophical, political, and racial reasons: anti-Hegelianism, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism. Marcuse, an Hegelian-Marxist Jew from Berlin, had written a thesis which relocated the problematic of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) in Hegel’s thought in order to “call for universal humanity and international proletarian revolution.”4 In light of Heidegger’s explicit identification of the philosophical enemy of Hegel’s systematic dialectic, the political enemy of communism, and the threat of ‘Jewish contamination’ of German academic and cultural life by the early 1930s,5 it is hard to imagine a thesis Heidegger could possibly have found more ‘objectionable’ than Hegel’s Ontology.
In January 1933, Marcuse left Freiburg, escaping Germany weeks before Hitler is named chancellor later that month. Marcuse officially joined the ISR shortly thereafter, following a conversation with Leo Löwenthal, who then spoke to Horkheimer on his behalf. Marcuse would oversee operations at the ISR’s Geneva office branch for the next year before moving to New York in 1934. Beyond administrative duties, however, Marcuse was hired by the ISR as the in-house ‘philosopher’ for the express purpose of counter-balancing the overwhelmingly social-scientific background and/or focus of the other members. In an important sense, Hegel’s Ontology was Marcuse’s introduction to ‘the Horkheimer circle’—already in 1932, Adorno had written a positive review of Hegel’s Ontology for the ZfS,6 praising, as Immanen puts it, its “promising position between Heideggerianism and a more historically concrete mode of thought.”7 It was because of Marcuse’s search for a more concrete, historical alternative to the existential ontology and phenomenology which was so fashionable at the time, and especially his attempt to find one through immanent critique, that Horkheimer quickly recognized Marcuse as a strong candidate for collaboration on Horkheimer’s long-planned and notoriously amorphous ‘dialectical logic’ project—the scope, focus, and co-authors for which changed a number of times throughout the 1930s. The earliest mentions of Marcuse in Horkheimer’s correspondence testify to this. In a letter to Erich Fromm dated 7/24/1934, in which Horkheimer outlines a possible beginning of the ‘dialectical logic’ in a materialist criticism of the “Ich” of both classical German idealism and psychoanalysis, Horkheimer concludes by noting: “I am talking with Marcuse about dialectical logic and am trying to get into the problem I'm treating.”8 And again in a letter to Pollock dated 8/3/1934, on plans for the collective division of work for the volume which would become the Studien über Autorität und Familie (1936), Horkheimer floats the possibility of Marcuse taking over the ‘sociological’ section of the literature reviews with the following aside: “Marcuse […] is showing real growth in our scientific world [viz., sociology] in the course of many scientific discussions we’ve had together here. […] I have already spoken with him a great deal about the structure of the logic, and have even sketched out some preliminary parts of the beginning.”9 From these letters, we know that Marcuse began collaborating with Horkheimer on sketches for the ‘dialectical logic’ as one of his earliest projects as an official member of the ISR. In several surviving sketches for a ‘dialectical logic’ written later in the 1930s (in both the MHA and Marcuse Nachlass), seemingly written for the collaboration with Horkheimer, Marcuse subjects several of the same fundamental categories which serve as the focii of these fragments—“nothingness,” “existence,” “infinity,” “finitude,” “subject,” “object,” and so on—to a similar procedure of dialectical ‘testing’—pairing their often self-contradictory development in the history of philosophy with an evaluation of their potential applications and limitations in the present.
