Horkheimer-Adorno: Reason and Self-Preservation. Winter 1941/42.
Prelude to Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Content.
Translator’s Note.
(Re-)Translating “Reason and Self-Preservation.”
Prelude to Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Reason and Self-Preservation. Winter 1941/41.
Appendix: Notes for Reason and Self-Preservation.
Translator’s Note.
(Re-)Translating “Reason and Self-Preservation.”
This post is devoted to an original translation of the essay “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung,” first published by the Institute for Social Research (ISR) in the limited-print hectograph pamphlet memorializing Walter Benjamin in 1942, Walter Benjamin, zum Gedächtnis. In order to distinguish this translation from the English version of the essay that was also published by the ISR in 1942, “The End of Reason,” I’ve retained the wording of the original German title for my own: “Reason and Self-Preservation.” Despite Adorno’s claim in a letter to his parents from May 1942 that “the essay ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’ is identical to the English one entitled ‘The End of Reason,’” he had good reason to recommend immediately thereafter: “What counts for us is the German version, so you do not need to read the English one.”1 This is not to say that the English version of “The End of Reason” that was published in the final issue (Vol. 9, No. 3) of the ISR’s journal—Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (1940-42), the short-lived, English-language successor to the international Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (1932-39)2—was poorly translated. (To the contrary: whoever first translated “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” into “The End of Reason” should have received the translator’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for handling such an uncooperative essay with such uncooperative authors so well.)3
However, there are a number of significant omissions, such as the reference to Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels at the beginning of the essay. There are also a number of slight modifications made to the language of the essay. Many of these were entirely in keeping with the ISR’s strategic self-censorship in their English-language publications at the time, which could be best condensed by a recommendation Adorno makes to Horkheimer in a letter from 8/18/1941:
For tactical reasons, I would suggest omitting the reference to Marx […]. Those in-the-know know it anyway, the others need not notice, and it should annoy [Henryk] Grossmann.
The most glaring is the final sentence. In “The End of Reason,” it reads: “The progress of reason that leads to its self-destruction has come to an end; there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom.” In “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung,” it 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.” As I’ve translated the latter below: “At the end of the progress of self-abolishing reason, nothing is left but the relapse into barbarism or the beginning of history.” This is an allusion to Marx’s formulation in the ‘Preface’ [1859] to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
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.4
This is a difference that makes a difference. The formulation “the beginning of history” will not only be a central point of contention in Paul Tillich’s critical “‘Remarks’ on ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung’” (July 1942), but one that Horkheimer would emphatically defend in his response (“On the Style of Theory (8/12/1942)”). There are, in fact, so many of these ‘tactical’ omissions and modifications that I was not able to keep track of them all even as I checked my own translation of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” with constant reference to “The End of Reason.” (I hope to do this in the near future, since even the slightest ‘tactical’ changes to wording were often the source of considerable drama among the members of the ISR core throughout the late 1930s and into the late 1940s.) A final note on this translation: because the footnotes are sometimes consistent and sometimes inconsistent between “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” and “The End of Reason,” I have tried, where relevant, to indicate which text I used for each footnote, and whether I adapted the translation of the few quotations in the essay wholly or in part from “The End of Reason.”
Special thanks to the CTWG’s resident Adornonaut, Zach Loeffler, for help with the translation of the riddlesome last paragraph in particular, and check out his work on Adorno’s intransigent music-critical communism for Ohne Angst Leben (“Life without Fear”) over at the CTWG blog!
Prelude to Dialectic of Enlightenment.
I’ve already covered the context (both in terms of composition and reception) of the essay in an introductory note to a translation of Horkheimer’s defense of the essay to Paul Tillich in a letter of August 1942: “Translator’s note: “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in Context.” There, I argued that the letter be read as a defense of the ‘style’ of Horkheimer’s most intensive period of collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in the earliest drafts and sketches for Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, first printed as a limited-edition mimeograph under the title Philosophische Fragmente in May, 1944, for Pollock’s 50th birthday. Here, I want to make a much stronger interpretive claim. In order to do so, however, some more detailed reconstruction of the writing process—between September 1941 and February 1942—is required.
The earliest references Horkheimer makes to the essay on “Reason” in his correspondence in the Fall/Winter of 1941 are largely qualifications meant to temper any expectations for the essay that the (rapidly shrinking) number of the ISR’s readers might’ve had for it. The real context of the essay on “Reason” was Horkheimer’s ongoing conversation with Adorno about the tasks and style of theory as they prepared to start work on their long-planned ‘dialectics’-book,5 which they’d begun outlining together in earnest as early as January 1939.6 Horkheimer only seems to arrive at the focus on “the history of the concept of reason” in early September (cf. Horkheimer to Adorno, 9/14/1941). At the beginning of October, Horkheimer writes Pollock that he planned to begin dictation for the essay soon, and said that he would try to arrange the work in such a way that “a number of notes for the book will fall out of the process as well” (Horkheimer to Pollock, 10/4/1941). In a letter from early November, Horkheimer writes Adorno that the primary focus of the essay had become the demarcation of his own position—an argument for the recovery of ‘reason’—against rationalism, and that this task was becoming “a serious burden” for the work, impeding any real progress.7 In a letter to Adolph Löwe from early December, Horkheimer still maintains that he expects “this publication for the journal will bring the old series of essays to a close rather than constitute the beginning of a new production.”8 All of these threads come together in a letter to Marcuse dated December 6th, 1941:
The train of thought is extremely simple: reason seems to be discredited in fascism. This is not correct. Rather, fascism has only fully dispensed with the metaphysical categories bound up with rationalism. Reason has always been an organ of self-preservation. This—in the most brutal sense—is what fascism is grounded on. With this, the last rationalistic illusion falls away: the “I” or ego that is organized for life, the synthetic unity of the person. The “I” contracts. The tendency towards shrinking is identical with the process of the expropriation of the middle bourgeoisie. The logical endpoint is the disintegration of culture, as foreseen by Sade and Nietzsche. Following this, there will be a short consideration of possibilities for bringing this disintegration-through-terror to a halt, and of the prospects for the reversal of individual self-preservation into universal solidarity. The essay will be relatively short (barely two sections), and I consider it a kind of conclusion to earlier works. Hopefully it will continue to bear fruit in the future not just because of the considerable number of notes, but also through certain questions of fundamental principle it has introduced.9
Between September and December 1941, Horkheimer appears to have generated a significant volume of letters on the ‘Reason’-essay and the difficulties he’d run into while trying to write it, but, aside from a ‘pile’ of notes for future work, very little material for the essay itself.10 The ‘drafting’ of the essay only seems to have begun sometime in late December 1941 (or possibly as late as early January 1942), when Horkheimer first sat down with Adorno—who finally arrived in California in November 1941—to work through what little he’d managed to write so far. By February 1942, Horkheimer’s references to the ‘Reason’-essay would take on an entirely different tone: “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.”11 In just over a month, Horkheimer would pivot from writing letters in which he tried to lower his readers’ expectations for an essay meant to close his old work to writing letters about how excited he was to hear from his associates about what they made of it, “since it is the first “official” result of this cooperation”—that is, of the collaboration with Adorno.12 This means that the writing of “Reason and Self-Preservation” can be divided into two phases: in the first, roughly September through December 1941, Horkheimer produced and compiled a series of fragmentary notes on the theme of the history of the concept of reason in Western civilization, including a bare-bones skeleton of the essay and its central thesis; in the second, roughly (late) December 1941 or (early) January 1942 through February 1942, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote and revised the essay in full. Almost as soon as the essay was finished, the pair began working on the earliest ‘schemata’ for Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Rather than the culmination of the series of essays Horkheimer wrote for the ISR’s journal, I want to suggest that “Reason and Self-Preservation” should be read as the ‘Prelude’ to Dialectic of Enlightenment—in style, content, and the inseparable unity of the two that defines Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘sacred texts,’ as Adorno would later describe them.13 In terms of its style, “Reason and Self-Preservation” undoubtedly had its precedents in both Horkheimer and Adorno’s bodies of work, but marked a qualitative shift: reducible neither to Horkheimer’s ‘under-writing’ nor to Adorno’s ‘over-writing’ of the theoretical text,14 the essay “derives its vital energy from the tension between the two intellectual temperaments which came together in writing it.”15 In terms of content, and its inseparable unity with style, “Reason and Self-Preservation” introduces the central motif of Dialectic of Enlightenment through the “intransigent analysis,” as Horkheimer would later describe his earliest draft of the book’s first chapter, that “seems in itself to be a better assertion of the positive function of rational intelligence than anything one could say in order to play down the attack on traditional logics and the philosophies which are connected with it.”16 In short, “Reason and Self-Preservation” is an event in its own right. It is as much Horkheimer and Adorno’s debut performance as it is a performance of the positive function of self-enlightening enlightenment.
Reason and Self-Preservation.
The stock concepts of Western civilization are in decay. The newer generation no longer puts much trust in them. Fascism has only reinforced their suspicion. The question now is—to what extent these concepts are still tenable at all. The concept of reason is central. The bourgeoisie knew no higher idea. Reason is supposed to regulate relationships between human beings, justify every achievement demanded of individuals, unless it be slave-labor. Enlighteners and Church Fathers agreed in praising it. “The Godhead’s incomprehensible gift to humanity,” Voltaire called it, “the origin of all society, every institution, each order.”17 So as not to dishonor reason, Origen said, one should not compare even the worst human beings with animals.18 Reason underlies all the orders of nature. The constitutions and institutions of all nations should be founded upon reason. For antiquity, it was the master craftsman of the cosmos;19 for Kant, the triumph of reason was the secret meaning of world history, to which it leads notwithstanding all relapses, periods of darkness, and detours.20 The concepts of freedom, justice, and truth were interwoven with it. These were held to be ideas innate to reason, whether beheld by or recollected through reason by necessity. The age of reason was the honorific the bourgeoisie claimed for its world.
