Horkheimer—Ethics after Metaphysics (ca. 1926)
On Hartmann’s Phenomenological Philosophy of Value and Kant’s Practical Philosophy.
Translator’s note.
Below, you’ll find a translation of an essay entitled “[Phänomenologische Wertphilosophie und Kants praktische Philosophie: Ethik als Harmonisierung der Gegenwart oder Gestaltung der Zukunft]” and dated “[1926?]” by the editors of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften (MHGS),1 whose “Prefatory Remark” I’ve translated as well. This post should be considered part of a series of notes on and translations from Horkheimer’s late-1920s philosophical studies, through which he stakes out a distinctive position in post-Kantian philosophy: a unique form of critical materialism. As the MHGS editors remark, Horkheimer’s critical approach here matches that of his roughly contemporary writings on sociological cognition and the problem of ideology critique.2 However, this piece—which I’ve called “Ethics after Metaphysics,” for the sake of concision—stands apart from Horkheimer’s other “theoretical texts” from the late 1920s in at least one crucial respect: it opposes Nicolai Hartmann’s philosophical optimism not with philosophical pessimism, but to the revolutionary overthrow of practical conditions of human misery and participation in the real historical movement to overturn that which exists.
Because of this, “Ethics after Metaphysics” can be considered a Wendepunkt between Horkheimer’s official-academic theoretical texts and his much more radical, unofficial-experimental literary ones, from his Philosophical Journals (1925-1928) to his notes for Dämmerung (1926-1931) and his aphorisms from Dämmerung (1934). Here, as elsewhere in his writings of the late 1920s (and through the late 1930s), Horkheimer’s relationship to Kant is one of deep ambivalence. In “Ethics and Metaphysics,” Horkheimer’s criticism of Hartmann’s Ethics (1926)—an entire section of which (“Section IV. The Kantian Ethics.”) is devoted to a critique of the subjectivism (XI.), formalism (XII.), and intellectualism (XIII.) of Kant’s ethics—challenges the latter’s claim to exceed the realm of experience and conduct “investigation[s] of the intelligible realm of pure essentialities” by using what Hartmann disparages as Kant’s “rigorism” to demonstrate the subjectivism, formalism, and intellectualism of Hartmann’s ethics. The minimalism of Kantian ethics, in its one single demand for the universalization of bourgeois freedom, proves superior to the maximalism of Hartmann’s ethics, which pretends to mere ‘description’ of the “fullness of the world of values,” values which are faint echoes of bourgeois ideals the Wertphilosophen like Hartmann presuppose but cannot account for:
They are irrationalists to the extent they emphasize the sheer givenness of values, rationalists to the extent they wish to impose their reactionary “insight” on us as universally binding, and pathetic enough to know nothing of the history of their own “ideas”—not to mention their own concrete history!
[Philosophical Notebooks (1925-1928): Entry No. 13 (3/17/1926)]
While Kant’s ethics proves itself objective, substantial, and practical in contrast to Hartmann’s, Horkheimer ‘returns’ to Kant against Hartmann’s pre-Kantian “post-Kantianism” in order to insist on a genuine post-Kantian alternative: (1) actualization of Kant’s “radical demand”—viz., “that we organize the world to enable the free activity of everyone in it, such that the sphere of freedom for each might coexist with those of all others”—not through the “civil social order” which has lost this ideal in the course of its development, but in a revolutionary (socialist) overthrow of practical conditions;3 (2) following “the great path of progressive knowledge upon which Kant is a milestone,” the path that “leads us closer and closer to metaphysical disillusionment,” to the point we’re forced “to renounce even the last vestige of metaphysical consolation Kant left [for us].” It is the germ of the “illusion-free orientation” of critical-materialistic self-consciousness Horkheimer will continue to develop into the next decade:
In opposition to the constant vacillation between relativism and absolutist speculation, the two constituent moments of idealistic thinking, the outlines of dialectical method are to be drawn up. Both of these moments are contained in the [illusion-free orientation] as well, albeit in a different configuration: critique and unswerving orientation towards a goal interpenetrate one another. It’s not going to be easy to describe this unity of opposites within correct consciousness such that the idea of a non-idealistic logic is rendered visible. I will, however, try my best, for I believe science is in need of more fruitful formulations on this point.4
For Horkheimer throughout the late 1920s, the sole post-Kantian orientation which does not fall back into pre-Kantian dogma—despite Kant’s own attempted rescue of metaphysics—is the attitude the materialist who joins the struggle for socialism without the need for any form of consolation a priori, whether metaphysically grounding intelligibles or transcendentally guaranteed intelligibility.5 With nothing to gild their actions, as Horkheimer closes below, they well know everything’s at stake.6
[MHGS Ed.:] Prefatory Remark.
