Horkheimer: On the Style of Theory (8/12/1942).
Letter to Tillich on method of presentation in the drafts with Adorno for the ‘Dialectic.’
“The idea of previous history as prehistory is no belief in miracles, for thinking does not depend upon more or less verifiable forecasts of a better society. It can, however, fashion itself a guarantor, however weak it might be, in always pledging fidelity once more to the lessons of the bad past.”
Contents.
Translator’s note.
[Note: On the Problem of the Revolutionary Subject.]
I. Paul Tillich: “Remarks” on “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” (July 1942) [Excerpt]
II. Horkheimer: On the Style of Theory (8/12/1942).
Ad. Letter—Horkheimer, re: “Our task in life is theoretical work.” (Nov. 1941).
Translator’s note: “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in Context.
Below, you’ll find a new translation of Max Horkheimer’s letter to Paul Tillich from August 12th, 1942,1 a response to Tillich’s critical “Remarks” on Horkheimer’s essay “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung,” published several months prior in the ISR’s limited-print mimeographed memorial issue for Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin. zum Gedächtnis.2 The essay would also be published in English translation in 1942 under the title “The End of Reason” as part of the last issue of the ISR’s journal, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. While this was in part a departure from the ISR core’s typical practice at the time (viz., of publishing ‘exoteric’ English-language texts for a broad audience while circulating more ‘esoteric’ German works amongst themselves and/or broader intellectual circles of emigres), both the German memorial issue and the English translation were subject to different, internally imposed censorship protocols.3 The publication of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” was, in some sense, the debut of Adorno and Horkheimer’s collaboration. In the Benjamin memorial issue, “Vernunft und Selbterhaltung” was published alongside not only Benjamin’s “Theses on the Concept of History” but also two essays Horkheimer and Adorno completed together in 1940, nearly two years prior: Adorno’s “The George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence, 1891-1906” and Horkheimer’s “Authoritarian State.”4 It was during the composition of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung,” however, that Horkheimer and Adorno would work so closely together that the character of their collaborative process would undergo a qualitative change.5 In a letter to Löwenthal dated February 11th, 1942, Horkheimer writes about the first ‘thirty pages’ of the draft of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”: “I have worked on these thirty pages with Teddy during the last weeks and I dare say that this is a piece of work which gives an idea of what I intend to do in the future. I have worked so closely together with Teddy that I even consider to publish it in connection with him.”6 That same day, Horkheimer described the collaboration again in another letter—to Tillich himself: “[…] I have devoted any minute which I could spare in the last weeks to the [‘Reason’] article which you will read very soon and which I completed with Teddy last night at 3 A.M. I am very eager to know what you say about it since it is the first “official” result of this cooperation.”7
Given that Horkheimer and Adorno had already begun their work on “the question of ‘enlightenment’” almost soon as “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” was finished,8 Tillich’s “Remarks” might be the earliest critique of the project of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a whole. It is also a prelude to Adorno’s 1944 critique of Tillich, “Contra Paulum,” from the shared theoretical standpoint Adorno and Horkheimer developed during the composition of the Philosophical Fragments.
[Update: 11/26/2025] I’ve just posted my own translation of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in full on Substudies, with an introduction that extends the line of interpretation suggested above, here:
Note: On the Problem of the Revolutionary Subject.
Towards the very end of his ‘Remarks,’ Tillich poses the problem of the absence in “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” of any revolutionary subject, group, or program—any “remnant” [“Rest”] that would, somehow, remain amidst the seemingly global process of dehumanization and, thereby, be capable of sustaining a revolutionary transformation of society. Only such a group, somehow ‘standing-outside’ [Draußenstehen] dehumanization, could serve as a ‘carrier of the future’; in the absence of such a group, Tillich suggests, there would be no grounds for the critique of contemporary society at all. (Tillich’s critique of Horkheimer and Adorno’s apparent ‘social pessimism’ will be be echoed in Herbert Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, and Franz Neumann’s comments on Horkheimer’s “Sociology of Class Relations” later on in the fall of 1943.) Horkheimer’s response is characteristically paradoxical and proceeds from the rejection of any consolation one might take in appealing to the ‘ambivalence’ or ‘complexity’ of the existing order. For Horkheimer, communism, understood as the end of human prehistory, cannot depend on our ability to point at some “remnant” or non-dehumanized group, or on some apology for the ‘many-sidedness’ of an existing institution, but requires only the weak guarantee of “the self-eloquent negativity of incorruptible thought” that time and time again pledges fidelity to the lessons of the bad past. What’s crucial is that this “incorruptible thought” is not specified as Horkheimer’s own, nor even that of his intellectual community, but is radically anonymized: “[T]he work [viz., on Dialectic of Enlightenment] fulfills our need to see things a little bit more clearly before the probable imminent decline, and to leave something behind which might mean something to some or anybody.” Horkheimer’s letter to Tillich refuses to arrogate the “remnants” of revolutionary subjectivity to the Critical Theorist or to displace it back onto some new social group that somehow ‘stands outside’ the process of dehumanization. Instead, the thought throws the thinker back onto themselves.9 The responsibility of becoming a ‘carrier of the future’ falls on the shoulders—however weak they might be—of anyone who is capable of the thought that no one is coming to save us.10 However little consolation there is in determining the new horror in all its horror, the thinker who undertakes this task isn’t the first to find themselves in such an impossible position: “Perhaps this was always the situation of theory—even for Marx.”11 The reader who poses the problem of the identity of the “imaginary witness” to whom Adorno and Horkheimer dedicate Dialectic of Enlightenment simultaneously dissolves it.12
