On The Method of the History of Philosophy (Excerpts) (1926/27)
Translations from Horkheimer's Lectures on Modern & Contemporary Philosophy.
Translator’s note. Translations of excerpts from Horkheimer’s introductory lectures on the history of modern (1927) and contemporary (1926) philosophy on the method of the ‘scientific’ (viz., materialist) presentation of the history of philosophy against the history of ideas (Geistesgeschichte), which I’m posting in the hopes of being able to return to these lectures someday and translate them in full.
Contents.
Excerpt 1: On a major tendency of the enlightenment. (1926)1
Excerpt 2: Against the history of ideas. (1926)2
Excerpt 3: “… One must ‘philosophize.’” (1926)3
Excerpt 4: On the very concept of ‘The History of Modern Philosophy.’ (1927)4
Excerpt 5: On ‘progress’ in the history of modern philosophy. (1927)5
Excerpt 1: On a major tendency of the enlightenment. (1926)
A major tendency of this movement [viz., of the enlightenment] can be expressed as follows: the medieval question concerning the meaning of a factum, posed from above, is increasingly replaced by the question of the partial facts which compose this factum, the relationships between these and other partial facts and the regularities which prevail in their interaction. While [medieval] thought is characterized by the fact that it will not remain at what is worldly, that it is hostile towards the mere confirmation of worldly events because it is preoccupied with the progression of the heavenly order and with the glorification of bad actuality as one willed by God, the characteristic of the enlightenment is exactly the contrary: the enlightenment too will not defer to ‘the worldly,’ but this is precisely because it would enter more deeply into it, because ‘the worldly’ still appears as something fabricated ‘by us,’ something which is to a certain degree poetic and fictional, or at the very least appears as to be something which only exists as it is ‘for us,’ because the enlightenment is guided by a horror of all anthropomorphizing and deifying. The Middle Ages illusioned and the Enlightenment disillusioned actuality. Yet, what the enlightenment holds in its hands, what it has to show as the end-product of its analysis, to the extent it consists of mechanical natural science, is, in every case and in every field, including the sphere of consciousness itself, completely devoid of meaning, a truly chaotic material of elements which the prospective science of the near future is to dissolve and reduce further still. So there it stands, empty handed.
[x]6 Having set out to find true actuality with all human means of knowing—one sees it reduced to nothing; total meaninglessness, no content endures. Reaction: Hypostasizing. Parallel: impressionism in art is of a generation which still feels the sheer acceptance of the given is too anthropomorphic. Instead, one must study its elementary composition, one must take up ‘science,’ in order to present it correctly. Art requires science as its presupposition—namely, exactly, analytical, explanatory, natural science. ‘Impersonality,’ scientificity of art was the motto of the great Flaubert, and to which he devoted his life. Zola burned with the ambition to become a naturalist of the social and to write the great roman expérimental, the vérité vraie, the true, the pure, the scientific truth. The impressionists in painting, on the other hand, and more so among the neo-impressionists in France, sought only the purest of colors for their palette and, on the ground of their scientific knowledge of psychological and physiological laws, render the image only in those necessary elements from which the desired effect of the whole would arise in the eyes of the beholder. Stripping the perceived of all additives, returning to the ‘actual’ elements which composed it, was the motto of the enlightenment in art and science. It is inevitable that it degenerate into mere technique. All which was supposed to be the actual content of art is expelled from it, shoved into the eye, the attitude, the conception, or in any event the subject of the beholder—into his private sphere, so to speak. But even there, one ultimately finds they stand in the very same world, the empty one. —Reaction: Expressionism, which ‘invents’ the content, mostly taken from art in other times, and is therefore deceptive.
Excerpt 2: Against the history of ideas.
The Kampfplatz of philosophy is a part—and by no means the least important—of the actual social battlefront, upon which it is not merely illusorily, but actually, dangerous to make one’s appearance. […] [Mere] biographical information is, as a rule, just as abstract and idealistic as the history of ideas itself, in which the lives of philosophers are treated in large measure as independent and detached from the actual relationships with which one is concerned, such as those between thoughts, the notion of a real history of ideas is entirely untrue. Of course, the theories of any one philosopher are in no way independent in terms of content from theories they discovered about the same objects of inquiry, and which they followed. But such connections constitute only a minuscule part, often perhaps the least significant, of the relationships which must be considered in order to understand their thought. The philosopher lives in the actual world. Their philosophizing is part of their confrontation with the actual world, as it has been formed in their given situation; moreover, philosophy itself fulfills an objective function, one which is in large part entirely independent of the philosopher. To lift ideas out of actual history and act as if one could adopt any propositions from one or other philosophy, however recent of an epoch they were written in, is inadmissible.
