Rescue of the Enlightenment (October 1946)
Horkheimer and Adorno—Discussions on a planned sequel to 'Dialectic of Enlightenment.' (Ed. Gretel Adorno)
Translator’s note.
Context.
First published in Max Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 12 (1985),1 these four discussion protocols—the “Rettung,” for short2—were recorded and edited (most likely by Gretel Adorno) over the first few weeks of October, 1946. The purpose of these discussions was to determine a theoretical approach for the long-planned sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947).
For notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s changing conception of the “second part” of the Dialectic as it developed between the Summer of 1944 and 1949, see:
For more translations of the fragmentary notes Horkheimer and Adorno produced in connection with the planned ‘continuation’ of their collaborative Dialectic, see the rest of the series:
Content: The Limits of Immanent Critique.
Reception of the “Rettung” discussions has largely emphasized Horkheimer and Adorno’s disagreement about how, exactly, they ought to approach the problematic relationship between the critique of reason and the critique of society. Horkheimer proposes (§2) that they begin with politics and proceed to philosophy in order to “determin[e] the moment of unity of politics and philosophy concretely.” Adorno makes the counter-proposal (§§3-4) that they begin with an immanent critique of philosophical categories (a dialectical logic) in order to reveal their social content.3 Commentators tend to dismiss Horkheimer’s proposal on the grounds of Adorno’s suspicion of an analogical leap in the transition from politics to philosophy without endorsing Adorno’s own immanent-critical approach to the transition from logic to social reality, where Adorno confronts the same problem in reverse: “my fear is that the leap from out of logic into reality will be of a dogmatic or analogistic kind…” (§4). Aside from Horkheimer’s suggestion that the transition take place via mediation of “a critique of political economy of the present” (§2), there’s very little that’s unique about the “Rettung” discussions in the context of Horkheimer and Adorno’s decades-long debate about the scope and significance of immanent critique—from their 1939 discussion protocols for the Dialectic of Enlightenment to Adorno’s incorporation of a ‘Horkheimer’-style suspicion of immanent critique’s pretense to merely ‘looking on’ in late additions to the manuscript for Philosophy of New Music (1949).4 The opposing sides become increasingly blurry, but what is thrown into relief that much more clearly is the shared, constant preoccupation with the problem of immanent critique itself. That the October 1946 protocols end in a deadlock between proceeding from politics to logic (§2) and from logic to politics (§3) is clear. However, contrary to the conventional interpretation of the October 1946 discussions for the “Rettung,” according to which the irresolution of the protocols proves the impossibility of the sequel’s execution,5 by 1947 Horkheimer and Adorno seem to have already converted the problem of immanent critique into a new point of departure: the double danger of remaining locked within sheer immanence to (pre-)history and the pretense to pure transcendence of it, or the problem of the concept of truth.
Contents.
§1. Consciousness of Negativity (10/3/1946)6
§2. Politics to Logic (10/7/1946)7
§3. Logic to Politics (10/10/1946)8
§4. Self-critique of labor-divided reason (10/14/1946)9
§1. Consciousness of Negativity (10/3/1946)
Horkheimer: Our theme: the rescue of the enlightenment [die Rettung der Aufklärung], to determine the positive relationship between the absolute and thinking.
Adorno: To establish the boundary where the process of civilization, which appears as if it were one of enlightenment, reverses into untruth according to the immanent measure of thought itself. Thinking must be found guilty of its deepest errors by thinking, because totality is a false thought.
Horkheimer: We should express what thinking is, what it means to philosophize. The existential philosophers are naive. Instead of unravelling the whole dialectic involved in the concept of thinking, they arbitrarily hypostasize one of its moments—existence. What distinguishes our thinking from that of others? Resolving our opposition to Schopenhauer. Further, our theme is: to grasp the truth positively in establishing its meaninglessness, and thereby to rescue thinking, to confront Schopenhauer with himself.
Adorno: Against Schopenhauer: basically, he remains caught in a logical contradiction: namely, the claim of thinking itself cannot be reconciled with the content of thinking as pure nothingness. In the act of thinking itself, there is already a transcending of pure facticity.
Horkheimer: Thinking can only be confronted with itself by reflecting on the meaninglessness of its own content.