What sets the following fragments—especially “Ideas for a ‘Negative Metaphysics’” (6/12/1933)—apart from the later sketches is that Marcuse here seems to adopt the same method of a dialectical-materialist Kategorienlehre for the sake of a totally unique project: a “negative metaphysics.” Not only is this project-conception unique, to the best of my knowledge, in Marcuse’s own intellectual development, but it offers a distinct alternative to the critique of metaphysics (and fundamental ontology) which Horkheimer had begun to work out in the Notizen zur Dämmerung (1926-1931)—for instance, in the fragment titled “On The Metaphysical Formulation of Questions,” in which Horkheimer concludes “there is no justified counterthesis to metaphysics; only its critique.” Marcuse’s “Negative Metaphysics” of 1933, explicitly formulated as a critique of Heideggerian ontology, is also distinct from Adorno’s search for an immanent critique of Heidegger in the early 1930s, which he outlines in the “Gutachten über die Dissertation von Sternberger” (1932).10 At the same time, however, Marcuse’s project of “Negative Metaphysics” has striking parallels with Horkheimer and Adorno’s projects at the time. Each of them seeks an ‘anamnesis of the genesis’ of idealist metaphysics and fundamental ontology, uncovering their ‘social content’ by reconstructing their internal dynamics as an expression of the historical experience of social crisis. Furthermore, all three had begun to develop their own variations on a criticism of Heidegger’s non-historical concept of ‘historicity,’ such as Horkheimer advances as early as his 1932 lecture on “History and Psychology.”11 The uniqueness of Marcuse’s ‘negative-metaphysical’ approach seems to stem from a proximity to Heidegger’s existential ontology and phenomenology that neither Horkheimer nor Adorno share. This is evident in the fourth paragraph of the “Negative Metaphysics” fragment, where Marcuse claims that Heidegger himself comes close on occasion to a ‘negative metaphysics,’ particularly in Heidegger’s analysis of Stimmung, attunement or mood, which Marcuse seems to think particularly useful for presenting and preserving the experience of the nothingness of existence, of the constant confrontation with the possibility of annihilation of all human order and all apparent lawfulness of the world and even humanity itself, in social crisis. Marcuse’s ‘negative metaphysics’ transforms the concept of Stimmung such that the experience of crisis, as an experience of irretrievable loss, is preserved against Heidegger’s concealed attempt to convert the ‘transcending’ of beings [Seienden] into the revelation of Being [Sein], such that “Nothing is again transcended into meaning” and serves as “the condition of possibility for Being.”
This ‘materialist’ correction of idealistic metaphysics and the all-too-theological recovery of Being (and meaning) in Heideggerian ontology, as Marcuse explains at the end of the fragment, has several unique consequences: (1) negative metaphysics, as opposed to every positive metaphysics, creates no new fundamental ‘categories’: it turns Kategorienlehre into Kategorienkritik; (2) it redirects human beings away from ‘the philosophy of finitude’ towards one of ‘the finite’; (3) it would preclude the reification of the experience of loss into a monolithic new category such as that of the isolated (if continuous or ‘lived’) experience of the “Augenblick”—‘moment’ in the sense of ‘instant’ or, literally, ‘blink of an eye’—in favor of the ‘dialectical concept’ of the “Present” [Gegenwart], which forces us to grapple with the problem of transience given the problematic relationship with the past, and especially the future, which inheres within the concept of the ‘present’ itself. This leads into the second fragment, “Demarcation of the materialist time-conception from that of the philosophical tradition,” which begins from the problem of the experience of time for finite beings.
A second unique feature of the fragment on “Negative Metaphysics” is that the social crises Marcuse uses to exemplify the basic Stimmung of negative metaphysics, the experience of irretrievable loss or being ‘thrust into nothingness,’ are both instances of racialized and racializing terror: “the lynching of Negroes in America” and, it seems, Marcuse’s own experience of racialization in his irretrievable loss of the total social world of pre-Nazi Germany. In the early 1930s, Horkheimer also takes the problem of racial oppression more seriously than is often acknowledged—for instance, in “The American Spirit” in the Notizen zur Dämmerung (1926-1931), where Horkheimer suggests the ‘spirit’ of American society is formed on the basis of a political-economic order of the enslavement of Blacks and the genocide of indigenous peoples, in addition to his review of The Hour of Decision (1933), a polemic against Spengler’s racial metaphysics of history. What Marcuse does in the fragment on “Negative Metaphysics,” however, begins to pose a more difficult question—about the connection between social domination and racial oppression, about the identity and difference between the experience of Jews under threat of anti-Semitic violence in late Weimar through early Nazi Germany and the experience of Blacks under threat of lynch mobs in the Jim Crow era United States.