I. Paul Tillich: “Remarks” on “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” (July 1942) [Excerpt]
[…]13 —I would, however, like to ask whether these structures have been considered in their many-sidedness. I have already shown in the foregoing what I mean with regard to some factual matters. But now I would like to express it on the level of principle and ask: From whence comes the belief that universal-mechanism can transform [umschlagen] into the beginning of history? Is this not a belief in miracles of the first order? And if not, how is such a turning-point to be prepared? Where are those forces that have not yet been disintegrated, or have already been integrated again, that could sustain such a volte-face? Indeed: from whence comes the power that makes a vision such as the one provided in the essay possible at all? Wouldn’t one have to somehow stand on the outside? Mustn’t the reason that describes its own destruction be somewhere indestructible in order to be capable of this [description]? Here, I’m returning to an old problem. The prophets knew it as the problem of the “remnant,”14 that which is multiplied through all catastrophes and upon which the beginning—the prophets called it the goal—of history would be built. The Greeks believed, like all mystics, in esoteric groups that would carry on and preserve spiritual tradition in its purity throughout the centuries. Church sects believed, and still do, that free movements of small groups would keep the intensity of religious consciousness alive—just as the older monastics did. Even the Marxists believe in proletarian-intellectual avant-gardes, etc. But if such groups, carriers of the future, must exist, then the entire structure must be in such a way that it enables the emergence of such groups, i.e., not completely disintegrated. Or, as I prefer to express it: the priestly spirit, in all its corruption, must nonetheless retain some small influence for the prophetic protest against its depravity to be possible. I could provide countless examples from church history and cultural history that show this is the actual structure, even if this is not visible in the analysis of most situations. The resistance to dehumanization, to its sources, to its power, to its depravity, to its resurgence—none of this is even hinted at in your essay. Instead, it appears as if there were no longer any human beings at all, but only machine-parts; no reason, but only clever means for reason-inimical ends. I am in complete agreement that this is the primary tendency of the structure; but the secondary tendencies are needed to make the picture concrete and, above all: the primary tendency of the future must arise from one of these secondary tendencies, unless, that is, a miracle is supposed to bring it about.
I do not believe that pure dehumanization does exist, just as I do not believe that pure humanity could exist. I believe that there is a fragmentary humanity that exists, surrounded by far-reaching and ever-renewed inhumanity. And I believe that this fragmentary humanity is strong enough to uncover and overcome every newly emerging inhuman structure, but only in the power of that humanity, albeit fragmentary, which is always present. This is valid for the feudal as much as the bourgeois period, and will remain valid even after history has begun.
II. Horkheimer: On the Style of Theory (8/12/1942).
Dear Paulus!
I don’t know if you have any idea of how gratified I am by your “Remarks” on “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung.’” The care and the seriousness with which you’ve worked through my essay has given me more encouragement than the handful of enthusiastic responses we’ve had from other readers. Your notes have reinforced my belief that the free movements of small groups, as you say,15 are truly what is living, and, what’s more, that I am fortunate to be associated with you in one such circle. For that, you have my deepest thanks.
Apart from simply acknowledging mistakes, I would be glad to respond to each point you’ve raised in detail. However, I feel the work to which I am presently devoting every one of the all-too-few hours left to me, on account of unavoidable delays and a certain weakness of constitution, is the only true answer to whatever the more serious difficulties between us are that still call for clarification.
These days my life runs a rather regular course. In the mornings, I take a short walk with Pollock; then, following some fairly methodical study, I write notes and drafts; in the afternoons, I typically see Teddie, and we finalize the text together. On occasion, I also consult Marcuse on the parts that fall within his remit. Evenings belong to Pollock, sometimes also to [Félix] Weil. And, in the midst of all this, seminars and dealing with practical questions of the Institute.
Only in the last two months has there been any work on the actual text to speak of.16 The entire time prior to this was spent on studies and other work, none of which I regret, of course. A considerable number of preliminary notes already exist, but their final formulation will still take some years to come. This is in part due to the objective difficulty of the task of providing a formulation of dialectical philosophy which does justice to the experiences of recent decades, and in part due to our lack of routine, sluggishness of thought, and the lack of clarity on certain important points on which we are still stuck. For God’s sake, don’t expect anything like a grand result; in the end it will come out to little more than a kind of record of our—long familiar to you—thoughts. Come what may, you will undoubtedly say all this was already formulated better in the discussions of some religious sect in the 4th or 5th century. Even so, the work fulfills our need to see things a little bit more clearly before the probable imminent decline, and to leave something behind which might mean something to some or anybody.