Adorno: Schopenhauer is the forefather of existential philosophy. For Heidegger, the transcendence of being is realized through consciousness of its nothingness. — Idealism is always nihilistic because it pretends to be positive. I sense in Hegel and Schopenhauer the ideological claim that consciousness of negativity is reconciliation.
Horkheimer: Consciousness of negativity is the identity-point [Identitätspunkt] of thinking, but is not for that reason reconciliation.
Adorno: When I’m the positivist, then you’re the idealist. Against Schopenhauer and Hegel, I object to the moment of identity philosophy. The statement that thinking is nothing presupposes the identity of thinking and being. Neither being nor thinking can be reduced to such a conclusive formula; there is no such Weltanschauung—rather, there is both despair and hope in thinking as much as in reality. True, there is Schopenhauerian night, but it’s in this night the stars are. Schopenhauerian nihilism is still an attempt to rescue the inner meaning of totality by declaring there is none. All is meaningless, and since all is meaningless, an absolute determination of being is provided and meaninglessness itself is made into meaning. Thinking does violence to itself by saying “it’s all for naught.” Positive thinking which has come into its own must be capable of reaching the concrete, historical distinction between “spleen and ideal,” the distinction between hope and despair. The bad enlightenment arises from the absolute totality of the concept of difference; the right holds fast to the concept of difference in the face of this leveling. The universal is in fact always that which is not, but if the concept can get ahold of its own universality, then it becomes capable of comprehending what is not.
Horkheimer: You reject Schopenhauer. Simply by designating all as meaningless, he takes meaninglessness itself for meaning. A verdict on comprehensive thinking. Schopenhauer’s system is itself naught. But you’ve performed a magic trick. You say that thinking should not claim totality, but must rather surrender its discursive violence and make contact with concreteness. But this you cannot do without thinking. Negation is the truth of thinking. Hegel is epistemology for Schopenhauer.10 We are in agreement on the critique. However, I do not see a next step.
Adorno: Hegel is worse, insofar as he passes the totality of negation off as positive; Hegel is better, in that he retains difference in the movement of the concept. He is, sensu eminentiori, the more differentiated. The verdict which Schopenhauer passes on the world is a conceptual repetition of the violence which human beings inflict upon nature.
Horkheimer: It is the expression of violated nature. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is misunderstood as ontology; it has been made out to be an ontology.
Adorno: He says the will is the thing-in-itself. He installs negativity as the Weltgrund, as metaphysical principle. Indictment of nature by the human being insofar as he must die. The guilt of God is abstracted from human guilt. The balance of life is negative. All attempts to think healing or reconciliation are in vain. The whole of philosophy consists of such attempts.
Horkheimer: We must formulate the emergence of dialectical thinking from discursive thinking more clearly. One proceeds from Schopenhauerian and Hegelian negation to a description; as soon as you try to make it more adequate, its inadequacy is unveiled.
Adorno: We have not yet said anything about spirit and idea [Geist und Idee].
Horkheimer: The stars are redemption, reconciliation. Our opposition is really only paper-thin: where I say the attempt to reach the positive may only be made through the expression of the negative, you…
Adorno: I say that to the extent you are capable of describing the negativity of the negative, you have, in logical terms, already transcended negativity (cf. Hegel’s critique of Kant).
Horkheimer: But you go further: you say one cannot reach the negative in thinking. There is some truth to what you say, but we do not yet have it. I believe you want something like the man who wanted to make the useless useful.
Adorno: You imagine I would to say to Schopenhauer—in a stupid, good-natured way—it’s not so bad after all. But my reaction is this: when I hear the sentence “all is vanity,” I feel something of the father who would chasten his son. The meaning of this objection is: I feel that the abstract verdict basically comes out to cutting off possibility. The ontological structure cannot be separated from the social-political. With Schopenhauer, one must say: I am identical with the worm; but also: I am different from the worm.
Horkheimer: The positive is my experience of identity.
Adorno: The positive is my experience of difference, but the experience of concrete determination is only possible by mediation of identity. We both, the worm and I, perish. It is the names which are non-identical. The specific shape of the worm must be mediated by the fact that we are nevertheless the same as the worm: only then does the difference emerge.