Bourgeois philosophy—there is no other, for the cities have always been the home of thinking—is in essence rationalistic. But rationalism turns against its own principle and reverts to skepticism time and again. Whichever nuance—the dogmatic or the skeptical—prevailed in philosophy decided its relation to social powers. The concept of reason bore that of critique inside itself from the very beginning. Skeptical and empiricist doctrines called on the infallibility, rigor, clarity, and distinctness of reason, which rationalism itself installed as the criteria of rational knowledge, against rationalism itself. The Platonic Academy was accused of superstition during the lifetime of its founder by the Socratic left and subsequently fell into skepticism. The rationalism of Thomas Aquinas was opposed by Siger of Brabant and Roger Bacon, until his own order gave way to empiricist tendencies.21 Against Descartes’ doctrine of the spiritual nature of the human being, progressive and reactionary thinkers alike raised objections: the materialist physicians and the Jesuit, Gassendi. Descartes’ deductive system contains the very same reason as the unity that prevailed in French administration against dissenting feudals. In the 17th century, France announced streamlined centralism for its principle, and in the 20th this came to an end in fascism. But skepticism belonged to reason from the very beginning. Skepticism demarcates the limitation of bourgeois rationality before the existing order. The deductive system projects no utopia; its universal concepts never meant the universality of freedom, but only that of calculation. Skepticism adheres to this. In Germany, Kant was even told that his doctrine “without reason or right, and thus in a pretentious manner, boasts of victory over Hume’s skepticism.”22
Today the skeptical purging of the concept of reason has left hardly any remainder; it is dismantled. Reason, by destroying conceptual fetishes, ultimately liquidates its concept of itself. Once it was the organ of ideas eternal, of which all earthly things were supposed to be but dim shadows. Reason was supposed to recognize itself in the orders of being, to discover the immutable form of actuality in which reason divine found its expression. For millennia, philosophers believed themselves in possession of such knowledge. Now, they know better. None of the categories of rationalism has survived: spirit, will, final cause, transcendental genesis, innate principles, res extensa and res cogitans are seen by modern science as spooks, even more than Galileo had the quirks of the scholastics. Reason itself appears as a specter sprung from linguistic custom. For the most current logical conception, the grammar of everyday language is still suited to the stage of animism: modalities, states, and activities fashion subjects for it, for life to call, duty to command, and nothing to threaten. Thus “reason” itself starts to make discoveries, to find satisfaction, to exist as one and the same in all human beings at the same time. Such “reason” today is regarded as meaningless sign. There it stands, an allegorical figure without function. Reason, which once had the power to understand meaning-deserted historical fragments as signs of a deeper insight,23 can no longer confer any meaning to itself. Along with that of reason, all ideas are compromised, so far as they point beyond given reality. And so there is little value in championing freedom, the dignity of man, even truth in humanitarian speeches and pamphlets; these names merely arouse the suspicion that the true reasons are absent or hidden. When the politicians of today invoke the name of God, at least one knows they speak for horrifying this-worldly forces; when the defeated appeal to reason, they merely confess their powerlessness.
Nevertheless, reason has not been altogether struck from the vocabulary of the times, as have the rights of man from the French Revolution, to which the concept of reason was once bound. Instead, it has been radically reduced—more than ever before—to its instrumental significance. Gone are the theses of rationalistic metaphysics. What remains is purposeful behavior. “The word reason,” Locke wrote, “has different significations; sometimes it is taken for true and clear principles; sometimes for clear and fair deductions from those principles; and sometimes for the cause, and particularly the final cause.”24 To this, he added four stages of the activity of reason: finding new truths, arranging them clearly, ascertaining their interconnections, deriving their consequences. Apart from that of the final cause, all of these functions are still considered ‘rational’ today. Reason in this sense is as indispensable in modern warfare as it always has been in the conduct of business. To summarize its many determinations into a single one: the optimal adaptation of means to ends, thinking as labor-saving function. It is an instrument aimed at what is expedient and advantageous; coldness and sobriety are its virtues. The belief in reason rests upon motives more compelling than the theses of metaphysics. Whenever the dictator of today speaks well of ‘reason,’ he means he possesses the most tanks. Because he was rational enough to oversee their production, others should be rational enough to surrender. To repudiate such reason is sacrilege par excellence. Reason is God of the fascist too.
As close as reason now proves itself bound up with practice, so it has always been. Human purposes do not lie directly in nature. Only on the path through social agencies can the individual fulfill his natural needs. Animals seek their nourishment, flee their enemies; humans pursue their purpose.25 Utility is a social category; in class society, this is what ‘reason’ is taken to be; ‘reason’ is the way the individual prevails or adapts within it; ‘reason’ is how they make their way through it. ‘Reason’ justifies the subordination of the individual under the whole, so far as the power of the individual isn’t enough, so far as the individual alone is forsaken. The service of the individual to the whole, which, among primitives, was left up to instinct, tends in bourgeois society to take place through the individual’s consciousness of their own utility. Greek idealism was already pragmatic. Socrates proclaimed the good the same as the useful, the beautiful nothing other than the practical,26 and Plato and Aristotle followed him in this respect. Though they assert utility as the principle of reason, they put utility for the whole first. Plato dismisses the objection that the guardians of his utopian state, despite all their power, might not be happy. The bliss of possessing power was not lost on him. In the end, however, it does not come down to any one group, but the well-being of the whole. Without the whole, the individual is nothing. Reason is the mode and manner in which the individual establishes a balance between their own advantage and utility for the whole through their actions. The concordance of the general in the particular interest, the representation of this harmony, was the ideal of the Greek polis. This was inherited by the cities of the Middle Ages and the politicians of early modernity. Whoever would live amongst men must obey their laws. This is what the secular morality of the West amounts to. So long as we do not take refuge in religion, Montaigne argues with reference to Socrates, we have but one guide: that “everyone generally obeys the laws of his land.”27 This is the counsel of reason. On this one point, even De Maistre agreed with the French Revolution: “Government is a veritable religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its ministers… the primary need of man is that his growing reason… be lost in the national reason so that it may change his individual existence into another, common existence, just as a river that flows into the ocean always exists in the mass of water though without a name and without a distinct reality. What is patriotism? It is that national reason of which I speak; it is the abnegation of the individual.”28 This was also the mentality of the cults of the Revolution he so despised. The religion of reason, says Mathiez, apologist of Robespierre, is just as intolerant as the old religion once was: “It admits of no contradiction, it requires oaths, it is made obligatory by prison, exile or the scaffold, and like religion proper it is concretized in sacred signs, in definite and exclusive symbols which are surrounded by a suspicious piety.”29 The adversaries agree in all their bourgeois profundity—even Hegel; difference of opinion is completely eclipsed by this unity of the epoch. The enthusiasm of the counter-revolutionaries and the popular leaders not only shared a faith in the scaffold, but also the conviction that reason might at any given time require the renunciation of thinking—particularly among the poorest. De Maistre, a belated absolutist, preached alongside Hobbes the renunciation of one’s own judgment for all time on the basis of reason itself. The others instituted democratic controls.
So it was that the individual had to inflict violence upon himself. The individual is supposed to grasp that the life of the whole is the necessary condition of their own. On the basis of rational insight, they are supposed to master their resistant feelings and instincts. Only the inhibition of the drives makes human cooperation possible. This inhibition, originally imposed from without, must moreover be imposed by their own consciousness. This principle was already fully formed in antiquity. Progress lay in its social expansion; the labor of slaves was compelled by external violence. In the Christian era, every person was obliged to assume this role themselves. The Reformation finally displaced the authority from the Church onto the conscience. For those below, however, the harmony of the universal and particular remained a mere demand. They were exempted from the very universal they were supposed to make their own. That it was never truly rational for them to renounce their drives means that civilization never actually reached them. They were always made into social beings through violence; this is what furnishes the basis of dictatorships. The Bürger, however, rightly recognized their own agency in the political and spiritual, outer and inner, social authorities. They actualized the idea of rational civilization for themselves; their sociability arose from their knowledge of their individual interests. In full consciousness of such a harmony, even the ruler could be referred to as the first among the servants of the state—until the self-administering nation replaced absolutism. In this, the masses too are supposed to have their political rights; in its conception, the democratic state should be as the Greek polis without slaves.30 However much the principle of society is by necessity posited alongside that of the individual, the self-interest of the bourgeois individual nevertheless remained the rational criterion of rational society. The difficulties of rationalistic philosophy secretly spring from the fact that the universality ascribed to reason can mean nothing but the harmony of interests for all individuals, whereas society is in fact still split up into classes. Because this universality hypostasizes the harmony of interests in a world wherein they nevertheless diverge irreconcilably, theoretical appeal to the universality of reason has always borne the features of untruth, of repression. The admiration of reason as such presupposes the givenness of a just society: the actuality of polis without slaves. Therefore the empiricists are right against the rationalists, whose idea nevertheless transcends bourgeois society. The rationalists are right against the empiricists, since they uphold the solidarity of human beings, in the concept of the harmony of autonomy and universality, against the solidarity of bourgeois society, which only ever asserts itself as violence and destruction. In practice, of course, the universal is transfigured into a positive, and necessity is proclaimed as freedom—an apology.
That for the Bürger reason was always defined through its relation to individual self-preservation seemingly runs contrary to Locke’s exemplary determination, according to which reason denotes the guiding of intellectual activity no matter the purpose it might serve. But in renouncing one specific purpose, reason is still far from breaking the spell of the self-interest of the monad; rather, in so doing it simply develops procedures to serve any and every purpose of the monad that much more readily. The increasingly formal universality of bourgeois reason does not signify increased consciousness of universal solidarity; rather, it expresses precisely the skeptical separation of thinking and object. Thinking becomes what it was at the Aristotelian origin of empirical science: an “organon.” For Locke, and really already for Kant, reason had become a relentless authority, no longer thinking its objects concretely but contenting itself with their ordering and classification. With the pervasiveness of nominalism, its putative opposite, formalism, prevails as well. Having resolved to humble itself and see objects once and for all as alien multiplicity, “chaos,” reason reconstitutes itself as a piece of office machinery that finalizes analytical judgments. In the face of these leveled objects, whose own being-thus-and-so is no longer taken into account under the practice of the universal measure of money, knowing becomes a matter of registration, and, once their subsumption has been accomplished, proceeds with their technical conversion. Species became an order-concept for modern philosophy once the order of specificity disappeared behind exchange-value on the market. The more the reality of experience is stripped of its qualities, the more uninhibited its manipulation can become. This is indicated by the convergence of empiricism and formalism. Neither proximity to nor distance from things is preserved; things are neither understood nor respected. Even the so-called cosmopolitanism of ‘pluralism of purposes’ is ideology. According to the pluralistic doctrine, a gulf separates theoretical judgments from the realm of purposes. Purposes arise from arbitrariness; in thinking, necessity reigns. Value-judgments have nothing to do with reason and science. The subject posits its goal at its own discretion: whether it’s willing to assume the risks of freedom or of obedience, whether it happens to prefer democracy or fascism, enlightenment or authority, mass-art or truth. Freedom of choice was, however, always restricted to smaller groups: to the wealthy. For the privileged it was possible to choose among so-called cultural goods, provided that they had passed through the mechanism of censorship and harmonized, in however mediated a fashion, with the ruling class. Aside from this there has never been a plurality of purposes. The nearer such purposes came to the basis of society, the more direct their determination. However fragmented it became through internal rivalry and competition, the concentrated will-to-self-preservation of the upper classes, in each case armed with all the means of material and intellectual power, overran the slaves, serfs, and masses. Whether to trade or fight with another class or nation, whether to erect a constitutional governing body or maintain the Herrenstandpunkt—this was decided according to the sole rational criterion: the preservation of privileges.31 Historically appropriate decisions were distinguished by far-sightedness or blindness, but not by the nature of their goal. True pluralism belongs to the concept of a future society alone.