I’m far from imagining that our thought could “break through in America,” as you describe it at the beginning of your “Remarks.” That would be synonymous with changing the world. We no longer hope for more than that, if the day should finally break, what we’ve written will be visible as a very small star, flickering, almost imperceptibly, in the horrific night of the present. For what else should the gaze which stares into the fireworks of magazines and other slick products of scientific and non-scientific mass culture perceive when it turns away from all this if not darkness. Suggesting a “material-rich, well-argued book” is certainly the most human suggestion one could propose to us, not just for the sake of the readers the book would thereby treat “democratically” but also for the sake of our own, external fate. But not even you yourself can admit that any publication of this sort could distinguish itself from the literary elements of the illumination of horror except through more exotic theses. But what are theses! Any theses of ours, as the guiding principles of a successful publication, would at best only add a new shade of color to the bouquet of rockets. I know how infinitely well-meaning you are. But should there really be no more thinking free of the intention to “break through”! I have no doubt that there might still be some positive kind of literary efficacy today that even we might say ‘yea’ to, and that you yourself might number among the vanishingly few examples, but for this—whether the fault lies with us or the way things are—we are still not strong enough.
Your critique of the style expresses lines of thought not far removed from our own.17 The decision in favor of the linguistic method, which you have called “dictatorial,” is, however, not a decision we made lightly. Solely in order to prove this—and not because the decisive reasons are developed therein—I quote from a short treatise on European relations I wrote this last year:
The style of theory becomes simpler, though only in that by doing so it denounces the very simplicity it consciously adopts by mirroring the barbaric process. The style approximates the rackets with the force of hatred and thus becomes their opposite. Its logic becomes as summary as their justice, as crude as their lies, as conscienceless as their agents—and, in this opposition to barbarism, becomes specific, exact, and scrupulous. The distinctionless designation of monopoly society as the embodiment of rackets is infinitely differentiated, since it summarily denounces the distinctionless brutality against powerlessness. The generalization and simplification of philosophy, which, in the eradication of even one innocent, forgets that the millions who allowed this to happen survive it, displays no lack of subtlety. In omission of the dependent clause [Nebensatz] that relativizes the mutilation of humanity, it attributes absoluteness to the horror that emanates from this. The subtlest shade of pleasure is sacred to philosophy. In the lack of any in-depth description of the apparatus, in the absence of syntactic conjunctions for the why and because and when of the calamity, the night in which one victim is like the other becomes eloquent in philosophy. Science reaches for statistics; for cognition, one concentration camp is enough.18
I can only concede that you are right in not a few of the critical comments in which you rectify errors and point out dangers in the presentation. Above all, of course, is the characterization of Duns Scotus as a Dominican.19 This is related to the fact that, ever since my semesters of history of philosophy courses under Clemens Bäumker,20 I have been an avid reader of the Church Fathers, but not of the Scholastics. From those years of study, however, I must have somehow gotten the notion lodged somewhere in my unconscious that the Dominicans had a relatively early presence in England, particularly in Oxford. Since a large part of Duns’ teaching activity took place there, in the back of my mind he must have fallen into some vague association with the Dominicans. But am I completely in error in believing that nominalist and empiricist currents, and even strong anti-Scotist tendencies, prevailed in the Dominican orders as well? —In any case, your comments on Duns and Ockham were most appreciated.
The same applies to what you say about Luther. (Surely, however, my memory of his use of the epithet “Beast,” along with those of “Whore” and “Fiend,” does not deceive me. Unfortunately, I don’t have the material here with me to locate the specific passages. If it is of interest to you, I would be happy to have the books sent here and track them down for you.) I must admit, however, that it is no easy thing for me to maintain objectivity towards Luther. When you describe him as patriarchal, an enemy of law and institutions, daring, anti-capitalist, anti-mechanistic, anti-ascetic, etc., you are speaking the truth, but only the truth implicite. Each of these concepts opens up its positive side in our present-day political and geographical situation, but at the same time encloses the devilish destruction we see at work over there. You were right to start with the concept of ‘patriarchal.’ In fact, Luther swings the masculine rod of discipline: he is the hero of anti-Semitism and peasant massacres. He anticipated what the Goebbels and the Streichers alone could contrive, and I’ve hardly read a single line of his, including his translation of the Bible, in which I did not clearly sense the connection to this side of his being. The ‘patriarchal’ is, furthermore, not the simple opposite of the bourgeois; the Nazis prove this, and I have a feeling that in this country, too, we might one day experience the bold ‘daring’ hidden under its bourgeois mantle. Under legalism slumbers hatred of the law, hardly as soundly as it did before the outbreak over there; under bourgeois Puritanism, the drive to excess. Asceticism is just as ambiguous; it belongs just as much to the ordering of the evil of that which exists as it does to resistance against this injustice. Whenever one, as you and I do today, have to exist in an atmosphere of sinister ‘objectivity,’ the Lutheran anti-asceticism that is celebrating its triumphs over there can only appear the higher right up to the point one happens to see the joy and delight in the murder at work right next to them. And then one becomes nostalgic for the mechanistic bourgeoisie. A note on ascesis I wrote down some time ago now just found its way back into my hands.21 I’ll enclose it with this letter. It’s nothing more than a marginal note made upon reading the Upanishads, rather one-sided and dubious. I send it only in salutation, since it just happened to come up.