§2. Politics to Logic (10/7/1946)
Horkheimer proposes the investigation of dialectics set out from a discussion of present-day politics, in particular the impending conflict between Russia and ‘the democracies,’ proceed from there onto a critique of the political economy of the present, and finally to the questions of philosophy proper. The crucial problem lies in the transition from political to logical and metaphysical questions. This transition cannot be understood as one to a higher level of abstraction. Rather, it is a question of determining the moment of unity of politics and philosophy concretely. We see this moment of unity in holding onto the radical impulses of Marxism and really of the enlightenment as a whole—for the rescue of the enlightenment is our concern—without identifying ourselves with any empirically existing party or group. In a certain sense, it is a materialism which renounces the prejudice that any one moment of existing, material reality is immediately positive. The paradox, the dialectical secret of true politics, consists in the adoption of a critical standpoint which does not hypostasize itself as positive. Therefore, when our friends say one must refrain from any critique of democracy because of Russia’s development into tyranny—such a standpoint inevitably leads to fascism. On the other hand, however, if the critique of Russia is relaxed in the slightest out of consideration for the potential for progress embodied in Russia, such that the whole truth about Russia is not told, the politics that results from this is no less totalitarian. Our philosophical standpoint, as a conception of dialectics in which thinking pulls itself out of the swamp by its own pigtails—in which thinking ought to overcome the standpoint of thinking—, today has the same shape as the demand we make of politics, and our task will consist in showing how, in detail, the logical-philosophical problems of this kind are identical with those which are directly political. There is a danger in our attempt—along the lines of Stoicism.11 In stepping back from the political, or even political-philosophical, standpoint to reflection which evades such influence, there is a moment of resignation with regard to that which merely exists; such resignation, in turn, is in danger of granting that which exists its right and of leaving the world to the powers that be. It is necessary for a dialectical philosophy, without resorting to the positivity of the absolute, to demonstrate at the same time the restrictedness and untruth of the stoic standpoint, which today corresponds precisely with that of existential philosophy.
Where political influence is possible without betraying the truth, it should be practiced to the best of our abilities. Given the circumstance that there is no truth, this influence will remain almost purely theoretical. This means, in other words, that in the present historical situation, salvation lies in thinking and politics lies in thinking; that we are therefore consciously thrown back into a Stoic standpoint—not because we would tell the existentialists they are the Stoics, but because we would cry out: we are the Stoics because there is no party.
Adorno: Nevertheless, there is an enormous difference between now and late antiquity, because the state of the productive forces today would allow utopia to be created, whereas back then utopia had been reached in the thought of Plato and Aristotle but material reality had not yet made it possible. In antiquity, the truth of the Stoa was that nothing remained for human beings but falling back into thought, whereas today thought must fall back upon itself; in this, it is precisely the delusion of society—that is, its untruth—which comes to light.
Horkheimer: I have my doubts about this, because early Christianity also could have conquered the earth. We have it exactly as difficult today, and are exactly as far-removed from the overwhelming multitude of human beings. The very same powers are at play. Given the scarcity which still predominates on earth, a program of abundance will remain a program for a long time to come. As things now stand, in the political field there are a multitude of power-factors against which one, as an individual, can do nothing, and the one who announces such a program is always an individual.
Adorno: I agree with you insofar as the consolidation of power makes it as difficult for us today as it was then. I do not seriously believe that the scarcity of material goods is still an obstacle to entering the second phase.
§3. Logic to Politics (10/10/1946)
Adorno expresses reservations in opposition to the proposal to begin with concrete, political dialectics and proceed from there to the principle of dialectics. He fears this transition will necessarily lead to mere analogy, or the exposition of abstract laws of thinking which have been abstracted from political reality. Therefore, he proposes beginning with analyses of logical and epistemological categories. Here, the task would be to subject categories such as concept, judgment, subject, substantiality, essence, and the like to an investigation in the manner already initiated in the Fragmente. Such an investigation should involve not only logical, but also historical and social discussions. The historical and social substance should be conceptualized and determined in their present-state on the basis of the immanent meaning of the categories themselves, and such analysis should accordingly lead to a judgment about the right and wrong moments of the categories concerned. Horkheimer’s demand to specify what right thinking is ought to be obtained by the interrogation of certain central categories of thinking.