The multiplicity of characterological traits itself springs today from one single root: that of self-preservation. Refinement, poise, uprightness, chivalry are at this point really what pragmatism renders them: the habitual forms of the adaptation of the individual to their social situation. There was a time when any other mode of conduct besides the one that has since solidified into such qualities would precipitate one’s expulsion into the lower class. Even now, as remnants of older social forms once beaten into individual character, these qualities bear inside themselves an index of that condition in which individuals would have been lost without them. They lose their force along with their expediency. Just as the ornamentation on everyday objects alludes to production techniques of the past by retaining certain marks of imperfection as decoration, so survives the violence those of the ruling class once had to inflict upon themselves in the powerlessness of ‘human’ qualities. In aristocratic qualities, the misery from which they first sprang steps back into the light just as the old form of injustice they once created vanishes before the more contemporary. Through their relative powerlessness within the present-day apparatus of domination, they acquire the reconciling power of purposelessness. But now even purposelessness knows to find its purpose. Where the aristocrat has been incapable of reclaiming the domestic market from the man of business, he seeks to conquer the world market on his behalf. Until the revirements which became unavoidable with the mechanizing of modern armies, the nobles retained the monopoly on service to the Bürger as military commanders in times when bourgeois qualities like thrift and integrity had already begun to share the fate of aristocratic ones. The magic which surrounded such qualities for so long was above all due to the endeavor of the bourgeoisie to solidify its own position through the glorification of its predecessors: it stood in solidarity with the ousted ruling classes against the ruled. Power ought to appear as eternal, not as transient. For the sake of their own reputation, alongside bourgeois functionaries like Napoleon Bonaparte, the Bürger expressed admiration for all the greatest rulers and executioners in the pantheon of history. At home, the wealthy imitate what they call ‘style’; at the office, they still observe a codex of honor under the title of business ethics, since the class could not exist without its own, internal discipline; but against competitors both peaceable and belligerent without, and indeed against the enemy within, what in truth binds them to tradition becomes manifest: total self-assertion.
As total, self-assertion turns against the self-asserting individual as well. For the authentic Bürger, the universal always had to manifest in his individual interest, even if the universal was proclaimed as metaphysical idea or as religion of the fatherland.32 The reason that dying for the fatherland, unlike dying for Moloch, is rational, derives from the fact that the power of the state must be defended on the modern field of battle as it alone can guarantee the existence of the one from whom it demands the sacrifice. The concept of reason purged through nominalism, the principle of self-preservation has, in all parties of bourgeois revolution and counter-revolution, always justified sacrifice—its own contradiction. At the end of the modern era, the endeavor to excise all transcendent elements from reason seizes the whole of society. All become nominalists who make an idol of the unilluminated universal. Already in the heroic ages, however, the individual destroyed his own life for the sake of the interests and symbols of the group his own life presupposed. From the clan to the state, the group has represented property. As soon as the individual becomes conscious of death as absolute catastrophe, the institution of property gives him the impression he will somehow survive it. Possession of property endures through the succession of generations.33 In feudal periods, it granted individuals an identical name from which their being and self-consciousness were inextricable. The name of the Bürger, however, emancipates itself from point of origin; through the mechanism of inheritance, possession of property allows the detached individual to transcend themselves. By means of conscious disposal of their legacy, the atomistic individual secures a continuation for themselves after death. Thus for the state whose laws guarantee the legacy, the surrender of the existence of the legator does not constitute a violation of self-preservation. Sacrifice becomes rational. Those famous Romans who made offerings of themselves for the Roma are already the businesspeople who ruin themselves for the Firma.
The rationality of sacrifice and drive-renunciation was, of course, differentiated precisely according to social status. With decreasing possessions and diminishing prospects for happiness, the rationality of the sacrifice waned as well, and the compulsion to sacrifice intensified. When it came to the poor, it was always ‘rational’ to help reason along with the penal system of earth and heaven. Voltaire admits that reason might triumph among the decent, but “la canaille n’est pas faite pour eile.”34 “We have never intended to enlighten shoemakers and maidservants—this falls to the apostles.”35 For one of the masses, the intellectual path from one’s own benefit to the interest in the preservation of society in its given form was always an immeasurably long one. Rational drive-renunciation alone could never be relied on. Any slave or even any Greek woman who assumed the air of Socrates—he who elevated loyalty to the laws of the polis above all else through his death—would not have been a sage, but a fool. Throughout the era of conscience Socrates heralded, rationality remained a property of the propertied. The rational justification of obedience, in all of its most contradictory shapes, took the form of the theory of the social contract. The flaw of the social contract was not that, as a rationalistic construction, it denied history, but rather that it was only too adequate to historical actuality. The ‘reason’ of the contract consisted in the agreement to enforce and reinforce the very non-rational conditions reactionary critiques of contract theory have always appealed to. Contract-theory gave expression to the truth of relationships among the propertied, and to which the propertyless were to be bound. To convert their material desires into spiritual demands, to fashion them the complacent farmers and laborers upon whom modern civilization is based, neither Grotius nor Hobbes was needed—for this, there was already Francis and Loyola, Luther and the Jansenists.
The social function of Protestantism above all harmonizes with the efficacy of purpose-setting reason. Rationalism has as little right to complain about Luther as it does the logicians of Port Royal. The only reason Luther called reason a beast was because it was not yet capable of generating the violence the modern individual had to be made to inflict upon himself of its own accord. The religious reformation instilled in human beings the capacity to subordinate immediate life to remote goals. It educated the masses out of their childlike abandonment in the moment into objective consideration, dogged consistency, and practical understanding. Through this, it not only reinforced human resistance to fate, but also made them capable, on occasion, of stepping out of their entanglements and rising above their self-interest and concern for advantage into contemplation. Such contemplative pauses, however, did nothing to change the fact that the purposes of the existing order were becoming ever more deeply anchored inside them. Protestantism was the strongest power in the promulgation of cold, rational individuality. In the past, the image of the cross was, as a symbol, at the same time sensed directly as an instrument of torture. Protestant religiosity, however, is iconoclastic. It has lowered that instrument of torture onto the human soul as an unshakable spur; under these reigns, the instruments for the appropriation of labor and the Lebensraum are produced. The evil of the veneration of things has been broken, and the cross internalized, but the worldliness that replaced it is even more dependent upon things. Works for the sake of salvation were replaced by works for the sake of works, profit for the sake of profit, domination for the sake of domination—and for which the whole world became mere material. Fichte preaches the principle of Protestantism without thereby being traitor to rationalism. If Protestant religion was also ‘the opium of the people,’ it was the opium through which they were able to endure the intervention rationalism prescribed: the industrial revolution of body and soul. The path from Leonardo to Henry Ford was none other than religious introversion. It produced that machine-like ‘industriousness’ and manipulable solidarity in line with the far-reaching ratio whose demands well exceeded the powers of human beings. The theocratic irrationalism of Calvin’s eventually revealed itself as the cunning of technocratic reason, which had first to prepare its human material, and indeed to produce it. Misery and codified death sentences alone did not suffice to goad the workers into the progress of the industrial age. By means of the reformed religion, the horrors were supplemented by concern for wife and child—for which the moral self-sufficiency of the introverted subject truly was crucial. In the end, what remains for human beings is voluntary docility as the rational form of self-preservation, which is just as indifferent to political content as it is to religious. Through it, the individual forfeits their freedom; without it, existence under the totalitarian state. The autonomy of the individual unfolds into and as its own heteronomy.
The new order marks a qualitative leap in the transformation from bourgeois domination into unmediated domination, but which nevertheless continues to be bourgeois. For all the talk about the National Socialists as gangsters, they do not in fact fall outside this development. They are indeed gangsters: they assume a tendency of the monopolistic period in which every economic outsider was virtually outside the law. The thesis of the gang is to be taken far more seriously than it has been in the indignation which imagines a return to normal conditions is possible once the police of the old order have cut off its malignant outgrowths. It was not interloping gangsters who usurped social power in Germany, but the same social domination that passed into the rule of the gangster by virtue of its own economic principle. The episode of the free, industrial economy, together with its decentralization into various enterprises, none of which were so great that they did not have to make compacts with the others, had confined self-preservation within the boundaries of the humane, which remained entirely external to it. Monopoly has exploded these boundaries once again, and with this domination returns to its true essence, which had only endured in its purity wherever the more humane form of domination left some loopholes for inhumanity: in the petty rackets and ring clubs of the big cities. They respected no law but the minimum of discipline needed to plunder their clients. Pimps, condottieri, bondsmen, and bands have always protected and exploited their dependents at the same time. They kept watch over the reproduction of life in their respective spheres. Protection is the Urphänomen of domination. After the liberal interlude, economic tendencies have progressed so far that only the monopolies remain, and these are in a position to tear the bourgeois separation of powers, the fabric of guaranteed rights of man, to shreds. In Europe, monopolies and governments form an impenetrable thicket against the masses of the ruled, and the immensity and variety of their overarching tasks, which distinguish them even further from the rackets, transforms on the one hand into all-embracing social planning and on the other into an all-out assault on humanity. This is inevitably driven by economic development itself. The monopolies obey the same necessity as the rackets of the big cities. Previously, the big city racket had to share its loot with others in the same branch; with the unfolding of the means of commerce and the progressive centralization of the police, the racket can no longer get by with modest bribes, fresh blood, and revolvers, but is compelled to mechanize its operation and pay to play with the big political organizations. Such investments only pay out if the spoils don’t have to be divided with other rackets: as much as in any branch of business, cartelization exerts its pressure on the rackets. Ultimately, the rackets of various branches in the cities and throughout the country as well are driven to the point of unification when and wherever the police do not succeed in breaking up the extra-legal gangs altogether. Likewise, as soon as the concentrated power of the big property-holders reaches a given threshold, the struggle reproduces itself on a wider front and, in the end, under the pressure of gargantuan investments needed for the maintenance of their standing in the continuous march of technological advance, devolves into the struggle for world domination punctuated now and then by periods of uneasy compromise. From this point on, distinctions between goals and ideals recede behind degrees of obedience and integration in authoritarian politics. Those who hold power are forced, even if against their will, to ensure that everything top to bottom is aligned with precision. In the appointment to positions of trust on the domestic front and the formation of regimes in dependent countries, what is decisive is less the form of organization or political system than reliability. Next to efficiency, certain human qualities are once again valued, first of all the resolute loyalty to power at any cost. The appointees are deputies. The one who is called to greatness must not bear any trace of that which reason, in its self-critique, has destroyed. He must incarnate the self-preservation of the bad whole, which has become completely one with the destruction of all that is human. At the beginning of the history of the modern racket stood the inquisitors; at its end stand the leaders of the fascist apparatus. Even the underlings who live in the shadow of catastrophe must react correctly unless—or rather until—they fall prey to the rational principle that none be kept around too long.