The typescript was filed in the Horkheimer Nachlass right next to the text for the lecture “Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart,” delivered summer semester 1926. For this reason, in addition to the fact that the only text cited in the typescript is Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethics of 1926, we can conclude with a certain degree of probability that this is the text’s date of origin as well. Here, the demarcation from contemporary metaphysics is conducted in the field of practical philosophy. In its basic features, the critical approach in this text corresponds with that in the sketches on sociological cognition and the problem of ideology critique. As Horkheimer does in those notes, here it is a question of a process of “metaphysical disillusionment”7 that draws on Kant and transcends both Kant and Neo-Kantianism. For Horkheimer, in the field of ethics this disillusionment leads to the postulate of a humane organization of society, to the critique of real grievances. For Horkheimer, the true alternative is not one between metaphysical optimism or metaphysical pessimism, but rather the alternative between metaphysics and “participation in the real historical movement.” For the first time in his theoretical texts, Horkheimer speaks of the postulate of a “revolutionary overthrow of practical conditions.”
Ethics after Metaphysics (ca. 1926).
Modern ethics is, in the first place, concerned with descriptions. It wants to bring the fullness of the world of values back into view, “to bring man into the conscious possession of his ‘moral faculty,’ to open to him again the world which he has closed against himself,” as Hartmann expresses it.8 From the first breakthrough in Husserlian logic to the differentiated phenomenological analyses of the present, philosophy has since become increasingly certain that the task of thinking human beings lies not in preparatory work for the practical mastery of the world, but rather consists of the investigation of the intelligible realm of pure essentialities [Wesenheiten]. It would be wrong to imagine that the enlightenment and its later representatives, such as Ernst Mach, were totally ignorant of the distinction between the essential and the inessential; only, in contrast to the metaphysics of the present, they sought out the condition for what appears as the essential and inessential to us not in the intelligible realm but in the realm of our human interests. Today, however, it is generally believed that this distinction can be grounded on pure, even unconditioned, free acts of cognition. What is essential does not depend on the actual situation, nor in the way I might react to it; rather, there is an essential content to things, which can only be grasped and presented in one fell swoop. We are not, as Kant taught, bound to the realm of appearances; rather, we have the capacity to venture beyond the realm of appearances, into the intelligible whatness of things. And in this intelligible realm is where values, existing-in-themselves, reside.