Excerpt 3: “… One must ‘philosophize.’”
Philosophy and science in general are no longer the self-conscious expression of strong social forces which are certain of their power; rather, the exact converse is true: people have become insecure, people no longer know what to make of society, they need something to hold onto and they seek it with feverish haste whenever there might be a prospect of finding one. In the past, philosophy confronted a rotten traditional ideology with new, perhaps in a certain sense naive but in any case robust and magnificent, systems. Today, there is a lack of any generally recognized Weltanschauung, sanctified by tradition, which might help protect the status quo, and the preeminent dangers to which this status quo is constantly exposed motivate the relentless search for ideologically solid ground. It is precisely the fragility of the wholly ideal character of the old Good which gives rise to the continuous attempts to produce the new, and which makes it appear so desirable. Therefore, in light of the enormous philosophical and semi-philosophical production of the present, it has never been so completely dangerless to express any ideological thoughts, however unusual they may be. […] And so, among its many achievements, we cannot expect exact science to produce a valid worldview, and one must, on one’s own initiative, seek one out, further and further—that is, one must ‘philosophize.’ […] This seeking and seeking-further, this discovery, systematizing and rejecting of theories, this unbroken endeavor to cobble together a tenable scaffolding for a worldview, this—as the saying goes—search for a spiritual content and intellectual meaning of life is the hallmark of the philosophical situation of the present. So far as there is an ideal ground for this state of affairs, it consists in the fact that the enlightenment, and all of those tendencies connected with the positive development of the exact sciences, have finally managed to not only dissolve the the sacred traditional contents of thought against which enlighteners fought in their heroic period before the great French revolution, but these same enlightened tendencies have also, and ultimately, directed their destructive force against the most indispensable ideological stock. When one considers the philosophical activity of the present and the ingress of philosophy into absolutely all areas of culture down to the last detail, one notices that all of these philosophical endeavors seem to be striving in one direction: towards the founding and validating of absolutely recognized values and truths, far above disputes of opinion. The famous resurrection of metaphysics in our day; all of the various attempts to renew positive religion; the great interest in extra-European philosophical, and especially religious, products of spirit; the reawakening of the scholastic dogmatists and their forefather, Aristotle; the apologetics for concepts such as personality, totality, unity, and so on; the entirety of phenomenology with its pretension to absolute essentialities [Wesenheiten] and essential laws [Wesensgesetze] in an eternally valid form—all of these currents are fundamentally motivated by the need to rescue or erect something absolutely valid in the midst of the universal destruction of everything which was believed and revered to date. It is the consequence of the science which arose from the enlightenment that no dogma or tradition was to be assumed valid, but to subject everything to examination, to dissolve it, to analyze it, down to its smallest elements and thereby destroy it. Today, as a result of the changed situation, many would like to reverse this course in many areas of life. There is an all-over aversion to mechanistic, rational methods; there is talk of turning back towards ideas and to seek these longed-for, unassailable ideal contents either in medieval or ancient history, or in other cultures (unlike in the past, primitive peoples are no longer considered undeveloped, but much more complex and of greater value than we poor Europeans)—or, they construct ideal and admiration-worthy entities on the ground of a new vision, a new perspective, a new belief.
Excerpt 4: On the very concept of ‘The History of Modern Philosophy.’ (1927)
With the collapse of the last of the great philosophical systems, the system of Hegel, which claimed that philosophy is the self-knowing of the absolute and that its history is the autonomous process of spirit on the path to complete and perfect truth—with the collapse of this last of the great idealistic constructions, the belief in the autonomy and unconditionality of philosophy in the spirit of the great philosophers is destroyed, and all subsequent attempts at reintroducing it have remained entirely irrelevant, or at least subject to changes of fashion. —We know that the philosophical intuitions and systems which have arisen in history can be explained on the basis of the actual history of humanity, and that the pretense of each to eternal standing, to absolute validity, itself unsubject to history, is void. Thus, the scientific task [concerning the history of philosophy] does not consist in discussing their doctrines on the basis of withdrawn, rarefied, philosophical concepts, which would be to put forth the history of philosophy in a truly idealistic mode, but rather in illuminating from the ground of a precise investigation into the history of the social life-process, from its lowest levels, how the prevailing philosophical intuitions emerged from this process—perhaps even from phases which have been long superseded. Their genesis, their conditionality, and their dependency are to be investigated, and only then—this we will grant to those who still believe in the possibility of possessing absolute truth—will we achieve clarity on what, exactly, may endure of philosophical ideas after such explanations have been conducted and what of them collapses. But no such decision can be made in the absence of such analyses; the claim, which one hears expressed so often in today’s philosophical circles, that the validity of philosophical propositions has nothing to do with their emergence, that philosophical knowing has nothing whatever to do with human history—it is not difficult to see how mistaken this claim truly is.