Horkheimer draws attention to the following difficulty: the discussion of logical categories can either ignore the classical investigations in this area or dispute them. The former does not quite match our method, the latter requires an extremely time-consuming reexamination of the relevant authors—above all: Plato, Aristotle, and, among the more recent, Mill, Trendelenburg, Sigwart, Brentano, Husserl, Prantl. There is something else. In the “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” we have already made several attempts at such analyses of categories—for example, in the section on projection, on holding onto a judgment and yet going beyond it, or on the subject and its material in the “Dialectic of Enlightenment.”12 What would be new about this today is the development of prehistory. There are different conceptions of the dialectic: either as a purely logical category, as the doctrine of thinking, or as an expression of the lawfulness of events in the world in general, whether as objective logic or as metaphysics. I am anxious about company like this.
Adorno: We cannot avoid expressing the claim of our philosophy. We subject the Hegelian claim to determine the identity of being and thinking through dialectics to critique. The task of pulling-oneself-out-of-the-swamp-by-one’s-own-pigtails with respect to dialectics actually means deciding whether, and how, a dialectical philosophy is possible without presupposing what it should to prove—that is, without taking the standpoint of the absolute. Is a materialistic dialectic in the philosophical sense possible?
Horkheimer: I would like to return to the matter of method. How are you thinking about these individual analyses? There must be some connection between them. What is our heading?
Adorno: The categories are all interconnected. The analysis of each of these categories passes into another, e.g., the concepts ‘subject’ and ‘reason’ are inseparable from one another. ‘Reason’ is inseparable from the concept of judgment, judgment from the complex of language.
Horkheimer: There are completely different categories which seem to lie even closer to the center, e.g., the division of labor, the influence of the division of labor, and the overcoming of this influence.
Adorno: The first categories mentioned refer to themes, whereas the division of labor pertains to the treatment of these themes. My idea was that we allow such concepts to be given to us, that we allow them to be transformed through immanent analysis into concepts such as division of labor, reification, etc. The former categories are the text, while the categories such as the division of labor are the translation of the text.
Horkheimer: I still have yet to see what we’re driving at.
Adorno: We aim at a critique of reason.
Horkheimer: The dialectic is a method by which one can develop one category from another, and thereby all categories. However, I would like to have a main theme in mind: e.g., what can theory do in the present situation? What is its place? Or: how can one overcome the abstractness of the concept by means of the concept itself?
Adorno: We must express the manner in which thinking that has passed through the full scope of critique and is right in the historical-philosophical sense must appear.
Horkheimer: Wouldn’t it be better to set out from a question such as: is theory possible at all?
Adorno: We are in agreement that this is what it comes down to, but there’s something in me reluctant to accept this. What I really have in mind is—once confronted with the state of thinking as it has been codified in philosophy and by the self-critique of this thinking, which is at the same time social critique, one can finally answer the question: how is theory possible, but not by means of free-floating reflection on it.
Horkheimer: How about we start with the concept of thinking itself, then move on to the concept of politics, and, finally, return to that of thinking.
§4. Self-critique of labor-divided reason (10/14/1946)
Horkheimer: Wherever the judgment of subject and predicate is experienced and assumed unreflectively, reason is still healthy, the illness is not apparent.
Adorno: No, reason is its own illness.
Horkheimer: By destroying reason, the self-certainty of truth is dealt a heavy blow. There is nowhere left to rest; there is no longer any rest in thinking.
Adorno: It is connected to the dissolution of being, to its functionalization.
Horkheimer: One can no longer even say there is something being dissolved.
Adorno: What is truly diabolical is that reason is ever more deeply entangled in its own work. By making things better, it makes them worse at the same time.
Horkheimer: The destruction of mythology is at the same time the destruction of innocence.
Adorno: Thus, at the same time, always necessarily a step towards the destruction of reason itself. —Things are not simple with the division of labor either, since we cannot philosophize as if the situation of the division of labor could simply be revoked along with thinking’s claim to power. The intention is really that we not naively presuppose the division of labor.
Horkheimer: That is, that one believes one is closer to the problem by starting with concepts such as ‘Judgment’ instead of ‘Punishment’ or ‘Soviet.’ Therein lies the fallacy of the nineteenth century.
Adorno: To the extent one thinks at all, in this itself there is already a moment of the division of labor. The act of thinking in the sense of dianoesis presupposes the separation of intellectual from manual labor. Self-critique of labor-divided reason.