Not even Kant denied that human beings employ manifold perspectives from which they evaluate the things of this world and assess the behavior of their fellow humans. Yet all of these perspectives—from which others appear to us under the aspects of neighborly love, truthfulness, bravery, shame, modesty, personality, etc.—were for Kant, according to his theoretical philosophy, nothing other than human representations under social and psychological conditions; perspectives to which we could no more bestow the honorific of “absolute knowledge” than any other contents of consciousness.9 According to Kant’s practical philosophy, such perspectives were indeed connected to the categorial imperative, i.e., bound up with our freedom, but without any sanction of their content and only with respect to the singular, completely formal, moral law and the radical demand that we organize the world to enable the free activity of everyone in it, such that the sphere of freedom for each might coexist with those of all others. This is what Kantian ethics, at base, comes down to. This is the ideal of civil social order Kant formulated as it was only just beginning, and which has been lost in the course of its development.10
And this is where the deepest distinction between Kantian and modern ethics lies: Kant’s emphasis on shaping the future, whereas phenomenology harmonizes the present through its description of ideal being. Characteristically, Kant’s ethics bears the title of praxis (“practical philosophy”), while today the preferred terminology is ‘ethics’ or ‘philosophy of value.’ The so-called “rigorism” of Kant’s ultimately comes down to the idea that the present is never enough, that what’s important is action, i.e., change, and that this action—as has already been said—is, in Kant’s own words, concerned with change of the human world, i.e., society. By contrast, the satisfactory description of the multiform regions of value, which are to be rendered visible in the present, ultimately ends in a profession of joy in, and affirmation of, this present. “Every ethics of duty and of the Ought alone, all purely imperative morals, commits this blunder—the blunder of overlooking the fullness of life. Whoever has fallen under the spell of such a rigorism may at this stage foolishly ask: Is not that which is valuable always given up first of all? Is not moral value always in its very essence an eternal Not-Being, an Ought-to-Be? Are there, then, actualized values in the world? Whoever asks this question has not noticed what a failure to appreciate life, what a thanklessness and arrogance hold him in their grip. As though the actual must necessarily be bad and of poor quality! As though human life were in itself a senseless game, the world a vale of tears, and as though all existence had only waited for him in order to attain through his will and his action light, meaning and value! An ethics exclusively of the Ought is a moral delusion, is a blindness to the value of the actual. No wonder that, historically, pessimism follows in its track. In a world stripped of values and profaned, no one could tolerate life.”11
For Hartmann, this devaluation [Entwertung] and profanation of the world lies not in the poor ordering of actuality, not in the existence of material hardship, oppression, nor in the horrors that, for example, the great powers of Europe and America inflict upon all continents of the earth; neither does he find it the atrocities committed by human beings every single day to maintain certain privileges, in the actual organization of society, but rather in the fact that society has theoretically denied the existence of objective values. Anyone who happens to open up these phenomenological writings will find therein much lamentation over the present, but no lament over actual misery—none whatsoever. This misery is left out of ethics, relegated to being the object of less venerable disciplines, to the sphere of all those mere sciences of facts. For Hartmann, the fault lies with our intellectual attitude. For we have become value-blind; our mechanistic mode of thinking—our positivism, which only perceives sheer facts and regularities—has allowed our faculty of perceiving the richness of the world of ideas to atrophy. Accordingly, the remedy is regarded as a spiritual transformation, a renewal of culture, rather than a revolutionary overthrow of practical conditions. Pre-Kantian theories of the unconditionedness of our decisions, the denial of the concept of causality, and the rewards of wise contemplation walk hand in hand with such an approach. The values praised in these ethical systems are precisely those which are perfectly compatible with the persistence of real evil in the world—inner tranquility, unity of one’s person, humility before the fullness of the world, purity, truthfulness, inwardness, etc.
Even the practical philosophy of the most recent Kantians was still essentially oriented towards the bettering of human society; having recognized that society encompasses all of the conditions for the shaping of human life within the scope of our influence, [the neo-Kantians] repeatedly came back to the “social,” though they did so in an idealistic and often childish manner, as in the case of Natorp. Nelson even developed a personal relationship to actual events and dared to criticize that which exists [das Bestehende]. However, when Hartmann speaks of such things, like the state, his tone is perfectly aperçu-like, contemplative. Here, I will refer to one of the few passages on the state from the Chapter VII., “The Various Domains of the Moral Phenomenon”: “The life of the State and public morality, and thereby indirectly politics and history, may well cover a wider domain. The structure of the State is as little engulfed in legal matters as is its morality in the legal code. It is more than an institute of law; it is a real entity, with body and soul. It has its own characteristic life above that of individuals, its own laws of development, its own tendencies and perspective. Its Idea inheres in values which have meaning only in and for it, specific communal values. What we in our political consciousness honour in the State, what we love, condemn, strive towards, hope for or welcome with enthusiasm—all this is related to it itself just as the moral qualities and peculiarities of individual persons are related to them. The sole difference is that in the macrocosm of communal life everything appears magnified, objectified, and endowed with greater significance, and thereby is more easily grasped and determined, is more open to discussion.”12 This is the speech of a contemplative philosopher, one who can only imagine a philosophical pessimism opposite his philosophical optimism, but cannot imagine participation in the real historical movement.