Your remarks on the Jansenists, those on Loyola for example, are extremely valuable to me. I do believe, however, that there’s something to be said for my approach to them as well. What’s at stake here is a difference of material, and I still hope that I can make the part played by Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation in the industrial mentality of the masses clearer than I was able to in my assertions in the essay. You’re completely in the right to say that these are still insufficient and questionable. Right now, unfortunately, I am only able to speak to this on a very general level. —To be sure, the direct effects of Jesuitism can only be established for the upper-class groups you’ve identified, but it nevertheless might have formed a crucial element in the spiritual transformation of the masses, as the essay suggests. The same applies to Protestantism. Even if your explanation, which I dare not contradict, that neither the North- and East-German peasants nor even the rural proletariat were ever truly swept up in any Protestant movement is entirely correct, it still seems to me that the religious influences exerted upon the spiritual structure of the European industrial proletariat are not sufficiently grasped by reference to the activities of the church in the Early and High Middle Ages. Certainly, in the 17th and 18th centuries in Germany, it wasn’t just the agrarian masses who were run roughshod over but the poorly paid country parsons as well—who were occasionally given no more to live on than the wages of a farmhand. And yet, the influence of religion on the constitution of the masses wasn’t just direct, but also reached them through the spirit of the laws and administration, in addition to the exemplary figures of the Lord, the Bürger, and the Civil Official. One need only think of the young men and women in the service of lordships in town and country alike, not to mention service in the army. Without a doubt, European workers were driven into the factories and workshops by the whip of hunger and other horrors. But the fact they didn’t always just run off again, as soon as an easing of the otherwise draconian laws gave them the slightest chance to do so, as happened at the beginning of the Bolshevik industrialization of Russia—in this, I think, modern religiosity played a powerful role. For it was through this modern religiosity, as through the cultural measures of the Russian bureaucracy, that the goal-oriented rationalism of the modern worker, making him capable of achieving these goals, was unleashed; likewise in Japan, where, with the rebirth of Shintoism and the modern restoration of Japanese Buddhism that accompanies it, certain features of European religious development reappear as caricatures in processes in Asia. Incidentally, it was a small satisfaction for me that, when identifying all such assertions in the essay that undoubtedly require greater precision, you let slip a sentence like the one about “the monstrous libertinism of the Catholic upper-classes in the Counter-Reformation of the Baroque and Rococo”! Damit nimmt es selbst Hollywood noch auf!
As for your comments on ‘the children in the Christian world’ (and the world of the Enlightenment), there has been a misunderstanding for which the text of my essay is, perhaps, not entirely without fault. What is meant is not the theological problem of the ultimate destination of unbaptized, dying children, but rather the much more tangible problem of what the Christian world did to living children. What is alluded to is the fact that, up to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the fate of children, with the exception of those of the highest upper-classes, was indescribably terrible as a rule. This is as true of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, of the Catholic as much as the Protestant regions. Just think of the youth of Herder and Fichte, the latter of whom once hatched a plan to escape the tortures of Schulpforta and to live on an island like Robinson Crusoe. He even followed through with an escape attempt. The fate of apprentices in the Middle Ages played out on the level of the modern concentration camp. I believe I would hardly be going too far if I were to say that, up to the 19th century, the mortality rate of children over the age of three and four who died from abuse was as high as from illness—and that, to be sure, is no small matter. All of this only relates in a highly mediated fashion to the individual suppression of drives in 19th-century families to which you refer and psychoanalysis condemned. This was more directly connected to the image of childhood innocence that the 19th-century bourgeoisie created as an escape hatch. The true child simply had to be innocent. In the 20th century, there is a structural change in the Oedipus complex, which is described in the essay.
The questions you pose [on the last few pages]22 of your “Remarks” are essential. I don’t know whether I fully understood you, but what you say seems to contain an important concession to our way of thinking. By denying the view of pure dehumanization—which, in any case, the essay does not assert—you at the same time presuppose the concept of pure humanity, which you nonetheless wish to reject in the interest of the doctrine of radical evil. But if one concedes the validity of this concept, or that of the truth, even just as a theoretical function, let alone as a Grundmotiv of thinking, one will discover that its negating power does in fact make up the life of the spirit itself. You are right—this does mean one would “have to somehow stand on the outside.” But I believe this ‘standing-outside’ cannot be determined by pointing to some “remnant,” by designating individual groups or programs as non-dehumanized. Rather, this sort of objectification seems to me identical with self-surrender of the theory to a practice which is itself mired in calamity. An example: the interesting article by [Reinhold] Niebuhr, “A Faith for History’s Greatest Crisis” in the July issue of Fortune, which I read with great shock. The title alone is a sign of capitulation to pragmatism. On the basis of “evil,” he justifies everything one could otherwise only wish for.