A third unique feature, which is particularly evident in the second fragment, “Demarcation of the materialist time-conception from that of the philosophical tradition,” is the fact that Marcuse has a much more positive evaluation of Kant’s transcendental idealism than Horkheimer has in the late 1920s and early 1930s. (Re: Horkheimer’s early Kantkritik, see the author’s “Translation: a Letter On Kant’s Apriorism (1937).”) In the “Demarcation” fragment, Marcuse initially seems to embrace Kantian dualism (in the reverse direction of Horkheimer’s ongoing efforts to dissolve Kantian dualisms since the early 1920s) but does so with a historical twist, since the Kantian theory of time, which locates the condition of the experience of time in the transcendental subject, is unable to respond to two problems: (1) the problem posed to it by Einstein’s theory of relativity, which undermines the paradigm of Newtonian mechanics on the basis of which Kant separated mechanical-objective and free-subjective time; (2) the problem posed to it by dialectical materialism, which holds that the ‘time of the subject,’ conditioned by the transcendental structure of subjectivity, and the ‘time of the object’—do not just ‘approximate’ one another (as is the case in Kant’s “infinite task”) but are, in some way, identical in their difference: they are both included in the determination of time in physics according to Einstein’s theory of relativity and they are both realized as the medium and result of the actualization of human practice in history.
To conclude: first, these fragments are both representative of the driving tendencies in Marcuse’s own theoretical development at the time and resonate strongly with the tendencies motivating Horkheimer and Adorno’s contemporaneous efforts; second, these fragments seem to offer an entirely singular variation on the approach to criticism of metaphysics and ontology in early critical theory. I hope I’ve been able to convey some of the conceptual force and strangeness of these fragments in this introduction. Lastly, if anyone wants copies of the original German typescripts, just let me know!
James/Crane (4/11/25)
A. Ideas for a “Negative Metaphysics” (6/12/33)
From birth, people live within a circle of custom, trust, care, love, etc. They are surrounded by institutions, establishments, and enterprises which seem to be borne by an enduring lawfulness [Gesetzmäßigkeit] and, whenever they are shaken, new lawfulnesses arise, which also seem to be made “to last an eternity.” Seldom, if ever, do people ever actually attain full consciousness that once, all of this was not, and some day, will be no longer.
What happens to someone who is, all of a sudden, torn from this order? He is, quite literally, thrust into nothingness. For beyond this ephemeral order, nothing “exists” for him. —(An example from our own time: the lynching of Negroes in America. One can imagine that the everyday, intimate life of Negroes is not dissimilar to ours with respect to those relations mentioned above: the same, perhaps even tighter, circle of trust, care, etc. All of a sudden, at the drop of a hat, all of this is no longer there…)
This poses a fundamental question: it is not only the individual, but humanity itself which is confronted with the constant possibility of the complete annihilation of its order and, thereby, of its “world.” If taken seriously, this thought calls for a “negative metaphysics.” None has yet been given because a hidden theology has always been contrived for the revealed one. The individual may at least have the consolation that in his annihilation, he will somehow “go on” (the Negro in our example may believe he will be remembered by his children or his kin, in later revenge for his lynching, or something similar), but humanity has no such consolation (there is no shortage of examples of God abandoning human beings when they needed him most!). Negative metaphysics says something “universal” [allgemeinen] about being: that behind all of Being is Nothing, behind all human meaning-making is absolute meaninglessness—in such a way that, theoretically and practically, Nothing is included in the interpretation of Being, meaninglessness in the interpretation of meaning.
This means something wholly different from the saying about the “nullity of all that is earthly” [Nichtigkeit alles Irdischen], for this signifies the eternity of the super-worldly. It also means something other than the metaphysics of nothing as outlined by Heidegger. In some places, Heidegger does come close to a truly negative metaphysics (for example, in the analyses of “attunements” which, in the subject, correspond to Nothing: anxiety, boredom, etc.), but his claim about the nothingness of beings [Nichtigkeit des Seienden] contains a concealed transcending [eine versteckte Transzendierung]: Nothing is again transcended into meaning. Nothing is before Being, not behind it; it is the condition of possibility for Being, allows Being to “arise,” but does not destroy it; it “nothings” [nichtet] Being, but does not annihilate it [vernichtet es nicht].