Horkheimer: Positivism has long since recognized that one does not fashion an image of the truth by attaching a predicate to a concept. It has grasped the manipulation of logical entities as something which bears no structural resemblance to reality.
Adorno: Positivism has performed some clean-up work insofar as it has demonstrated the nothingness of forms of thinking in relation to being. Hegel has also proved the nothingness of forms of consciousness, but to the effect of declaring the totality of these thought-determinations reduced to nothing the truth, or the absolute.
Horkheimer: According to Hegel, the truth is the intellectual process in which the nothingness of individual forms of thinking comes to light as their destiny.
Adorno: On the one hand, we cannot grant ontological substantiality to the forms of spirit, and are in agreement with positivism that we cannot use a concept such as “being” at all. On the other hand, as theorists of reason, we cannot simply take the leap into naively realistic categories of politics and society either. Whenever one interrogates transcendental-logical categories for their own meaning, it is not these formalizations themselves, but the historical-social reality of the categories which becomes apparent as their true meaning. This demonstration is really the path by which one may cure reason of the illness of its abstract absolutization.
Horkheimer: Isn’t this mythical metaphysics? The assertion that one merely follows the true interest of the object is a deception. Hegel had absolute truth, its fulfillment, as his guiding principle. What do we have for our guiding principle?
Adorno: We already have one—namely, that reason has fallen ill. We must establish a connection between the thought of the illness of reason and the possibility of its recovery by means of this very illness, with the demand of delivering the forms of consciousness themselves over to their social or anthropological reality, which is simultaneously the ground of the inadequacy of each individual form of consciousness.
Horkheimer: Then we are to address once again the dialectic of enlightenment.
Adorno: But now, we want to indicate a concept of right reason.
Horkheimer: Why has reason fallen ill? We are getting ourselves involved in something very difficult. I have no sense of fulfillment here either. Basically, we have so much to say and are now on the verge of shifting into areas in which we are not only in competition with the most abstract products of the nineteenth century, but wherein we cannot convey precisely what we must—namely, our opposition to the world as it now is.
Adorno: You fear a piece of monstrous professorial philosophy; my fear is that the leap from out of logic into reality will be of a dogmatic or analogistic kind. The whole of history is contained within each act of judgment. Only if we draw out this mediation does what we intend have actual force; otherwise, it remains a history of thinking without affecting the truth of the logical characters themselves. There is a similar question with respect to the problem of being and thinking: only if we can show that the meaning of the categories of consciousness necessarily points to something which reaches beyond consciousness can we actually overcome idealism instead of merely opposing it dogmatically with materialism.
Horkheimer: So we should become a second Emil Lask. I would really like something more substantive as a point of departure—for instance, an analysis of self-assertion in mass society. To what extent is one to participate in self-preservation, and to what extent is it madness to do so?
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik] (1946).” In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 12. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 593-605. Author’s translation.
Cf. James Schmidt, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Social Research 65:4 (1998) 807-838. [link]
See: Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, “Editor’s Afterword.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by E. Jephcott (SUP, 2002), 241-242. And: “Editorische Vorbemerkung,” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 593.
Adorno: “The process is immanent: The internal consistency of a phenomenon—in a sense that is to be developed only in this phenomenon itself—becomes the guarantee of its truth and the ferment of its untruth. Contradiction, as the guiding category, itself has a double nature: The works themselves are successful to the extent that they shape the contradiction and in this shaping allow the contradiction to reappear in the marks of their own imperfection, while at the same time the force of the contradiction defies the forming process and destroys the works. An immanent method of this sort presupposes—as its admittedly omnipresent contrary—philosophical knowledge that transcends its object. It cannot depend, as could Hegel, on that “pure looking on” that promises the truth exclusively because the conception of the identity of subject and object underlies the whole so that the observing consciousness is all the surer of itself the more completely it extinguishes itself in the object. At a historical hour, when the reconciliation of subject and object has been perverted to a satanic parody, to the liquidation of the subject in the objective order, the only philosophy that still serves reconciliation is one that scorns the illusion of reconciliation and asserts against universal self-alienation the reality of the hopelessly alienated for which the “thing-itself” scarcely speaks any longer. This is the far limit of its immanent method, which, indeed, can no more undergird itself dogmatically by a claim to positive transcendence than could Hegel’s method in its own time. Like its object, knowledge remains bound to determinate contradiction.” In: Philosophy of New Music. Translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 24-25.