If that outside is spoken of other than through the self-eloquent negativity of incorruptible thought, the outside becomes inside, the “remnant” fades away, and the groups turn from witnesses and fighters for the truth into apologists for attitude and institutions. May I quote something of ours once more? In a passage where we confront the accusation of the one-sidedness of negativity, because it suppresses the good in power, it says:
[The lie] insinuates that even when one contradicts the existing order, one is acting in the service of other, emergent powers, competing bureaucracies, and rulers. In its nameless fear, it can and will see only what resembles itself. Anything which is absorbed into its medium, language as mere instrument, becomes identical to the lie as objects become indistinguishable in darkness. But although it is true that there is no word which could not ultimately be used by the lie, the word’s temper never gleams in the lie but only in the thought hardened in the fight against power. Uncompromising hatred of the terror inflicted on the last of the earth’s creatures legitimizes the gratitude of those who are spared. Invocation of the sun is idolatry. Only the spectacle of the tree withered in its heat gives a presentiment of the majesty of the day which will not scorch the world on which it shines.23
The idea of previous history as prehistory is no belief in miracles, for thinking does not depend upon more or less verifiable forecasts of a better society.24 It can, however, fashion itself a guarantor, however weak it might be, in always pledging fidelity once more to the lessons of the bad past. As I now read over the last sentences of your “Remarks” again, I find that, despite the contradictions, they are not so far removed from what I’ve just expressed. I consider raising this identity to clarity one of the most important tasks I have been put on this earth to accomplish.
May I also say that your letter against Emil Ludwig to Aufbau is, for me, one of the rare rays of light in the darkness of emigration.25 For this, I am particularly grateful.
Ad. Letter—Horkheimer, re: “Our task in life is theoretical work.” (Nov. 1941).
[Excerpt from: Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 11/29/1941.]26
Our task in life is theoretical work. Now it is time for the experiences and discussions of the last ten years to bear their fruit. The content of the future work is more or less together—in part in writing in our earlier works and notes, in part in our heads. With regard to form, hardly anything has been determined yet. The theme around which our efforts will revolve will probably (but not definitely) be anti-Semitism. My ideas for the mode of presentation [Art der Darstellung], which will diverge greatly from that of the conventional book, are not yet clear. Even if the prospective theme warrants a German version first, we will most likely need to undertake the English version ourselves, either from the outset or at another relatively early point in the process. In view of the complete lack of routine, I will have to impose tremendous demands on my own energy myself. I imagine it will be much the same for anyone working with me, if for different reasons. Whatever the outcome, the meaning of our work, indeed our very existence, will become clear for the first time. Given the horror already extant without now also arising within, given the fact we see no one around us for miles, the responsibility is enormous.
Horkheimer to Paul Tillich, 8/12/1942. In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften Band 17. Edited by Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 313-327. Author’s translation.
Previously translated into English in: A Life In Letters: Selected Correspondence. Max Horkheimer. Edited and translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 208-214.
[MHGS, Bd. 17 Ed. Note:] In a letter to Horkheimer and Pollock of July 15th, 1942, Tillich wrote, with reference to an article he’d just written: “The essay “Spiritual Reconstruction after the war” bears strong traces of Horkheimer’s Vernunft-article, which I have here had the chance to study intensively and enthusiastically, and which, I hope (in contrast to the English version) I have understood. I have written the following pages about it—in led pencil, on copy paper, so that I can send a copy to [Adolph] Löwe as well.” Cf. Tillich, “Spiritual Problems of Post-War Reconstruction” [in: Christianity and Crisis, Vol. 2, No. 14 (New York, 1942), 2ff.]. Tillich’s remarks on Horkheimer’s essay “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” [in: Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis (WBG). Typoskript des Instituts für Sozialforschung (1942), 17-59.], published in English as “The End of Reason” [in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (SPSS), Vol. IX, No. 3 (1942), 366-388.], have not survived in manuscript-form in the MHA, Tillich-Nachlass, or Adolph Löwe papers. However, there is a typescript copy in the Tillich-Nachlass in Cambridge, Mass., reproduced here.
In a letter to his parents in May 1942, Adorno—after asking whether or not his parents received the “big” version of the Walter Benjamin memorial issue (in contrast to the ‘small’ version from which Horkheimer’s radical “Authoritarian State” had been cut)—insists that “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” is “identical” to “The End of Reason,” but tells his parents not to bother reading the latter anyway since “[w]hat counts for us is the German.”
Adorno to his Parents, 5/6/1942: “Did you receive the Benjamin memorial issue and the Studies? Max and I have given instructions several times for both of these to be sent. If you do not have them, you can simply ask Leo to give them to you. Please let me know if you are given the correct ‘big’ version of the Benjamin issue, which is over 160 pages long. [*] Incidentally, the essay ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ is identical to the English one entitled “The End of Reason.” What counts for us is the German version, so you do not need to read the English one.” In: Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents. 1939-1951, Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2006), 98.