Such concealed transcendings [versteckten Transzendierungen] are to be found in all metaphysics to date: unconcealing [Aufdeckung] them would be a significant task. In most cases, it is a matter of transcending the temporal into the eternal [Zeitlichen … ins Ewige], of the finite into the infinite. Terms such as “essence,” “law of essence,” “a priori,” etc., all contain moments of one sort of transcending or another: they abolish [aufheben] the nothingness of existence [die Nichtigkeit des Daseins] in an “ideal” context (even in Hegel’s concept of good infinity, the “bad” infinity is abolished [aufgehoben]). —And is the philosophy of finitude [die Philosophie der Endlichkeit] actually a philosophy of the finite [eine Philosophie des Endlichen]? That it is not is evident from its interpretation of death: it is precisely death, the true index of nothing and meaninglessness [den eigentlichen Index des Nichts und der Sinnlosigkeit], which it uses to grant existence its ultimate meaning. Through concepts such as “heritage” [Erbe], “community of fate” [Schicksalgemeinschaft], etc., the finite life of the individual is made meaningful beyond his death.
Negative metaphysics would be completely distinguished from any positive metaphysics through its conceptuality [Begrifflichkeit]; indeed, it is questionable whether any concepts could ever become “categories” for it at all.
Negative metaphysics would be the sole possible “metaphysical” foundation for materialism: having taken it as a point of departure, the life of human beings could not be directed towards “eternity” or transcendent values, but exclusively towards the present. Powers such as tradition, heritage, etc., would be “valid” for it only insofar as the present has something to “learn” from them; beyond that, it would emphasize by way of contrast everything which never became heritage or tradition, but was irretrievably lost.
The redirection of life towards the present would not signify its redirection towards the “Augenblick.” “Present” [Gegenwart] is a dialectical concept: it contains the future (as much as the past) within itself, but the future only so far as it can actually be cognized in or built out from the present. The “Augenblick” is a typically undialectical concept: it isolates the three dimensions of time and collapses them into a single point. All philosophy of the “Augenblick” is secularized theology: the Augenblick is always somehow supposed to be the incursion [Einbruch] of the eternal into the temporal, or infinity into the finite.
B. Demarcation of the materialist time-conception from that of the philosophical tradition.
Point of departure: the polarity of subject and object. This is the condition for an essential difference of times in the problem of time: to what extent can it be assumed that the time “in” which the perceiving subject [Subjekt] sees an object [Gegenstand] is simultaneously the “objective” time of this object itself? And further: can such an identity of time be accepted?
A distinction can be made between the following kinds of solutions to this problem:
(1) (Vulgar) Materialism asserts a (photographic) reproduction [Abbilden] of objective time by the subject.
(2) (Absolute) Idealism recognizes only the time of the (absolute) subject (of Spirit, of the absolute “I”, etc.) as “true” time, and conceives “objective” time as a mere form of appearance [Erscheinungsform], ossification [Erstarrung], derivative, etc. of true time.
(3) Transcendental idealism (Kant): so far as Kant, by means of the concept of the thing-in-itself and the decisive role of receptive sensibility, which depends on the givenness of objects, leaves the polarity of the cognitive process [Erkenntnisvorgangs] in place, the problem of the difference of times becomes particularly acute for him. He deals with the problem in the second analogy of experience, taking the problem of causality as his guide: the apriority of causality is the condition of possibility for the subjective succession of our representations to possess objective necessity as well.
For a philosophy which is actually materialistic, Kant has important approaches to offer for the solution of the question of time: In the last instance, Kant conceives of the polarity of subject and object as a dynamic process (see his concept of the “infinite task”) and cognition [Erkenntnis] as an attempt in overcoming this polarity. In a meaningful sense, this also applies to the problem of time. The whole of science could be considered an ever-renewed attempt to overcome the difference between subjective and objective time.
For dialectical materialism, this apriority of causality does not constitute an overcoming of the difference between times. The dismembering of events into a succession of different states, in which the preceding state always conditions the state which follows, signifies for the dialectical materialist an abstract fragmentation of the actual event. For him, time is not constituted by the sequence of alternating states, but is always “fulfilled,” or “full” time, in a manner peculiar to the object or subject itself. The difference of times, therefore, does not signify the mere possibility of difference in the succession of representations, but extends to the totality of the subject and object and is grounded in their difference of “position” in the procession of events (which, for the subject, is characterized as “determination by fate” [Schicksalbestimmtheit] …). This difference in the situation of the total subject and total object must be accounted for in the problem of time.
With Einstein’s theory of relativity, it was discovered that a determination of time [Zeitbestimmung] is only possible by the inclusion of subject and object in the system which is to be determined.
This problem takes on a special twist in history: here, human practice realizes itself through time which is subjective, yet, at the same time, objective.