But now that I have called to your attention the great reservations which today stand in the way of any discussion which would give itself the title “The History of Modern Philosophy,” and have delineated the true scientific task to be solved in the so-called history of philosophy, namely the consideration of the dependency of philosophical notions upon the practical developmental process of human beings, I must openly confess that I was speaking of a future program. Though we do indeed possess the crucial sketches of such an exact kind of treatment of modern philosophy, just arriving at an understanding of these drafts would require theoretical considerations from us that would occupy our entire semester. If I had such theoretical articulations of the role of philosophical notions in modern history in mind, my announcement for this course would be quite different from the way it has, in fact, already been formulated. For by ‘The History of Modern Philosophy,’ one usually understands, according to the old custom, the recitation of doctrines of the famous philosophers from the Renaissance through Kant or Hegel—such as those of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and a number of others—along with biographical information about the course of their lives and, perhaps, also their respective dependencies upon predecessors in philosophy and their so-called general significance for culture. Thus, with respect to this title [‘The History of Modern Philosophy’], it is typically understood to consist of what is more or less a mere recitation of data without any scientific reference to their historical origin, without any point of departure in the historical context which conditions them. As is often the case, when the communication of these data is now and then interrupted by the critique of the narrator, his criticism of individual doctrines narrated from his point of view on the basis of his own standpoint, this may be highly informative with respect to the narrator himself and—if he has any merit—certainly important or interesting, but in this case there is still no scientific approach to the subject, it remains a “collection of dead facts,”7 it remains relationless, in detachment from real existence.
That I cannot change this situation, that I myself cannot present you with the result of scientific analyses of the philosophical doctrines of modernity, but can only, in the traditional manner, give little more than the aforementioned narrative of facts which are typically understood to be included under the title of our course, is the reservation I wished to express in our first meeting about the scope of our undertaking. This reservation refers less to our particular kind of approach here than to the teaching of the history of modern philosophy in the situation of the present in general. What you can expect to hear in this class is as faithful of a report as possible of the philosophical doctrines and schools of modernity. As is the custom, I will also provide biographical information and, further, establish connection to contemporary philosophical theories, in particular the doctrine of Hans Cornelius, which appears to me the most consequential and enlightened of pure philosophical doctrines in the present. If we are to follow the traditional path together this semester, you can expect to learn its general significance. It is very possible that, by the end, provided you have given the matter some attention, you will be equipped to answer exam questions on the history of modern philosophy. However, you will still only find yourselves at the beginning, rather than the end, of this science. You will have learned about the philosophical surface phenomena of a cross-section of actual human history, a history in which the production and reproduction of life are at stake in very real struggles, and in which philosophical notions and theories are generated as manifoldly mediated productions. As far as the detail of this conditionality is concerned, this would furnish you with the motive to stimulate your own scientific work—in the first instance the study of the history of human society. To this end, the material which I will communicate to you this semester, i.e. “The History of Modern Philosophy” proper, may, among other things, be a precondition.
Excerpt 5: On ‘progress’ in the history of modern philosophy. (1927)
But if one does not regard philosophical and theoretical notions and systems, as we do, as autonomous, and does not assume they have a separate history of their own, then one arrives at a completely different point of view with respect to their meaning. It means recognizing that the production of ideas, and of notions of the legal, political, moral, religious, metaphysical kinds, is an efflux from the material intercourse of actual human beings, and is interwoven with their real behavior. Thus, it is immediately clear that the way and mode in which human beings live at a determinate historical stage corresponds to the degree of their theoretical knowing. A society of primitive hunters and fishermen, or a society at the stage of a closed domestic economy, could not possibly produce the perspective on the world found in modern natural science. Rather, the more primitive the stage of social development, the more obscure knowing must be. This is not to say that, at any determinate stage, there are not elements of a higher kind of knowing which will later displace the older, dominant form of knowing. But so long as these elements do not acquire social power, so long as society produces its life and structures its institutions on the ground of old notions of nature, the older form of consciousness will remain the ruling one, and this traditional stage of knowing will be protected in particular by those social strata which have a vested interest in the continuation of the older economic order and the social order with which it is intertwined. That the elements of new knowing form in the womb of an earlier stage of social development and do not fall to us from heaven, but are conditioned by processes in the deep material foundations of this stage of society, is of less interest to us here; more important is that these elements can only become dominant if the social forces of which they are an expression prove in fact to be strong enough to replace the older order of society with a newer, better one. When I say ‘better,’ I mean only that it must supersede the old in such a way that it presents a more purposeful method of the social production of life, one better adapted to the growth of forces which occurred in the older period. The newer stage will only truly emerge and have the capacity to maintain itself if it provides better living conditions for a greater part of society—that is, if it works with more refined methods and forms of organization. At this juncture, those theoretical notions which were formed in the older epoch, and in opposition to it, become dominant, and which thereby prove themselves the superior knowing of natural actuality. In this respect, there is no fundamental distinction between natural-scientific and philosophical-metaphysical thoughts. In truth, they share the same object—namely, real actuality. Recent history has shown that even those objects which were once thought to be purely supernatural, otherworldly, and “philosophical” have, in the course of social development, proven to be entirely natural, just previously shrouded metaphysically.