[*] See James Schmidt (1998): “Horkheimer’s letters from the 1940s suggest that he was extremely sensitive to statements by other members of the exile community that described the Institute for Social Research as “Marxist.”’ For example, a 1943 letter to his friend Friedrich Pollock discussed at length how the institute should be defended against charges that it was politically “radical” (17, pp. 451-57). The lengths to which Horkheimer was willing to go in order to avoid even the appearance of radicalism border on the comic: before sending a colleague a copy of the mimeographed volume that the Institute for Social Research published in memory of Walter Benjamin, Horkheimer instructed Leo Loewenthal to “simply take a complete copy and cut the last article out. You may explain that the last pages were so misprinted that we had to destroy them—or find some other explanation” (17, p. 345). The article Loewenthal was instructed to remove was Horkheimer’s essay “The Authoritarian State,” which, with its defense of worker’s councils, was perhaps the most politically radical essay he had written.” In: “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Social Research Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter 1998), 813.
Adorno to his Parents, 5/8/1940: “Yesterday Max and I finished work, once and for all, on our second joint child, the essay on George and Hofmannsthal, and it is already going off to the typesetter today. The new issue (*) will consist of our collaborative efforts: the piece on state capitalism [viz., “Authoritarian State”], the George essay and the English project on anti-Semitism that we wrote last year.” [(*) Letters to his Parents Ed. Note:] “This could not be published because of the German invasion of France, as the publisher (Felix Alcan in Paris) who produced the journal in German and the printing company (Presses Universitaires de France) had already been unable to edit and print the manuscripts they had for the third 1939 issue and the first 1940 issue under the conditions of the occupation.” In: Letters to his Parents (2006), 46-49. On the collaborative composition of “Authoritarian State” (at the time referred to as Horkheimer’s “State Capitalism” essay), cf. Adorno to his Parents, 3/24/1940 and Gretel Adorno to Adorno’s Parents, 4/21/1940. In: Ibid., 44-46.
For more on Adorno and Horkheimer’s collaborative process, see Adorno’s description in a letter to his Parents, 11/22/1944: “The joint work with Max has now settled into a very comfortable routine. Sometimes, after talking through the matter in depth, each of us sketches his ideas separately, but normally we discuss, agree on something and then formulate it together, often in such a manner that one of us begins a sentence and the other concludes it, which is possible because what we plan to write has always been precisely determined beforehand. There is always a unification of our opinions before anything is written down. There is not a single line in the Dialektik der Aufklärung, the Culture Industry and ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ that we did not formulate together, often many times over.” In: Letters to his Parents (2006), 204-205.
Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 2/11/1942: “You assume there was a draft of my article [viz., “The End of Reason”] ready at the end of January. This is true, but the draft was in a state of complete disorganization and nobody would have been able to decipher it. It consists of about a hundred pages and contains far more than I intend to publish. The thirty pages, the translation of which will be available, I hope, in about a week, represent a part of the larger text. I have worked on these thirty pages with Teddy during the last weeks and I dare say that this is a piece of work which gives an idea of what I intend to do in the future. I have worked so closely together with Teddy that I even consider to publish it in connection with him. Since I want to go over the draft on Thursday, it will be next Monday until it will reach you, not much before the English version, the completion of which I shall rush to the utmost. I am burning to have your reaction as to the German version. We still intend to make anti-Semitism the problem of our first book, most of the points mentioned in the new article will have to be dealt with in that book. If you like the article, I would advocate that we bring the mimeographed issue out and insert this new article in the place of “State Capitalism” [viz., “Authoritarian State”]. If it is too expensive, we could omit the articles of Vagts and Rosenberg and perhaps have some pages from Brecht so that the issue would really be an homage to Benjamin. You know that Brecht was an intimate friend of Benjamin’s. Enclosed please find the project of Jacoby. Please give him my kindest regards and discuss his work with him.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 266-267. English in original.
Horkheimer to Paul Tillich, 2/11/1942. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 271-273.
Adorno to his Parents, 5/2/1942: “Our work revolves, in the widest sense, around the question of ‘enlightenment,’ in that both positive and negative analyses of the guise taken on by enlightenment in modern philosophical thought are to help us to develop in the conceptual medium the insights we presume to have gained regarding the present state of the world and the possibility of a way out. The first main section, which we are beginning to draft now, relates to the philosophical concept of enlightenment and its connection to myth and rule.” In: Letters to his Parents (2006), 94-96.