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr: “The two authors failed to agree, however, on the question of the proper relationship between political and philosophical analysis. […] Perhaps this dissent should be seen as one of the—undoubtedly numerous—reasons why the planned continuation of Dialectic of Enlightenment did not materialize.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 241-242.
Cf. Rolf Wiggershaus (1994): “But the discussions in October 1946 in which they tried to clarify how enlightenment was to be rescued and how a concept of correct reason was to be developed showed that they were largely at a loss.” In: The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson (Polity Press, 1995 [1986]), 325-326.
“[1. Wie ist Bewußtsein der Negativität möglich?] (3. Oktober 1946).” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 594-597.
“Über Dialektik der Aufklärung, Negation und Versöhnung, Hegel und Schopenhauer.” In: MHA Na [806], S. [129]-[131].
“[2. Politischer Stoizismus der kritischen Theorie] (7. Oktober 1946).” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 597-599.
“Politik und Philosophie; Kritische Theorie resignativ?” In: MHA Na [806], S. [132]-[134].
“[3. Verhältnis von Vernunftkritik und Gesellschaftskritik] (10. Oktober 1946)” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 599-602.
“Politik und Philosophie (Fortsetzung).” In: MHA Na [806], S. [135]-[137].
“[4. Selbstkritik der arbeitsteiligen Vernunft] (14. Oktober 1946).” In: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 602-605.
There is no corresponding protocol in the MHA. Per the MHGS editors: sourced from the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv. [no further reference information]
Cf. Horkheimer to Adorno, 8/28/1941: “One of the most important theories in the essay is the description of music as an “antagonist” of language. This is in precise agreement with Hegelian philosophy correctly interpreted. Hegel, of course, goes much further in a terrible sense of the word. To speak in the terminology of the essay, in Hegel the triumph of philosophy is that it proves itself the antagonist of knowledge and yet is able to know. In Hegel philosophy always only knows about nothingness. His denunciation of the Schelling-like night in no way changes the fact that dialectical scholarship, which he demands in contrast to other kinds, does indeed construe the relationship of things in detail but only in order to show how they are “destroyed.” The transcendence of alienation is the transcendence of knowledge from its object. The specific negation does not want to leave “nothing” over in its individual steps, but at the end it arrives at an artificial proof of the nothingness of everything definite. If the categories developed in logic, such as the spirit of God before the creation of the world, are the skeleton of being as well as the constellation of eternity, this constellation signifies the decline of mankind. In the famous passage in the preface to the phenomenology Hegel assures us that what is disappearing is also to be viewed as substantial. But I recall the shock I received each time I read this passage when I learned that this substance consists precisely of originating and vanishing. The revocation of alienation is at the same time the revocation of any knowledge of what exists, and philosophy, in spite of all comforting assurances, is the execution of its first thesis of the identity of being and nothingness, in which “nothing” is, characteristically enough, in second place and in the end remains victorious over being, as opposed to Heidegger, where the emphasis lies on the being of nothingness. What is true for music, according to your beautiful sentences, that it is able to speak as something that is meaningless, is also true of philosophy. Insofar as it destroys knowledge it is still able to know. Hegel's assurance that “specific thoughts” are positive and necessary instances of the totality is devious. His entire oeuvre serves to determine the sense of this positivity and necessity as that of negativity and vanishing. His theory is infinitely more pessimistic than Schopenhauer’s. At the same time it is infinitely freer because it contains no reconciliation, or its reconciliations are bad and transparent.” 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), 191-192.
For more on Horkheimer’s growing preoccupation with the dangers of the Stoic standpoint in the postwar world, see:
Translator’s note: Ch. 1, “Concept of Enlightenment.” The MHGS editors mistakenly italicize “Dialektik der Aufklärung” despite the fact that the book was, in October 1946, still titled Philosophische Fragmente, as is evident from earlier in the same protocol: [Adorno] “Here, the task would be to subject categories such as concept, judgment, subject, substantiality, essence, and the like to an investigation in the manner already initiated in the Fragmente. …”