See:
Na 1 Nachlass Max Horkheimer, 800 - Manuskripte (teilweise unveröffentlicht), unter anderem 'Dämmerung', Tagebücher und Tagebucheinträge, Buchbesprechungen und Notizen (p. XI 1 - XI 5d.1-12): (...) Ein philosophisches Tagebuch; Aufzeichnungen, 1925 - 1933:; 1. Ein philosophisches Tagebuch; August 1925 - November 1928. Typoskript mit eigenen [?] Korrekturen, 46 Blatt [GS 11, S. 237 - 261]; 2. 'Gedanken zu einer 'negativen Metaphysik'' [von Herbert Marcuse], datiert: 6.12.1933. Typoskript, 3 Blatt und handschriftliche Notizen, 1 Blatt; 3. Das Verhältnis von Interesse und Erkenntnisgegenstand und die Soziologie. Typoskript mit eigenen Korrekturen, 4 Blatt [GS 11, S. 166 - 170]; 4. 'Abgrenzung der materialistischen Zeitauffassung von der philosophischen Tradition' [von Herbert Marcuse]. Typoskript, 2 Blatt;
Wiggershaus The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson (Polity Press, 1994), 104.
For Wiggershaus’ full gloss on Marcuse’s philosophical development in the early 1930s, see: Ibid., 95-105.
For another account of the same, see Richard Wolin and John Abromeit’s “Introduction: What is Heideggerian Marxism?,” in: Heideggerian Marxism, Herbert Marcuse. (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xi-xxx.
Immanen concludes: “What can we conclude about our exploration of Marcuse’s “habilitation odyssey”? No piece of evidence unequivocally shows that one of our three lines of interpretation—philosophical, political, or racial—is stronger than the others. But they are all entirely plausible. As to philosophy, was Heidegger sincere when in 1931 he denied that recent Heideggerian readings of Hegel were not a personal insult to him? We should remember that after the publication of Being and Time in 1927, and even more after the Davos disputation in 1929, Heidegger was seen in the eyes of many as having surpassed both Cassirer and Husserl as Germany’s new first philosopher. Given this heightened status, could it be that Heidegger was offended that Marcuse had used Being and Time to lift Hegel above him? But if Heidegger abhorred Marxism, why did he accept Marcuse as his student in the first place? Perhaps he only gradually became aware of his student’s political background. Perhaps he had ignored Jaspers’s mention in 1928 of Marcuse’s first article. Or maybe it was simply not a concern for him at that point. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to argue that Heidegger’s ignorance of or indifference to Marcuse’s political preferences changed in the next couple of years. Influenced by Jünger’s idea of total mobilization and by Nazi ideologues like Alfred Baeumler and Hitler himself, Heidegger underwent a change in attitude toward Marxism. Reading Marcuse’s Hegel book and perhaps also his Marxist articles, he recognized the connection between communism and the subtlest details of Hegel’s dialectic. Concerning anti-Semitism, when it comes to Heidegger’s broader cultural predilections, Marcuse, a Marxist Jew from Berlin, represented everything that Heidegger’s antimodern and anti-Judaist prejudices stood against. When Heidegger turned to Nazism in 1930, this certainly did not cure him of his prejudices; it strengthened them. Following Trawny’s argument about the Heidegger-Husserl debate, we could speculate that as Heidegger sketched his “history of being,” his prejudices underwent transformation from traditional anti-Judaism to being-historical anti-Semitism. With this change Marcuse’s reconstruction of Hegel as the originator of the problematic of “being and time” would appear not only as a personal insult but, like Husserl’s phenomenology, as a sophisticated conceptual contribution to the forgetting of being. Instead of trying to single out one factor, could we not consider that the most plausible answer might be that all three overlapped? This is implied by Heidegger’s 1932 letter to his wife, which contains all three factors: Hegel, anti-Semitism, and anticommunism. With the narrative of history of being already in place in 1930, the increasingly crisis-conscious Heidegger would have detected in Hegel’s Ontology’s reconstruction of human subjectivity a fateful omission of the question of the meaning of being (philosophical interpretation). Hegel’s Ontology’s understanding of the problematic of “being and time” in terms of ontology of labor would have contributed to total mobilization, or what Heidegger’s later remarks on Marxism called the “imperative of progress” (political interpretation). From the perspective of Heidegger’s being-historical understanding of National Socialism, Hegel’s Ontology’s implicit call for universal humanity and international proletarian revolution would have contributed to the “de-racialization of peoples” and helped keep Germany from playing its role as the redeemer of the West (racist interpretation).” From: “Revisiting Marcuse’s ‘Habilitation Odyssey’ in the Light of Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks,’” in: New German Critique 135, Vol. 45, No. 3 (November 2018), 149-150.