Cf. Horkheimer’s critique of the assumption of the revolutionary subject on the grounds of Marx’s critique of political economy in “Traditional and Critical Theory” [1937]: “But it must be added that even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge. The proletariat may indeed have experience of meaninglessness in the form of continuing and increasing wretchedness and injustice in its own life. Yet this awareness is prevented from becoming a social force by the differentiation of social structure which is still imposed on the proletariat from above and by the opposition between personal class interests which is transcended only at very special moments. Even to the proletariat the world superficially seems quite different than it really is. Even an outlook which could grasp that no opposition really exists between the proletariat’s own true interests and those of society as a whole, and would therefore derive its principles of action from the thoughts and feelings of the masses, would fall into slavish dependence on the status quo. The intellectual is satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat and finds satisfaction in adapting himself to it and in canonizing it. He fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort (which the passivity of his own thinking spares him) and of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need be. His own thinking should in fact be a critical, promotive factor in the development of the masses. When he wholly accepts the present psychological state of that class which, objectively considered, embodies the power to change society, he has the happy feeling of being linked with an immense force and enjoys a professional optimism. When the optimism is shattered in periods of crushing defeat, many intellectuals risk falling into a pessimism about society and a nihilism which are just as ungrounded as their exaggerated optimism had been. They cannot bear the thought that the kind of thinking which is most topical, which has the deepest grasp of the historical situation, and is most pregnant with the future, must at certain times isolate its subject and throw him back upon himself.” In: Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory. Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell and co. (Continuum, 2002), 213-214.
Cf. Horkheimer to Kirchheimer, 7/6/1942: “My work at present is taking a course which aligns exactly with your wish for a careful elaboration of these dialectical structures. It has led me (along with Adorno and Marcuse) to fundamental philosophical questions, the articulation of which, from our standpoint, forms the presupposition for the reformulation of the theory, which is what it all comes down to in the end. The doctrine of the bourgeois individual forms a constitutive part of this as well. The themes with which we are presently engaged (i.e., in the next few months; later on, we will proceed to more concrete topics), are nothing short of the theory of language and the enlightenment. There is something almost comical about the fact that people with capacities as limited as ours are supposed to undertake an enterprise that seems to demand gifts both infinitely greater and different from our own. However, since those with said gifts were either murdered in the concentration camps or, at the very least, prevented from working in peace, we would use the time which remains to us to work on this principle, even if it is more than questionable as to whether we will ever be capable of offering anything remotely adequate with regard to the intention. It is infinitely difficult, and you can well believe me when I say we will in any case not come up wanting where the utmost exertion is concerned.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 308-310. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Adorno, 6/23/1941: “The principle of civilization that we know from history is identical to domination. Their separation is the new puzzle, and we don’t know whether and how it will be solved. These theoretical relationships should be preserved even in our reactions that are conditioned by sensitivity. Nil admirari—if one should happen to experience the living conditions of society oneself instead of always only the others doing so. The members of the masses are called “idiots” because nothing is left for them but admirari: respect or hatred, as opposed to the thinking that is found among equals, among patricians. We, of course, find ourselves in an intermediate state that is appropriate for neither one nor the other. Perhaps this was always the situation of theory—even for Marx. ...” In: A Life in Letters (2007), 177-179.
Cf. Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations” (1943): “Unlike the medieval doctrine of the church or the liberalistic apology of the market system, proletarian theory of capitalism did not glorify its subject. It looked upon capitalism as the final form of domination. In no way did it justify the established ideas and superstitions of those whom it guided. In contrast to the tendencies of today’s mass culture, it did not sell the people their own way of living, which they unconsciously abhorred, but overtly acclaimed. Proletarian theory was the critical analysis of reality including the worker’s own warped thoughts. The locus of theory was the difference between the objective interest of the exploited class and the immediate interest of the individual workers: The more this difference is obscured by the existing social set-up, the more theory tends to vanish.”
Cf. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947): “Social theory—reactionary, democratic, or revolutionary—was the heir to the older systems of thought that were supposed to have set the patterns for past totalities. These older systems had vanished because the forms of solidarity postulated by them proved to be deceptive, and the ideologies related to them became hollow and apologetic. The latter-day critique of society for its part refrained from apologetics, and did not glorify its subject—not even Marx exalted the proletariat. He looked upon capitalism as the last form of social injustice; he did not condone the established ideas and superstitions of the dominated class whom his doctrine was supposed to guide. In contrast to the tendencies of mass culture, none of those doctrines undertook to ‘sell’ the people the way of life in which they are fixed and which they unconsciously abhor but overtly acclaim. Social theory offered a critical analysis of reality, including the workers’ own warped thoughts. Under the conditions of modern industrialism, however, even political theory is infected with the apologetic trend of the total culture.” In: Eclipse of Reason (Bloomsbury, 2004 [Continuum, 1974]), 103.
Adorno and Horkheimer, “Propaganda”: “What is suspect is not, of course, the depiction of reality as hell but the routine invitation to break our of it. If that invitation can be addressed to anyone today, it is neither to the so-called masses nor to the individual, who is powerless, but rather to an imaginary witness, to whom we bequeath it so that it is not entirely lost with us.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 213.
Excerpt sourced from the reproduction of Tillich’s remarks in: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 326-327. [Footnote No. 23] Author’s translation.
“remnant”: [“Rests”]
[MHGS, Bd. 17 Ed. Note:] This citation [viz., to page 15] is to the manuscript version, which has not survived; the version in the Tillich-Nachlass consists of only nine pages. The passage in question can be found at the end of Tillich’s remarks.