In his practical philosophy, Kant offers very little in the way of a description of the fullness of the realm of values. All in all, he formulated one single demand, that of the most advanced class of his age: the demand for freedom, which is not to be grasped in an ethereal, merely intelligible way, but is to be brought to bear upon the organization of earthly conditions. His doctrine of the primacy of practical over theoretical reason in the last instance means nothing other than that we must mobilize the sciences in the spirit of this practical demand as well. We should not expect to gain any absolute truth through the sciences; for Kant, no contemplation, no participation in the Platonic ideas, leads us beyond our conditionedness and our finitude. Neither can ethical demands be given theoretical foundation; rather, they are present as factum in our consciousness. To the extent we participate in the organization of a world in which all human beings can live with dignity, this happens solely on the grounds of sheer belief in our responsibility to see that it does. There is no starry realm of ideas from which we might receive signs that our actions do indeed possess an eternal value, or that they are justified by an eternal reality. To the extent we are theoretical, scientific human beings, we can examine our moral behavior in a scientific manner, as much as any other natural process—yet, for all this, there is no theoretical transfiguration.
Modern philosophical attempts meet with such great success because their ideas provide human beings with secure footing, a theoretical reassurance for their actions, but also because they propagate a very specific, positive mode of conduct, precisely what they wish for. For all the promise their descriptions, sometimes rather subtle, may hold for future processing by actual sciences, for all of the material they might generate for a categorically-ordered—in the Kantian sense—psychology or sociology, the philosophical thesis of their work (absoluteness) is already outdated. The mode of conduct which corresponds to it, its optimistic, “keep-smiling,” good-natured disposition, joy in the fullness of that which exists, the American praxis of German theory, would perish the second it became aware of the fact that its world is actually a vale of tears—something it’s never truly noticed before, but that its moral philosophy has nevertheless always denied. The great path of progressive knowledge upon which Kant is a milestone leads us closer and closer to metaphysical disillusionment. For those who are concerned not with unfolding the absolute world of values, but with stripping the vale of tears of its earthly character, i.e., with really bettering this world, they will have to renounce even the last vestige of metaphysical consolation Kant left them. They have nothing to gild their actions. For them, everything is at stake.
“[Phänomenologische Wertphilosophie und Kants praktische Philosophie: Ethik als Harmonisierung der Gegenwart oder Gestaltung der Zukunft] [1926?].” In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 11. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 138–144.
For more on Horkheimer’s late-1920s conception of revolutionary socialism as the consummation of radical bourgeois enlightenment thought, see his 1927 lectures on the French enlightenment:
Horkheimer to Wittfogel, 8/21/1935. In: MHGS, Bd. 15 (1995), 389-391. Author’s translation
On the ‘standpoint’ of the historical materialist, see: “On the validity of historical materialism for the past,” in Notes for Dämmerung (1926-1931); and “On the Materialist Theory of History” (ca. 1935/36).
In CTWG’s Margin Notes, Vol 1, Esther Planas Balduz develops the problem of Horkheimer’s moral critique of moral philosophy in the 1930s: “Horkheimer’s Materialism vs Morals and Metaphysics. Its Limitations and Possibilities.”
[“metaphysischen Ernüchterung”]
[Horkheimer’s fn.:] Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik, Berlin, Leipzig 1926, S. 15. English from: Ethics, by Nicolai Hartmann. Volume I: Moral Phenomena. Authorized translation by Stanton Coit (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1932), 45.
“absolute knowledge”: [absoluter Erkenntnisse]
civil social order: [bürgerlichen Ordnung]
[Horkheimer’s fn.:] Ibid., S. 8. English from: Ethics, by Nicolai Hartmann. Vol. I (1932), 36.
[Horkheimer’s fn.:] Ibid., pp. 62f. English from: Ethics, by Nicolai Hartmann. Vol. I (1932), 113.