This admittedly rather schematic meditation should only serve to demonstrate the extent to which—in opposition to prevalent romantic and ahistorical interjections—a certain order also prevails between the philosophical systems of modernity, to the effect that the systems of the eighteenth century are more progressive than those of the seventeenth, at least in one and the same country. The most interesting scientific task for the future will be determining the movements of such progression by means of in-depth comparisons. However, it should be noted from the outset that ‘progress’ is by no means unambiguous and unbroken. Aside from the difference between lines of development in different countries, within a single philosophical system one may very well find, side by side, traditional notions which might originate from stages in the distant past and new, forward-driving thoughts.
What has been said above regarding historical progress is in no way meant to be a claim valid for all times and all peoples. Rather, what has been said is only valid on the condition that no events occur which catastrophically throw development, so far as one may observe its course in a determinate field, back to earlier stages, or at least bring its outward development to a halt. For the territories of Western and Central Europe in the space and time under consideration, this is not, however, the case, and thus we need not pay any particular attention to it for the sake of our purposes.8
In particular, it should also be noted that in different epochs, philosophy had entirely different functions within the context of the cultural totality. For the ascendant bourgeoisie, for example, philosophy is one of the most significant and sharpest of their weapons. It lost this function in France following the great revolution; in Germany, around ten years following Hegel’s death. If, therefore, there is supposed to be an ascending order between the Ideas of these points in time and those of the present, then this must not be sought in the works of professional philosophy, but in other intellectual endeavors. Though we have not taken a step backwards in knowledge—however noble and lofty this backwardness may sound to the romantics who, in their dismay, like to shroud themselves with the halo of humility—we nevertheless cannot seek ideal progress in professional philosophical journals or dissertations. But this semester, we will not be discussing where actual theory exists in the present, but only take up our stated object of inquiry in the following studies. With this, I have warned you against illusions which accompany this object of inquiry—that is, against absolutizations—but I have also not concealed from you the fact that the knowledge you are to learn only presents you with the material for future science.
“Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart (Vorlesung)” (1926), in: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990), 210-211. Author’s translation.
In: Ibid., 175-176; 186-187. Author’s translation.
In: Ibid., 176-178. Author’s translation.
“Einführung in die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie” (1927), in: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 9. (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 17-20. Author’s translation.
In: Ibid., 22-24. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer’s marginal note, marked ‘x.’
Alfred Schmidt’s note in MHGS Bd. 10: »Sammlung toter Fakta« ((x) Marx; Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, in: Werke, Band 3, Berlin 1962, S. 27.).
Marx & Engels: “The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. [The following passage is crossed out in the manuscript:] The ideas which these individuals form are ideas either about their relation to nature or about their mutual relations or about their own nature. It is evident that in all these cases their ideas are the conscious expression – real or illusory – of their real relations and activities, of their production, of their intercourse, of their social and political conduct. The opposite assumption is only possible if in addition to the spirit of the real, materially evolved individuals a separate spirit is presupposed. If the conscious expression of the real relations of these individuals is illusory, if in their imagination they turn reality upside-down, then this in its turn is the result of their limited material mode of activity and their limited social relations arising from it. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness. This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists. Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement – the real depiction – of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We shall select here some of these abstractions, which we use in contradistinction to the ideologists, and shall illustrate them by historical examples.” In: [4. The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History. Social Being and Social Consciousness], “Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook. A. Idealism and Materialism.” The German Ideology 1845.
Horkheimer’s note ‘1.’