The prevailing contempt for the concept of reason does not in any way extend to the rationality of purposive behavior.36 Today, that being of spirit, the mind, appears not just to those in-the-know but also to the general public as a senseless word, so far as it is supposed to designate not the coordinating of ends and means, but an intellectual faculty or even an objective principle. The annihilation of rationalistic dogmatism through the self-critique of reason, carried out by the ever-renewed philosophical-historical nominalistic movements, has now been ratified by historical actuality. The category of the individual—to which the idea of autonomy was tied despite all of the tension between them—did not withstand large-scale industry. Reason has disintegrated to the same extent it was the ideological projection of the false universality whose once seemingly autonomous subjects now experience it as their nothingness. The disintegration of reason and that of the individual are one and the same. “The ego must be given up,”37 and self-preservation disappears its subject. For whom is an action supposed to be useful if the individual biological being is no longer conscious of itself as a self-identical “I”? The body at any rate has only a rather questionable identity throughout the various stages of life. The unity of the individual life was not a natural one, but a conceptually, and thus socially, mediated one. As this mediated unity weakens, the individual’s concern for their own preservation acquires a different meaning. Everything that once served the higher development and unfolding of the human being—the joy of insight, living through recollection and anticipation, taking pleasure in oneself and in others, narcissism as much as love—becomes objectless. There is no longer any conscience, any egoism. Today, the moral law appears in the fullness of its disparity with those who are now held to it as sheer deception: the agency on which it once relied has since dissolved. The moral had to disappear because it did not measure up to its own principle. It pretended to be independent of the empirical individual, to be universal without restriction; and yet the form of the universal maxim eternalized exactly the opposition between individuals, the domination among human beings and the domination of nature. It is vain to hope for any return to the morality of better times. However, the trace that this morality has left behind in human beings is free of false positivity. It consists in the nagging consciousness that the reality for which they are dying is false. Nietzsche proclaimed the end of morality; modern psychology confirms it. Psychology was the reality-oriented form taken by rationalistic skepticism, or self-dissolving reason. Psychology triumphed over the moral law by unmasking it, in the unconscious, as the super-ego in the guise of the father, the uncle. The positivist zeitgeist was all too happy to accept this theory and others of its kind. Depth-psychology only took flight when twilight had already begun to fall over the sphere of circulation from which its categories stemmed. Banking- and merchant-capital could no longer be so sure of themselves. Though the father might still possess a super-ego, for the child it’s already been debunked, along with the ego and character. And so the child imitates performances, achievements; the child absorbs not concepts but facts.
With the disappearance of self-sufficient existence in the economy, the subject itself, as a synthetic unity, disappears as well. It has become foolish to plan for one’s long-term self-preservation, let alone for the sake of one’s heir. Under monopoly, the individual only ever has short-term opportunities. Once fixed property as a possible goal of acquisition has disappeared, so does the nexus of individual experience. The ego, or “I,” has always been constituted by concern for private property—its disposal under fairly stable conditions, regulated competition, and universal law. Neither slaves nor paupers had ‘individuality.’ The “premise of all my acting in the sensuous world, can only be as part of that sensuous world, if I live amongst other free beings. This determined part of the world … is called … my property.”38 The concept of the ego or “I” is interconnected with that of the will that, for the person in question, “there be a future state, and that this state shall have resulted from the present as a consequence of the rule followed in resolving to act.”39 In bourgeois society, the idea of a past and future of one’s own was conveyed by property and its permanence. Today, planned administration is constituted as the constitution of the ego dissolves itself. In its stead, as a result of economic centralization, a small group of industrial magnates has installed itself. Despite and because of the magnitude of capital supposed to be at their disposal, they are just as incapable of getting a handle on things as are those beneath them. The latter are divided into sectors, groups, and associations. In such associations, the individual is only an element who lacks any significance of their own. If they want to preserve themselves, they must be ready to get to work anywhere, be a part of every team, be skilled at everything. They’re always a part of a workforce—of the factory, public works construction, agriculture, sports, Wehrmacht. In every such camp, they must fight for their own physical existence; they must assert their right to have work, food to eat, a place to sleep; they must take and give blows and punches; they must submit themselves to the most severe discipline. In the stead of the wide-reaching bourgeois responsibility for self and one’s own through the generations, what emerges is the ability to adapt to mechanical tasks of any kind. The individual contracts. Ever vigilant and prepared, always and everywhere the same kind of vigilance and preparedness, always and everywhere directed to something immediately practical, hearing only information, pointers, orders—the individual is without dreams and without history. The semantic dissolution of language into a system of signs, as is performed in logistics, transcends the realm of pure logic. It only draws its conclusion from a state of affairs that expropriates language and transfers it to monopoly. Human beings must echo the bandwidth of radio, film, and magazines just in order to be tolerated. In mass society, no one is beyond suspicion; everyone is under investigation. No one really earns their own living, and so their mere existence is suspicious—everyone needs a permanent alibi. The individual no longer has a future to foresee; they have only to be ready to fit in, to pick up on every wink, to operate any lever, to do always different things which are always the same thing. The cell of society is no longer the family, but the social atom, the individual alone. The struggle for existence consists in the individual resolve not to be physically annihilated at any moment in the world of apparatuses, machines, and handholds.
Though physical strength is not the main thing, it is important enough. It is by and large not a natural quality but rather the product of reification, an unincorporated element whose abstract bearers are whole backwards strata of a society that had itself already transitioned to the capitalist form of strength: industrial progress. The brutishness of those who possessed that quality in excess among the dominated groups mirrored the injustice of the oxen muzzled to the plow. Culture was the attempt to tame the barbaric principle of physical strength as one of immediate violence. But in the process of such taming, it concealed the physical exertion that remained the core of labor. This corresponded to the transfiguration of physical strength in ideology, from the declaration of greatness as the positive quality par excellence, especially greatness of spirit, to glorification of the biceps—first at county fairs, then in the Gesamtkunstwerk, and finally in the stadium. Now physical strength has been stripped of its ideological veil and is openly lifted into a principle: under the sign of striking force and brute violence. Even more than muscles, however, what the individual of today needs is presence of mind. What is crucial is rapid responsiveness, affinity for any kind of machinery—technical, athletic, political. Instead of being mere appendages to the machines on the factory floor as in earlier times, the human being of today must be ready to be an appendage in any and every sector. Reflective thinking and theory itself lose their significance for self-preservation. Fifty years past, psychological experience, skillful argumentation, and an overview of the economic and social situation were means of advancement for countless numbers of people. Even the bookkeeper needed intellect and not just skill before the mechanization of the office. With the total incorporation of enterprise into the realm of monopoly however, argument loses its force. It bears all the marks of the salesmanship and slick-talking it once served and which the successful corporation can dispense with. The mistrust of peasants and children towards the skilled manipulators of language has in its immaturity always preserved the intimation of the injustice by which language, as the handmaiden of privilege, has always been marked. The muteness of the human being today is at the same time verdict on that language which once spoke so eloquently against them. What one needs is knowledge of facts, the automatized ability to behave the right way, not the calm deliberation of various possibilities, which presupposes the freedom of choice and the time to reflect. Even though that freedom the market once offered producers and consumers, as lords over all their intermediaries, was abstract and deceptive, it did preserve some room for reflection. In the apparatus there is no time left at all. One must have the capacity to reorient themselves rapidly, innervate promptly. In the planned economy, human beings are controlled by the means of production more unrestrictedly than they were under the indirectness of the market. Lack of operational ability is punishable by death. The scarce free time that everyone once had must now be safeguarded to keep from being squandered. The danger that it will degenerate into leisure, the state so hated by all industry alike, must be prevented. Since Descartes, bourgeois philosophy has been nothing but the attempt as a science to put itself at the service of the dominant mode of production—if occasionally diverted by Hegel and his like. With the abolition of leisure and of the ego or “I,” thinking is no longer so useless. The social atoms may yearn for liberation in secret, but, for better and for worse, they have lost their sense for speculation. All the worse for philosophy. No philosophical thought is imaginable that would not demand leisure to be thought and understood; today, even the word ‘leisure’ has an obsolete, musty ring to it. The argumentative stance of traditional philosophy becomes a provincial, doomed circuitousness. In its final hour, phenomenology undertook the paradoxical attempt to construct a thinking without arguments; but the positivism from which it sprang is also its legacy, in that it banishes thinking itself from philosophy and reduces the latter to a technique for reproducing and abbreviating the organization of what is at hand. In this philosophy, reason asserts itself through its own liquidation.
With the collapse of the ego or “I” and its reflective reason, human relationships tend to a boundary where the control of all personal relations by the economic, the universal mediation of social life by the commodity, transforms into a new mode of immediacy. The isolated objects of domination have nothing of what once separated them from each other any more. Without support by means of property, school and home lose their protective function as well. Their mediation is no longer needed for preparation for social life: life and preparedness for life become one and the same, just as they are for the professional soldier. In school, the secret hierarchy of sport and games triumphs over the hierarchy of the classroom—the children never really accepted the latter anyway. The dubious authority of the teacher is disassembled in favor of an unquestioned and anonymous but ever-present one, whose demands are given new priority. This is the authority of the omnipotent Zweckformen of mass society. The qualities this society demands are impressed on the child by the collective of the school class; for this collective is also a segment of the strictly organized society itself. The teacher has the choice of either ingratiating himself with the class, be it through brutality, or being mocked. Compared to the skills that really matter today, the instructional content the teacher has to offer is only of rather negligible value. The children quickly learn their way around the automobile and the radio inside and out. They seem to be born to such knowledge, and it is, in essence, not so different from the operation of the most complicated piece of machinery; science is not needed. The physics they are taught by their teacher is doubly outdated: just as equally removed from the mathematical consequences of relativity and quantum-theory, which teachers have long since lost the ability to represent, and from the practical skillfulness now important for the youth. The teacher cannot find anything to mediate the gap between the two, since there is no longer any identifiable transition from practical observation to theory. The most rarefied theory is still a kind of blind technique, only it’s operated by other specialists instead of others in a repair shop. The difficulty confronted by the theoretical physicist whenever he tries to endow his mathematical syntheses from far-flung regions with content and meaning is the same as the powerlessness of the most skilled auto-mechanic who tries to shift from the question of the way the motor works to the question of its principle. That physical knowledge has been split into knowledge of tangible things and knowledge of fields is a special case of the division of labor. But it also affects how the young relate to knowledge itself. The familiarity with functions has everywhere replaced the exploration of meaning. The animistic remnants in theory have been uprooted, a triumph paid for by sacrifice of intellect. Technical activity can do without physics, just as a movie star can do without apprenticeship and the fascist statesman can do without Bildung. Education is no longer a process that plays out between human beings, as it was in the time when the father had to prepare his son to inherit his property with the assistance of the teacher. It is carried out by society, and it takes place behind the back of the family. Childhood proves itself an historical phenomenon. Christianity prefigured the idea of childhood in its transfiguration of the powerless; the idea was occasionally actualized in the bourgeois family. Throughout the Christian centuries, however, reason acted upon the child from without as an intervention, as self-preservation imposes its will upon everything that cannot defend itself. The formative arts of the Middle Ages, which did not recognize any differentiation between those who were small of stature and those of lower social standing, revealed the true principle of the ordo and hierarchy—who can still beat whom with impunity. After hell had been laid out for the children of the Christian world, the enlightened world reserved Christian heaven for them. They were supposed to have it good because they were chosen to be the image of innocence itself. Through the icon of one’s own children, the old faith could still be mourned without this being irrational; children simultaneously embodied the lost past and the promised future. The rationalistic society of the 19th century employed fairy tales and religious legends to impart a faith in paradise to children so that they might mirror this back to the faithless bourgeoisie. But the real reason was the strengthening of the proletariat. The bourgeois created childhood as an escape route from the bind between sober insight and ideology, and from which it could not free itself in the face of the ever-present threat of revolution. The figure of the bourgeois child in the late 19th century seemed to reflect the truth in the lie through which the men of enterprise kept the workers in line: the utopia of eternal happiness. With this, the bourgeois preserved the faith of those decaying social forms in which he’d once been at the bottom. The puberty of the individual therefore ontogenetically recapitulates the transition of society into the age of reason. In the society of monopoly, puberty is known only as biological process; it no longer exists as a crisis for the child, who is already an adult as soon as they can walk and remains at that stage. Development falls away. In the time of the family, the father represented society over and against the child, and puberty brought about conflict with both. Today, however, since the child stands exposed before society, the conflict is decided before it ever breaks out. The world is so utterly preoccupied by ‘what is’ and the frenetic activity to comply with it that critique, with which one could still attack the father for contradicting his own ideology, never even comes up in the first place. What in fascist reeducation camps is carried out consciously and according to plan, the hardening of human beings through breaking them, is inflicted upon them everywhere under the silent mechanisms of monopoly. By the time they become conscious, everything has already been settled. Since Freud’s time, the relation between father and son has even been reversed. The child represents the rapidly changing society which passes judgment on the elder. Reality first enters the home in the figure of the child, not the father. The fearful respect the Hitler Youth enjoys from his parents is only the political escalation of a universal fact. Even the very first years of life, during which the father-imago and super-ego are supposed to form, reflect the new relation in which the father is not represented by another individual but is displaced by the thing-world and the collective.