For example, see: Martin Heidegger to Elfride Heidegger, 1932: “The whole Jewish intellectual world is going over to [communism] now; the Berliner Tageblatt has been a communist paper for a year now. Behind it is the systematic dialectic founded upon Hegel.” Quoted in: Ibid., 129.
Theodor W. Adorno, “[Besprechung] Marcuse, Herbert. Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit.” In: ZfS, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1932), 409-410.
Immanen: “Hegel’s Ontology’s important place in the history of the Frankfurt School should not be under-appreciated. It was Marcuse’s calling card to Horkheimer’s circle, where Theodor W. Adorno took notice of Hegel’s Ontology’s promising position between Heideggerianism and a more historically concrete mode of thought.” In: “Revisiting Marcuse’s ‘Habilitation Odyssey’” (2018), 132.
Horkheimer to Fromm, 7/24/1934. 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), 40.
Horkheimer to Pollock, 8/3/1934. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 197-199. Author’s translation.
Adorno, “Gutachten über die Dissertation von Sternberger.” (1932) In: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel. 1927-1969. Band I: 1927-1937. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz. (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 546-551.
Recently, Mikko Immanen has also written about the significance of Adorno’s report on Sternberger’s dissertation as an immanent critique of Heideggerian ontology. See: “Demythologizing Heidegger’s Thrownness: Toward Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in: Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School (Cornell University Press, 2020), 172-202. [link]
Horkheimer, “History and Psychology” [1932]: “The philosophy upon which the other concept of history is based maintains no such modesty with respect to the available sciences. It is a part of the contemporary effort to make the so-called ideological [weltanschaulich] questions independent of scientific criteria, and to develop philosophy entirely beyond the realm of empirical research. In contrast to the epistemological view outlined above, the various realms of being are to be made comprehensible not in terms of the sciences but rather in terms of their common root, primordial Being [ursprungliches Sein], to which our age claims a novel access. A new concept of historicity has emerged particularly from the phenomenological school, the fundamental doctrine of which was at first completely ahistorical. In Scheler's attempt during his last years to reconcile the undialectical doctrines of phenomenology with the fact of a revolutionary [umwälzende] history, he essentially understood social and political history under this rubric. For Heidegger, however, “historicity” means a mode of being [Geschehensweise] in the ground of Being [im Seinsgrund] which latter had itself to be discovered in human beings. History [Geschichte] as a theme of “Historie” would first acquire its meaning from this primordial mode of proceeding. It thus seems appropriate today to begin from this meaning of “history” in any fundamental discussion. For the topic under consideration here, however, it is no less problematic to premise the concept of inner historicity than it would be to start with the concept of history employed in traditional science. Because existential philosophy in the phenomenological tradition seeks to make itself independent of the results of research in the various spheres, because it is determined to start from the very beginning and strives to determine the meaning of Being without respect to the contemporary state of research, its approach appears too narrow for our problem. According to the notion that history is first to be grasped out of the inner historicity of Dasein, the interweaving of Dasein in the real process of history would have to seem merely external and illusory. Just as engagement with external history illuminates the individual beings [das jeweilige Dasein], however, the analysis of individual existence [das jeweilige Existenzen] conditions the understanding of history. Dasein is indissolubly implicated in external history, and accordingly its analysis cannot lead to the discovery of any ground that moves in itself, independent of all external determination. Real history, then, with its multifaceted, supra-individual structures is not merely a derivative, subsidiary, objectivated realm, as existential philosophy would insist. The theory of human Being [vom Sein im Menschen] is thus transformed—along with all kinds of philosophical anthropology—from a static ontology into the psychology of human beings living in a definite historical epoch.” In: Between Philosophy and Social Science (1993), 112-113.
https://open.substack.com/pub/clementpaulus/p/recursive-praxis-living-the-collapse?r=5c1ys6&utm_medium=ios