On the timeline for composition of the earliest drafts of what would become the main chapters of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1942, see, for ex.: Horkheimer to Adorno, 9/17/1942: “There is only one thing which we have to look at: our work. We are inferior in all fields but in one: that of truth. Unfortunately, it will be quite impossible for me to do any theoretical work here. I can only do some thinking which may help us later on. I can hardly await the day when we sit down to go ahead with A4. This and A5 [viz., Thesis IV and V of “Elements of Anti-Semitism”] should be finished about the middle of November. After that, we should do some work in connection with the economic projects (sociology of rackets). Very soon in the new year we should start either with what you wrote in mass culture or with some other subject with which we can proceed a little faster than with our first paragraphs. How ever [sic] it will be, it will be beautiful.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 331. English in original.
Cf. Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 1/20/1942: “The German draft of my article on Reason was ready some time ago. I devoted the last ten days discussing it with Teddy and to using the occasion for taking lots of notes for the future work. Unfortunately, I cannot satisfy your desire to see these notes because thus far Gretel has not been present at our discussions as at earlier times, and the notes consist of slips of paper which Teddy and I filed away or stuck into notebooks with the intention of classifying when the time comes to use them. By the way, I don’t feel that I have in any respect moved away from our common theoretical conclusions. There are, of course, many new details and even some new conceptions, for instance that philosophical argument, which has lost its basis with the abolition of the sphere of circulation, now seems to me impossible. This has a great influence on the form of theory itself. Theory has to become so simple that it is adequate to the situation of the young generation. The new article will not show much of this insight but I think all my future work will. We must beware of talking ourselves into an unresolvable antagonism to youth which I think has much more promise in it than most of us tend to believe.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 245-246. English in original.
Full translation of Horkheimer’s “Haupt- und Nebensatz” [1942/44] forthcoming in the CTWG’s collection of translations from Horkheimer’s 1940s fragments on ‘Dialectical Logic.’
[MHGS, Bd. 17 Ed. Note:] In the original versions of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” and “The End of Reason,” Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are named as members of the same order. [“Siger of Brabant and Roger Bacon fought the scholastic rationalism of Thomas Aquinas until his own order, after Duns Scotus, gave way to more empirical tendencies.”] Duns Scotus was not, as was Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, but a Franciscan. Horkheimer took this correction of Tillich’s into account in his own personal copy, deleting the words “mit Duns Scotus” from the formulation “bis sein eigener Orden mit Duns Scotus empiristischen Tendenzen Raum gab.” This correction was, however, ignored in later editions of the text. Even the published version in MHGS, Bd. 5 still contains the original, erroneous formulation.
[MHGS, Bd. 17 Ed. Note:] Clemens Bäumker (1853-1924), Professor of Philosophy in Breslau 1883, then in Bonn (1900), Strasbourg (1903), and Munich (1912).
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Transformation of the Idea into Power.” In: Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 175-178.
Horkheimer cites “page 14 and the following pages.” Horkheimer is referring to the final paragraphs of Tillich’s “Remarks,” translated above (cf. “Paul Tillich: “Remarks” on “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” (July 1942) [Excerpt]”).
Adorno and Horkheimer, “On Voltaire.” Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 181-182.
There is a marked difference of formulation between the last sentence of the English version of “The End of Reason” (SPSS) and “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” (WBG). The last sentence of “The End of Reason” reads: “The progress of reason that leads to its self-destruction has come to an end; there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom.” (p. 388) The last sentence of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” reads: “Am Ende des Fortschritts der sich selbst aufhebenden Vernunft bleibt ihr nichts mehr übrig, als der Rückfall in Barbarei oder der Anfang der Geschichte.” (p. 59) Translated into English, the last sentence of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” would read as follows: “At the end of the progress of self-abolishing reason, nothing is left but the relapse into barbarism or the beginning of history.”
The latter ends with an allusion to Marx’s formulation in the ‘Preface’ [1859] to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.” In: MECW Vol. 29 (Lawrence & Wishart [E-Book], 2010), 263-264. [link]
[MHGS, Bd. 17 Ed. Note:] An article in The New York Times of July 6th, 1942, under the headline “LUDWIG ASKS FIGHT ON ‘GERMAN PEOPLE,’” quoted from a speech of Emil Ludwig’s that he’d delivered on the fourth at the “Win the War—Win the Peace” conference in Los Angeles and in which he’d called for a fight against Germany, having equated it with Hitler. Tillich, who was, at first, only familiar with the speech through these quotations, harshly criticized Ludwig in a letter to the German-Jewish New York newspaper Der Aufbau, denouncing it as a mere value-inversion of anti-Semitic propaganda and an insult to German resistance fighters. Tillich described the speech as one that “should prompt all decent German Jews in America to distance themselves from Ludwig clearly and decisively.” [Cf. “What should happen to Germany?” in: Der Aufbau, July 17th, 1942, p. 6] Tillich’s attack on Ludwig unleashed a controversy that was followed up with further contributions from other authors in the subsequent issues of July 31st and August 7th, 1942.
Horkheimer to Löwenthal, 11/29/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 223-24. Author’s translation.