The fact that this conflict has been settled by the extinction of what might resist has had its effect on lovers too. Along with the authority of the family, the threat of catastrophe disappears from their horizon. However, it was this threat that once inflamed their devotion. Today the sexual seems to be freed while its repression continues to exist. The social manipulation of relationships between the sexes, in the shaping of prescribed normalcy through the various spheres of mass culture, had already advanced quite far before its true features were revealed in völkisch eugenics. The path to eugenics was paved by the enlightenment. Realistic science objectified sex for as long as it needed to become manipulable.40 Kant’s definition of marriage as the contract for the mutual possession of sexual organs—which, in its inhuman sobriety in the discourse of natural law, pronounces judgment on the inhumanity of sexual privilege—was in the 19th century transferred onto human activity. In mass-society, the sexes are leveled to such a degree that both regard their sex as a thing over which they have cold and illusionless disposal, to advertise with pride and invest with caution. The girl seeks to come off as smart as possible in competition with others; flirting serves prestige more than future pleasure. Like Kant, the modern girl is conscious of her sex as property with exchange-value, but not in the sense that Wedekind once demanded the freedom of prostitution, since, according to him, the only way women could ever catch up to the leg up men had in society was through the conscious exploitation of their sole monopoly; rather she exploits the patriarchal taboo that degrades her as it transforms her into a superior being. Sex loses power over human beings, who switch it on and off according to the necessity of the situation without ever surrendering themselves to it. No one is moved or blinded by love any longer. The official encouragement of extramarital sexual intercourse in the authoritarian state confirms the private labor of coitus as socially useful labor for class society—it too must fall under state regulation. The children of the bourgeoisie, who were trained as heirs in the good times and educated to be potential supports for their parents in the bad, are in fascism produced and offered up under the auspices of the state as a kind of tax—so far as one can speak of taxes at all when a group of trust-magnates is squeezing the rest of society dry. Among the ranks of the propertied, the tax has the effect of an accelerant on the process of centralization; with its help, the competition falling behind full operational capacity is completely eliminated. Among the ranks of the Volk, its money-form which concealed its true essence is progressively shed; it reveals itself as real labor in service to real power, a part of which is the labor of childbirth. Social authority proscribes the girl’s refusal of the man in uniform as much as the old form of the taboos proscribed her willingness. In Germany, the icon of the Virgin Mary was never fully able to absorb the archaic cult of the woman. In the collective consensus against the old maid as much as in the devotion in the German poem to the abandoned maiden, the repressed Volksgeist already prevailed, long before the National Socialists condemned the prude and celebrated the unwed mother. But this excess, fed by the memory of the long-buried past and authorized by the regime, itself still fell short of the beatitude of the Christian virgin, wedded to her heavenly bridegroom. For the regime subjects that past to its violence—by dragging what was buried into the light, by naming it, by mobilizing it for the self-assertion of large-scale industry, it destroys it. Wherever this past hesitated to break through the Christian form and declare itself ‘Germanic,’ it gave German philosophy and music their specific intonation. Only with the unfettering of the ‘German’ soul that is invoked as heritage is heritage completely mechanized. As vain as it is to dismiss the mythical content of National Socialism as sheer swindle, just as untrue is the National Socialist claim to preserve it. The spotlight it has thrown upon the survivals of myth accomplishes in a single blow what culture elsewhere needed centuries to achieve. Thus the commanded intoxication born of fear of exogamous order does not lead back to promiscuity, but mere mockery of love. Love is the irreconcilable adversary of prevailing reason; for lovers are those who neither preserve themselves nor protect the collective. They throw themselves away—and for this they are met with all scorn. Romeo and Juliet died in opposition to their society for the sake of what their society itself proclaimed. In their irrational surrender of self, they asserted the freedom of the individual against the objective domination of property. Anyone who perpetrates Rassenschande (“pollution the race”) in Germany today remains true to the lovers’ example. For in an inhuman world that reserves the title of hero for the prudent youths who submit themselves to the process of procreating, birthing, and dying, what was once called heroism returns through Rassenschande: loyalty without prospects. The sad rendezvous of the lovers who cannot do otherwise closes itself off from reason triumphant without. The harsh light of dawn in which the executioners surprise the forgetful lovers illuminates the grimace of what’s left of reason: ingenuity, initiative, and readiness to strike. The lovers are backwards, and the backwards may hope for no mercy from the streamlined world. Their martyrdom, which all the wizened in the Third Reich deem just because the lovers were clumsy, puts the lie to the fascist ‘emancipation’ of sex and the life licensed by it. The uninhibited, healthy sexual activity of today obeys the same rationality that turns love into hell. And yet, the bookseller on the corner who risks his life for meager profit selling pornography to men serves the true claim of sex at a time when it is otherwise promoted as a matter of military policy and progressive statistics.
What fascism does to those it singles out in order to demonstrate its boundless violence seems to fly in the face of all reason. The tortures transcend the powers of imagination and thinking: the thought that attempts to grasp the atrocity is petrified by terror and rendered powerless. Even consciousness of oppression fades. The more incommensurable the concentrated power of capital and the powerlessness of the individual, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to penetrate the human origin of their misery. The threadbare veil of money has been replaced by a denser, technological one: the centralization of production under the compulsion of technology conceals the free intercourse of capital. Crises appear more natural, more unavoidable than ever; the seduction of ‘war aims’ already drives whole continents of peoples as surplus materials onward to their annihilation. The conflicts unfold on such an inhuman scale that even what little theoretical imagination has survived, unmutilated by economic and trade union leadership, is lost in the gauntlet of departments of social domination. The forms of repression have never been as blindly accepted as superhuman fate than they are at present, all while the great renewal of society is on everybody’s tongues. The thought of change is swallowed by consciousness of universal calamity. All feel that in times of peace and times of war their labor feeds an infernal machine, from which they tick off the little time they have to live and lose back in tending to it. Onwards they march, up for anything and understanding nothing, scorning death and yet always in flight from it. For the individual constituted by self-preservation, death was the absolute boundary. Hamlet’s line, “the rest is silence,” in which death without hope is followed by oblivion, points to the origin of the bourgeois ego. It’s not for nothing that traces of the first skeptic of modernity, Montaigne, have been discovered in Hamlet’s reflections. Life was infinitely more important to the individual for whom death meant absolute catastrophe. Fascism reaches down into this fundamental fact of bourgeois anthropology. It pushes what is already falling: the individual. It teaches him to fear something worse than death. Fear reaches farther than the unity of his consciousness. He must abandon the ego and outlive himself. The objects of organization are disorganized as subjects. In Germany, this is being put to practice. The non-identity [Unidentität] of almost every individual with themselves, a condition in which everyone is, having renounced all consistency, simultaneously Nazi and Anti-Nazi, a person of conviction and a skeptic, brave and cowardly, clever and stupid—this is the sole mode of behavior that really takes reality into account, defined not by so-called plans but by the concentration camp. Demonstrating to human beings they are themselves nothing but those already broken by the camps is the method of this madness. This produces an action-at-a-distance that extends far beyond exact knowledge of the process and contributes more than anything else to the cementing of the Volksgemeinschaft. When, however, those who have been released from the camps adopt the jargon of the executioner’s assistants, and speak with cold reason and consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) as if it could not have been otherwise and wasn’t so bad after all; when those who have yet to be detained conduct themselves as if they had already been tortured and confessed to everything—then the murderers speak the language of Ullstein, the cabaret, and the wholesaler.41 As the real sphere of trade and commerce lives on only in the hands of the titans and eludes the gaze of the common man, indeed that of the titans themselves, so in fascism the sigils of the intellect that sprang from the market, Jewish phraseology, linguistic gestures of the salesman and the travelers who even had to cower back then, live on in the mouths of their executioners. It is the language of the compulsory winking of the eye, the confidential tip, the nod among deceivers. The Nazi calls the failure Pleite, the one who can’t keep time meschugge, and the anti-Semitic hate song accuses the Americans of not having a clue “was sich tut.” The authors of the pogroms justify it because something just wasn’t quite koscher with the Jews. The secret ideal of the SA-men is to wiggle their way out of things, their longing for the Jewish brains they bash in; behind the shrewdness they parody, they still suspect that truth they must deny and destroy. If in the end this truth is discarded and converted to the reality principle and moral-free reason, whatever the cost of enforcing it, becomes omnipotent, then none may be allowed to stand outside and look on. The existence of a single irrational person illuminates the shame of the nation as a whole; it testifies to the relativity of the system of radical self-preservation posited as absolute. If superstition has already been purged to the extent that only superstition is still possible, then not even fools may wander around, feeble of mind as they are, seeking their happiness anywhere except in merciless progress. Their foolish clinging to the one God who abandons them every time, the irreconcilability of the same principle they uphold, even if they don’t realize it, is what grounds the hatred of the Jews, identical to the murder-lust towards the insane.42 The suspicion of madness is the bottomless well of persecution. It springs from mistrust in one’s own purified reason, upon which rational civilization “goes to ground” [zugrunde geht]. The means of calling humans back from those intelligible worlds into which Kant forbade us to stray—is pain. Pain has always been the surest teacher of raison. It brings the resistant and the rambling, the fantasists and utopians, back to themselves: indeed, it reduces them to the body, to a part of the body. In pain, all are leveled, each is made the equal of every other: human to human, human to animal. Pain engulfs the whole life of the being it has seized: it becomes nothing more than a shell of pain. The reduction of the ego which befalls humanity as a whole is repeated over and over again. The mesh of practical demands that holds each in thrall at every instant, the purposive rationality of the industrial age, engulfs the whole life of the beings it has seized. Pain is the archetype of labor in class society and, at the same time, its organon. And so philosophy and theology have always preached. That history thus far has known labor only as condition and consequence of domination is mirrored back by thinkers in their paeans to pain. They justify pain because it drives us to reason, the reason which knows how to assert itself in this world. “Teach us to remember we must die that we may become prudent,” reads Luther’s translation of Psalm 90. Pain is the “sting of activity,” says Kant;43 and Voltaire: “the feeling of pain was indispensable to stimulate us to self-preservation.”44 For the inquisitors who once veiled their horrific service to ravening domination on the grounds that they were divinely appointed for the good of the errant soul, sent to wash away its sins, heaven was already a Third Reich, into which the unreliable, irksome cantonists could only gain entry through the re-education camp. If one of the unfortunate souls somehow escaped their custody, the wanted posters would describe him “as one insanely led to reject the salutary medicine offered for his cure, and to spurn the wine and oil which were soothing to his wounds.”45 The Inquisition already enacted in practice a rage over the failed introduction of Christianity that is openly recalled in fascism upon Christianity itself. Pain is reinstated in full. In the respite of civilization, in the lands it called home, naked physical pain was still only inflicted on the most wretched of all; for the others, it was a final resort, an extreme possibility on the edge of their horizon, the ultima ratio of society. Society today resorts to it once more. The contradiction between what society demands of the human being and what it could provide them has grown so stark, the ideologies so thin, the path of mediation so long, the discontent in class-culture so great, that it must at least offer to compensate with the downfall of those who cause the most offense today: political enemies, the Jews, the asocial, the insane. The new, fascist order is the reason in which reason reveals itself as unreason.
But what remains of reason in its present-day decay is not just its persistence in self-preservation and the continuation of the horror it’s been perfected in. The age-old bourgeois definition of reason as self-preservation was already its limitation. Those explanations of the idealist philosophers—as degrading to the animal as those of the materialist physicians are to the human—that reason distinguishes human being from animal contain the truth that through reason the human first wakes from the captivity of nature; not, however, as the philosophers imagined, to dominate nature, but to comprehend it. Always has that society dominated by the self-preserving reason of the propertied still co-reproduced the life of the dominated class, however poorly and accidentally. Something of the objective relationship to the living, and not merely to one’s own existence, is borne in the subjective faculty of reason: it obeys purposes and schools itself in them, while it withdraws from them at the same time. It has always been capable of recognizing the shape of injustice in domination and, thereby, of reaching beyond it to truth. As the power to call beings and things by their right names, reason has never fully merged with the self-alienated life that survives solely through the annihilation of the other and itself. It must not, however, hope to rise above history and contemplate the true order of things from out of itself, as the idealistic delusion of ontology would have it. Reason, by shedding its rationalistic illusions in the hell it made of the world as domination, may nevertheless withstand that hell and recognize it for what it is. There is so little left for it to clear away. Nowadays, ideals can be switched out for one another as quickly as contracts and alliances. Ideology resides rather in the composition of human beings themselves, in their intellectual reduction, their utter dependence on association. Every thing is experienced solely in relation to the conventional conceptual system of society, already ensnared by the dominant schemata before it is ever perceived by consciousness; this is the true Kantian schematism, that “hidden art in the depths of the human soul,” except that the transcendental unity at work therein is no longer that of universal subjectivity, however unconscious, as it was in the free market economy, but rather that of the pre-calculated effect of mass-society on the psychic apparatus of its victims. It is this, and not false doctrines, that constitutes false consciousness. Under the pressure of the social relations of monopolism, the ideological incorporation of human beings into society takes place through their quasi-biological preformation for the collective to be controlled from above. Even where the individual is not a mere mask for the universal equality of atomized human beings, it nevertheless remains a function and appendage of monopoly. Culture is today not the antithesis to mass culture but rather a moment of it, and which has value for the latter precisely because it cannot as such be produced under the conditions of monopoly. For that reason it is pressed into the position of a monopoly-good sui generis. Paris, Austria as a whole were determinable in their very existence solely by reference to the America from which they distinguished themselves. Culture becomes transparent as the illusory semblance which concealed the past shape of domination, and this semblance dissolves along with culture. The self that disintegrates in the most recent stage of society was the ground not just of self-preservation, but of ideology too. With its dissolution, the measureless dimension of violence becomes the sole obstacle that blocks insight into its obsolescence. However mutilated all may be, they could, in the span of an instant, awake to the fact that their world, so thoroughly rationalized under the compulsion of domination, could release them from the self-preservation that now pits them one against the other. The terror that once came to the aid of reason is at the same time the last means of bringing it to a halt—so close is truth. Once the atomized and disintegrating human beings of today become capable of living without property, without place, without time, without Volk, they will also have forfeit the ego in which all of the prudence and stupidity of historical reason, all of its complicity with domination, still survived. At the end of the progress of self-abolishing reason, nothing is left but the relapse into barbarism or the beginning of history.
Appendix: Notes for Reason and Self-Preservation.
[Note 1:] Unsentimental Reason and Bourgeois Neutrality.
[Sourced from: pages 11-20 of draft “1f)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.]
Suppose that several centuries ago, European humanity hatched a plan to subjugate the earth on a fantastic scale, to devise methods through which the forces of nature could be controlled with ridiculously little effort, to make labor more productive a thousand times over—they could hardly have conducted themselves more appropriately than they did under the lash of Protestant conscience. [Before it took root,] the ultimate reason that workers held out to the bitter end in manufactories and factories was the threat of misery or the death penalty. [...] Later, the transfigured fatherland took the place of religion, as in the greatest moments of the French Revolution. The thought of the harmony of national and individual interest would not have bridged the gulf between the two for the individual in any of the ordinary periods of the bourgeois order. Reason purified of metaphysics is unsentimental. It knows no ideal that has no ground in individual self-assertion. The individual’s capacity to lead the group that serves him is the highest of all: not the capacity for achievement or performance in general, but always with reference to the necessity of asserting oneself. The individual must make their way in the group, and the group in society. The qualities the individual needs for their own success correspond to those the group must demand of its individual members for the purpose of its self-preservation. However much these qualities might differ according to class, it is technical skill, clear calculation, and the skill of dealing with other people that form the basic stock of the character now demanded everywhere. [...]
The individual is ‘moral’ who, without needing undue coercion, follows the rules without which their group cannot exist. Whoever breaks the rules must either [do so in order to] assert themselves or establish new social structures in place of the old. For the purified concept of reason, morality in itself is held als Irrweg der Metaphysik. All is permitted—unless, that is, you were to ruin the basis of your own existence; then you are a fool. Few have articulated these consequences of the metaphysics-purified concept of reason. They follow inevitably from skeptical doctrines, however, which recognize no reason but this. Its exact application results in present-day social actuality. Reason, as sensible self-preservation, dominates in every organization. Whoever adapts best, both actively and passively; whoever knows how to put their weapons to the best use—makes their way. Reason provides no grounds for objection to National Socialism. If, at present, the national principle might be suited to the individual interests of the masses, under German capital these were relegated to imperialist aims: the subjugation of other peoples was also for the good of German workers. The preservation of the peace through the alliance of the German with the English and French capitalists, as was planned by their respective governments before Hitler, offered the workers rather bleak prospects. When a richer existence beckons, even the most terrible discipline or the surrender of one’s own life are justified before reason. The paradox—that one must put their life at hazard in order to expand their power and security—is a continuous motif in the rationality of European and American history. It is the essence of the pioneer spirit. Power is the intensification of self-preservation, and the power of the group is the presupposition of the power of the individual. In a world ruled by monopolies, the German masses had nothing good to expect from the reconciliations between their respective men of state. Labor, discipline, and order, strength at home and abroad, were a better option in the age of competition among international power groups than peace and unemployment. Hitler demanded discipline in national enterprise, just as entrepreneurs always did in their factories, claiming all the while that the flourishing of their businesses was the presupposition of the flourishing of their fellow countrymen. The moral aspersions cast by the older regimes had no more impact on the newcomer than the complaints of the old competitors who resisted restructuring, reminiscent of the anguished cries of the first and second estates when the third stripped them of their privileges. To the Germans, these cries have always seemed the paragon of hypocrisy.
Maneuvering and compromise have appeared as the preeminent virtues of reason throughout history because bourgeois individuals and groups were forced to rely upon them so often given their social situation. The philosophers of antiquity had everything to fear from power. The political figures of the 16th century—l’Hôpital, Baudouin, and Montaigne—saw in the fanaticism of the religious parties the ruin of all trade and commerce. Brutal displays of power against the ruling authorities were seldom in the interest of the class strata whose prosperity was grounded on contract and peaceful intercourse. However, when it came to the suppression of proletarian uprisings, in matters of criminal justice, or in the administration of colonial territories, the bourgeoisie showed that their erstwhile forbearance was not an absolute but a purposive code of conduct. The renunciation of violence institutionalized in private law had its ground in the multitude of self-sufficient economic entities that had to reach agreements with one another. This renunciation was characteristic of the intercourse between members of the bourgeois class and did not pertain to exchange with anyone who’d been deceived or brought down by them from the start. To the latter party, it was clear that intercourse within bourgeois legal forms were a means of self-preservation at a specific stage of economic development: that of fragmented entrepreneurship.
The Aristotelian definition of practical reason as a golden mean doubtlessly applies to large stretches of bourgeois history. Recourse to the extremes was imprudent in intercourse with one’s equals; indeed, it was generally considered unwise even in the context of one’s own factory floor. However difficult and impenetrable social life may have gotten, personality was to be cultivated harmoniously, an embodiment of the most promising qualities in normal bourgeois life. “‘Reason’ as a noun,” according to John Dewey, “signifies the happy cooperation of a multitude of dispositions, such as sympathy, curiosity, exploration, experimentation, frankness, pursuit (to follow things through), circumspection (to look about at the context).”46 There are historical situations in which, within such a concert of dispositions, sympathy and openness did predominate. The reason of the industrial pioneers and dictators was determined more through an inner affinity for power and command. Indeed, metaphysics-purified reason always has a necessary relation to domination. Because it aims at the satisfaction of natural drives by way of society, human beings are, contrary to Kant’s metaphysics, always only a means to this end. The categorical imperative—that everyone should also always treat others as ends in themselves—belongs to those theses of rationalistic metaphysics which cannot withstand the scientific consciousness of the present. It would first have to be demonstrated why consideration is, in general, more rational than oppression. What is rational is a psychic constitution suited for the greatest possible existence and advancement; this can vary significantly according to profession, class, and nation. But what all characters have in common is the will to self-preservation, in which either the interests of the group or the interests of the person may dominate. With respect to command and obedience, reason is neutral, and the bourgeois character corresponds to precisely this neutrality. In the typical specimen, the qualities of flexible compliance and forceful violence are not developed at the cost of the other, but instead the mechanism of adaptation is cultivated which, according to fate, might demand one or the other.
Bourgeois neutrality also extends to forms of state. For all their express preference for oligarchy, monarchy, or democracy, as was fitting for their time or their group, the political authors of the bourgeoisie largely practiced a certain reserve when it came to such a question. They weighed the advantages and disadvantages of such forms against one another. In their doctrines of state, the formal right for all citizens to have a voice or vote in no way guarantees the best administration for any one group. Whatever significance political democracy would have for individual segments of society would depend on the state of the whole. The voices of the materially and intellectually oppressed masses can always result in measures and representatives that in no way serve the benefit of the masses. Political equality under economic inequality tends to its own annihilation. In the times of the bourgeois struggle for emancipation, formal democracy was absolutized at the cost of its content; the struggle was against absolutism, even for the enlightened bourgeoisie—who already possessed property and simply needed free disposal of it and control over political powers to ensure this. Formal freedom becomes the ideal of reason at the cost of every other interest.
In opposition to absolutism, Diderot writes: “One can abuse one’s power to do good as well as to do evil; and it is never permissible for a man, whoever he may be, to treat his constituents like a herd of cattle. We force them to leave a bad pasture and move on to a fatter one; but it would be tyranny to use the same violence with a company of men. If they say: “We like it here;” if they say, even if they agree: “We don’t like it here, but we want to stay here,” we must try to enlighten them, to disabuse them, to lead them to sound views by the voice of persuasion, but never by the voice of force. … Peoples, do not allow your so-called masters to do good even against your general will.”47 Diderot makes his view more precise by continuing on to say that freedom refers to the use and abuse of property, and that “monastic form and rigidity” must reign against the masses.48 With this, he betrays the class-specific meaning of his political demands: that repressive force should leave industry in peace. The masses themselves were not interested in such a democracy in equal measure, even though they did mobilize in the revolution waged for its sake. They relied, unlike the bourgeoisie, upon the raising of their miserable standard of living. Throughout the 19th century, entrepreneurs were careful to ensure that the powers of government did not extend beyond the maintenance of order in Diderot’s sense: of guaranteed general security, domestic peace, army, and judiciary; the workers and the peasants were only ever conditionally interested in this restriction of powers, namely, insofar as the development of industry was the precondition for raising the general level of prosperity. The latter cared much more about the realities of the situation, the facts of the matter, than the formal aspects of the political constitution. The stronger the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few, the more clearly formal democracy—with its parliamentary structure of governance and the demands of domestic and foreign policy—proved inadequate.
For decades, continental Europe was less interested in democracy than in social reforms, in a stable social order, in work and bread. Political freedom had proven to be an illusion anyway, in light of the fact that the economies of whole nations were controlled by a handful of families. After Hitler shook the foundations of the national and democratic apparatus, the masses didn’t hear the promise of its reintroduction in the old style as the call of the higher reason. Now, a Europe of many nations with sovereign and constitutional governments could only be imposed on its peoples from without. The restoration of constitutional guarantees in full, including the freest suffrage, would not overcome the masses lack of independence nor the mutilation of human capacities inherent to fascism, but would only renew them in another form. By means of the cliques that would subsequently establish relationships between the victors in every liberated country, the peoples of Europe would be forced into a new kind of economic slavery, the specific structure of which would depend on whether the larger industries of the continent were destroyed in the war or brought under foreign control. If Europe were infinitely less populated, establishing a system of small, agrarian democracies could be in the rational interest of the masses. This would, however, presuppose that the process of extermination were carried out on a completely different level than at present. Barring a drastic decline in population, the utilization of all technological means developed in the industrial age is required. For the proper, further development of modern industry, the borders of Europe that once had rational significance would merely be an obstacle. These borders exist exclusively for the benefit of antiquated state bureaucracies and a small number of property owners in individual nations. Their maintenance would be almost as costly as that of the supra-national terror-apparatus a unified, fascist Europe would have to sustain. The remote hope that the transition from a uniformly fascist Europe of complete political unfreedom into a state of general social freedom would, in some way, be more logical or easier to accomplish is deceptive. In the process of tearing down the old state borders, National Socialism at the same time erects new walls between human beings through the brutal exploitation of subjugated peoples, through a system of graduated colonization, and through the differentiated treatment of sexes and social classes, all against the background of a decay in productive forces so rapid that any such hope must disappear.
Whichever party the masses—rationally—side with in the world-spanning social changes of the present depends upon their position. Every individual seeks to develop the qualities that will enable them to exist and advance within their group. Conversely, every individual hopes to find their own relief from life’s hardships through the power of their group. When calculating which interests deserve priority in the event of a conflict—those of family, of profession, of class, or nation—theoretical probabilities and imponderabilities play a significant role. From the beginning, staking one’s life has been implied in the motif of self-preservation; all that remains is deciding where the risk is proportional to the odds. Commercial thinking furnishes the model for such deliberations: the less potential for profit, the less one should risk. And just as the social process of exchange—to which the history of human reason refers back to as its origin—generates a commercial instinct among its agents that varies in kind according to the stage of economic development and geographical region, so too do isolated individuals among the masses tend to develop an instinct for adaptation to their political living conditions; an instinct which, of course, does not protect them ruin. However, this instinct and the emotional dimension both inhibit and demand rational reactions. It becomes easier for individuals to act in a rational manner when they are also emotionally bound to the social structures and modes of behavior that are crucial for their advancement; however, individuals remain attached to them even once it has become disadvantageous for them. What is decisive is that the individual belongs to such groups, or joins such groups, as are at any given moment victorious in the broader social struggle, and in which one’s needs prevail. Demands in themselves have no rational hierarchy and, therefore, no rational priority. It comes down to the individuals and groups to whom these demands relate. Peaceful relations between power-blocs may be good for some and bad for others. For some, the peace could lead to social reforms; for others, the peace could intensify the pressure of misery unbearably. It comes down to whether war means obtaining or losing employment, whether war promises a loss or an increase of income, whether, after the war, one can expect to participate in world-domination or only a return to an antiquated, crisis-ridden economy. It is from such points of view that rational individuals evaluate “peace” and “war.”
Idealistic motives, like the liberation of oppressed individuals and peoples, have a propagandistic function. Rescue operations must be solidly anchored in self-interest. For everything is subordinate to this one goal. Any elements from a different orientation or provenance that still play a role in individual life can only appear misguided and provincial in comparison, unless they can be exposed as rationalizations for deeper rational impulses in the end, like ‘introducing Christian civilization to Africa’ as the struggle over surplus profits. For modern reason, what demands further justification is not the atrocities of the plantation owners—which might then be found in the works of missionaries. Rather, the plantation provides the excuse for the missionary. On its own, the work of the missionary would be foolish, a “waste of energy.” The categorical imperative—that other human beings are always also to be treated as ends in themselves—is no mere metaphysical thesis, not when reason necessarily regards others as mere means. For there is always some end to be achieved through them. And so, human beings come into rational consideration only to the extent they can be of some use, can serve some purpose. In the version of the categorical imperative that prohibits this, Kant let slip the secret of the bourgeoisie: everyone knows the other only as means, never as end. In fascism, this comes to the fore for the first time: human beings are objects of domination, means for the expansion of power. In themselves, they have no value at all. Nothing has value in-itself. In the order that preceded the fascist one, this was expressed in the fact that human need in-itself was never sufficient grounds to set even the smallest piece of machinery into motion. It was only ever to the extent that the satisfaction of need was of some use to the producer—that it increased his profit, his power—that it was not madness to satisfy it.
[Note 2:] Dismantling the “I.”
[Sourced from: pages 25-28 of draft “1f)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.]
The transition from the self-preservation of the “I”-conscious individual, grounded on bourgeois property, to the self-preservation of elements in the modern collective sharply divides the generations of the middle classes from one another. The older generation is taken aback by the harshness and illusionlessness of the younger generation, and the latter refuse the older their respect. For the young have drawn the necessary consequences from the new situation. It would be futile to oppose them with so-called cultural values: the true, the beautiful, the good, respect for tradition and human life. The young see through it all; they see it all rests on the shaky footing of the older generation, and that the older generations themselves are only seeking out the consequences of their own past. The historical process in which these changes occur goes back far enough. Even in earlier times, whole social strata sank into the proletariat. Under monopoly, this happens on a larger scale and at a faster pace. Among the proletariat, the culture of the “I” and of the person, and everything that belonged to it, has always corresponded more to the ideology of the well-mannered socialist functionaries than to their actual situation. The proletarian family had only superficial similarity to the bourgeois. It offered no protection for wife and children from hard labor, and its dwarven property was in perpetual decay.
Now it is becoming evident that the bourgeois individual as a whole was a transient phenomenon, generated by an order of property that pitted each individual against all others of their own class and against the lower class. But the very same reason that insists on clear principles and coldly draws its conclusions has not stopped short of its own concept. It has dissolved the dogmatic remnants in the moment of self-preservation. Everyone is their own best friend.49 But am I my own best friend as I will be in the next thirty, twenty, ten, or five years? Whether and to what extent this is true depends on the composition of society. Today, the false absoluteness of the individual has been destroyed. One’s own future is no longer held in such high regard—nor even one’s own life. The instruments of self-preservation educate human beings for indifference towards death. The economic forces which, by means of competition, emancipated and spread the bourgeois order of property, created the very monopoly under which it is dissolving; the rational forces which, by means of critical reason, emancipated and spread the bourgeois “I,” created the very Tatsachenmenschen (‘fact-minded people’) who no longer have an “I” at all. Just as expropriation was inherent in bourgeois property from the beginning, so too was decay in the bourgeois individual. The two processes are identical.
The erosion of the reason of the individual “I” as the foundation of society was already visible in the 18th century. Theories of natural law that derive the coexistence of human beings from the calculation of mutual interests, and thus from self-preservation, were rightly criticized even then. “No natural law,” says Rousseau, “can be founded on reason alone.”50 He goes on to demonstrate that rational morality, in the sense of the precept “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which underlies Kant’s categorical imperative, must ultimately result in the triumph of injustice. His student, de Sade, develops the consequences of this in total clarity. Reason left to its own devices liquidates not merely the immortal soul but the mortal “I,” and so reverts to a pre-theological surrender to the powers of non-human and social nature. However, dismantling the “I” has more than just a negative significance for the essence of the human being. Self-preservation against others in the long term only justified action for the sake of the whole or for one’s neighbors by way of the mediation of one’s own material interests. Any other kind of community stuck out in the present as a relic from a dark, pre-historic past. Even the family, insofar as it was not grounded on shared assets, a business, some kind of enterprise, or at least pro-familial legislation, had a medieval complexion.
Now, however, the whole liberal order of law, the free-market economy along with its ideas of the equality of the person, of individual freedom, and of economic opportunity for all—ideas which might have applied, with certain restrictions, to the proletariat—have for the overwhelming majority of society become pure illusion. To express concern for the formal independence of one’s person, to uphold the integrity of the contract, to respect the happiness of others, in short to cultivate the spiritual “I” in the liberal sense, now also belongs, even in the boldest imagination, among those relics bygone times. No real interest corresponds to it any longer. Alongside the “I” and its spiritual-intellectual world, the representation of harmony that was a part of this world is dismantled as well. Such far-reaching justifications for loyal behavior to the whole, which only ever functioned as a weak supplement to real pressure anyway, can no longer be believed. Human beings won’t wait anymore. They react only to direct compulsion and the threat of being handed the bill.
Never have there been so many unbelievers than under fascism, which emblazons its banners with slogans of faith in Führer and nation. For inherent to faith is the possibility of its relativization, but the powers of the present absolutize it. If the leader cannot keep his promises—even if he threatens to put you up against the wall at the first hint of a complaint—, then he too will become: bogeyman, superstition, metaphysics. His credit is always limited; hence the relationship between the leader and imperialism. Contempt for humanity and the promise of peace stand arm in arm at the beginning of totalitarian order; as it runs its course, however, the leader must repeatedly prove his magical power, otherwise the unbelievers will quickly abandon him. What occurs, however, as soon as the pressure diminishes somewhat seems to brook no doubt. A new, brutal ruling class strata of leaders, whether domestic or foreign, will inherit the mantle of power, or chaos will break out all over. The bourgeois idea that society will in the end resemble a Greek polis appears meaningless, for the “I” or the ego of the Greek polis presupposes a kind of property which has vanished, irretrievably.
[Note 3:] Alternate Opening: On the History of the Concept of Reason.
[Sourced from: pages 1-4 of draft “1h)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.]
To inquire about ‘reason’ without further specification is considered meaningless according to today’s scientific principles. The investigation of reason requires a more exact definition. First of all, one needs an explanation of the concept, even if only in the sense of everyday language, for example: reason is the capacity to derive particular judgments from general judgments according to specific rules. After this, research questions can be formulated: questions about the application of reason in mathematics, physics, law, strategy, in playing football; about its occurrence among the Maori, in New Zealand, among the French petit-bourgeoisie, among young Negro men in Harlem, among women, men, elderly, children; about its impairment by hysteria. The comparative scientific disciplines, the authorities on the subject—ethnology, social research, psychology, statistics, psychology.
In the lives of individuals, however, reason plays yet another role. They ask how their own lives and the life of society is to be rationally organized. Of course, for some reason it always seems that for some, ‘reason’ signifies merely the directive to pursue ever greater profits; for others, to find a way out of everyday misery. But such an agreement between ‘reason’ and ‘success’ vanishes whenever a conflict arises between one’s own individual interests and those of the class, nation, or family, or between value and utility. Seen from the outside, the decision constitutes a psychological or sociological factum, a link in a chain of conditions and consequences. In the consciousness of the individual, however, they can also aim for what is right, however much the inner process of decision-making within the automatized human being of today resembles the distorted image of the individual it projects. As a rule, thinking is replaced by the power of suggestion of the existing order, which comes equipped with a ready-made schema for each individual, according to which their reaction-response plays out before they even become aware of their own helplessness. But sometimes the mechanism shorts out. Even today, individuals have the capacity to reflect on what is rational overall, instead of merely what is advantageous, timely, decent, patriotic. Though the possibility seems to have vanished from the individual, something of it still lingers inside them. The individual can set aside the recollection of what “one” ought to do in their situation and question whether the ‘plausible’ is really what’s best. They might find that even such self-evident considerations and maxims still require justification. Nothing is to be taken as legitimate by virtue of its sheer existence—neither one’s own life, nor institutions, nor the systems of institutions and forms of culture, nor even society itself. All that is human, at least, requires a reason for its existence and grounds that demand its respect. In reaching beyond pre-given standards in the direction of an ultimate meaning, thinking performs the function of reason.
Reason as relationship to truth, meaning, origin, is the theme of the great bourgeois philosophies, indeed of philosophy overall—for there is only one philosophy: that of the urban bourgeoisie. Skepticism belongs to philosophy as one of its fixed, dogmatic shapes. Skepticism elevates the moment of legitimation found in the concept of reason into its exclusive attribute and will only accept what is tangible as valid criterion, much like the liberal bourgeoisie reduces the state down to the police and only defers to the bank statement. For in both cases, an inner affinity with their opposite is revealed: one day, the largest account balances stabilize as the authoritarian state and the tangible sensations of the defrauded masses form the ground of their blind faith in the false ideal.
The demand to define reason without doing violence to its historical linguistic usage is impossible to fulfill. All concepts which might bring us closer to a more precise determination contain the same element that makes the concept seem so high-flown in the first place. If reason is declared to be the capacity to recognize good and evil, following the second chapter of Genesis, then either good or evil must themselves must mean something determinate and fixed, which runs contrary to the very meaning of reason, or else the definition misses its mark. The concepts of truth, of freedom, and of thinking also contain the problematic of reason-in-itself. The lack of clarity over these concepts springs from the fact that neither the form of future history nor that of concluded history is determinable, and yet we relate to it in every act of the present. The rejection of these highest concepts on logical grounds, which may have some justification (so far as there is such a thing without ‘reason’), affects the spiritual-intellectual culture of Europe itself. Modern anti-philosophical logic—though with less consciousness of having done so—draws the same negative balance as Spengler. Reason without further qualification, reason in the sense of the Logos and the core of humanity, was an ideology. The significance of the concept of reason for the human being’s understanding of itself and its relations to the world cannot be overestimated. If humanity ever lived in that pre-historical condition which philology and ethnology describe as totemic and gynaecocratic, then the transition into the forms of family, state, and religion that characterize the historically legible development of humanity is bound to trust in the power of rational Geist (viz., mind, or spirit). For, in distinction from nature, Geist was bestowed upon human and divine beings alone. If recollections of prehistory are indeed correct, then human beings once felt that they shared a soul, a blood with the beings of nature, with plants and animals, and that this unity was itself immediate and natural. The manifold transformations that lead out of this condition point in the direction of recognition of an active, unified mind, relatively independent from nature, which presides over all events and, as the highest power in every individual human being, is supposed to govern their life as a whole and and every individual action. Their decisions are determined by nothing external to them. The many gods of ancient Greece, with their manifold desires and tasks, and no less than the vengeance of Jehovah, still point back to these ancient times. [Insert: The ideal of one single reason in God and man, subject to no powers of the earth, teleologically determines the whole course of spiritual-intellectual development. It refers to those later times in which]51 man has spiritually and physically conquered the monsters of prehistoric times, and the strict theological divorce of God and world is overcome.
Because the body itself still bespeaks the power of the earthly, the natural, it is in the end not religion but philosophy which, as the logical consequence of this historical process, gives this ideal its purest expression. The daimonion of Socrates, his idea of dialectical philosophy as the overcoming of the relative, the unfounded, the merely factual, is a clear expression of the principle and, in the forms it was given by Plato and Aristotle, has dominated in the history of European culture as an active force. Man alone among the beings of earth carries out his actions in self-consciousness; he alone can give an account of himself, opposing through his own thinking the stimuli which act upon him. The most consistent formulation is found in the rationalistic systems of Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. But these doctrines, without which European history is undoubtedly unthinkable, have themselves and in their derivative shapes always encountered decisive contradiction. Sensualistic, skeptical, materialistic schools of thought have attacked reason, whatever the name or the form under which it was asserted by the opposing side, as a false concept. Not only has it been disputed that there is a formative reason to be recognized in the objective world, but so too have all of the theories about the connection between body and Geist. The assumption of a rational substance separate from the body has always been met with fierce opposition. The physics of the Stoics and the Epicureans, in opposition to Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul, maintain the corporeality of everything actual, and, accordingly, the essential likeness of man and animal. Gassendi, in his Objections to the Meditations, speaks of the the rational “I,” for whose being Descartes had argued, with open mockery: “Give yourself the special label ‘mind’ if you like, but your having this grander name doesn’t mean that your nature is different, i.e. that you are radically different. To prove that—i.e. to prove that you are not a body—you need to do something quite different in kind from anything the brutes do—something that takes place outside the brain or at least independently of it. That’s what you need to do, and you don’t do it…” (Fifth Objections).52
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.
For a short history of the ISR’s journals and the significance of the end of the ZfS and beginning of the SPSS for the development of Critical Theory, see:
I haven’t been able to determine who exactly was responsible for the English-language translation of “The End of Reason” that was published in SPSS—possibly Edward M. David, who was at the time employed as an English translator and copy-editor for the ISR and was responsible for translating works like Horkheimer’s “Art and Mass Culture” (1941) and Adorno’s “Spengler” (1941) and “Veblen” (1942) essays for the last two issues of SPSS. Cf. Adorno to Horkheimer, 8/21/1941. (Author’s translation.)
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]. In: MECW Vol. 29 (Lawrence & Wishart [E-Book], 2010), 263-264. [link]
For the author’s translations of eight letters from the Horkheimer-Adorno correspondence between April and September 1941, see:
For a translation of seven discussions for the planned book on ‘dialectics’ (recorded and edited by Gretel Adorno) from January 1939, see:
Cf. Horkheimer to Adorno, 11/7/1941: “Dear Teddie: Naturally, I read your ‘Veblen’ the day it arrived. I am absolutely in favor of including the work in the next issue. Do you have something like a rough draft in English? If so, I would have David review it posthaste. You have decisively distinguished Veblen from rationalism, from theses such as the identity of thinking and being, the category of the whole, freedom. These are precisely the concepts I’m now occupied with in my work on the [Reason-]essay. I myself feel, comically enough, that we are against our will being forced into a common front with a rationalism that no longer exists, and so I envision a demarcation from rationalism as the main content of my essay. But I must confess that I am finding this rather difficult to do at the moment. The separation is virtually beginning to transform from one of quantity into quality (viz., into that of a serious burden). Given the operation [viz., of the ISR] as it is unfolding there at present, my insistence on your departure will unavoidably provoke the subsequent accusation that nothing came of it and that, ultimately, the association with Columbia was destroyed for naught. I can and will not set myself up for this accusation to the extent it is justified. It would be foolishness to place the protection we will probably have great need for in years to come for the sake of such a short span of time. But the whole affair requires a bit more nerve.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 208-209. Author’s translation.
Cf. Horkheimer to Adolph Löwe, 12/1/1941: “You know just as well as I do that I am no ‘Institutsdirektor.’ If I want to make up for the time I lost in the honest effort to become one and contribute something theoretical to what it is we all care about, I must find a way and stick to it. I am working on an essay about reason, which will be rather unwieldy. It provides me with an excuse, however, to finally read something and make systematic notes. The thesis is that reason in Western history has been identical with self-preservation and, ultimately, with domination. But I am very well aware that this publication for the journal will bring the old series of essays to a close rather than constitute the beginning of a new production. There is still much I need to become much more clear about. Not only do I have infinitely less experience and routine in theoretical work than you do, but there are still other obstacles we will have to speak of on another occasion. At the moment, I am tormented by the question of my promise to you and Paulus [Tillich] to return this coming Winter. Without the living relationship with you and the few friends I can truly count on one hand, my thinking would lose its basis. I do not have the impression that I have gotten far enough by now to really communicate something to you yet, and aside from this a trip would set my work back for a number of weeks. However, if you now take the fulfillment of this promise to be something essential, I will gladly keep it. I have already written to Paulus, and perhaps you will discuss the matter further with him and with Pollock. My absence must not under any circumstances weaken the vitality of our theoretical—and not merely theoretical—community.” In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 17. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996), 231-232. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer to Marcuse, 12/6/1941. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 234. Author’s translation.
Cf. Horkheimer to Marcuse, 11/7/1941:
I am working on ‘Vernunft’ literally day and night. My notes and index cards for the future are piling up. But so far, only a few pages of text have been written. The article itself will most likely be rather unwieldy; I regard its true function to be an attempt at a positive formulation of our standpoint, more so than we’ve succeeded in doing so far—an attempt, I say. [MHA: VI 27A.98]
And: Marcuse to Horkheimer, 11/11/1941:
[...] But I still can’t say that. I’m just not one for “messages in a bottle.” What we have to say is not only destined for some mythical future. I have often enough had occasion to observe you during discussions, and I know what sort of response you can elicit in others. That, too, comes with an obligation. Your book must be a “success.” I know precisely what I’m saying here. We can formulate our problems against counter-atmosphere and counter-speech—this can only do you good. I hope to finish my essay while I’m here. What consoles me is that you will likely be working on your own essay [viz., “Reason and Self-Preservation”] for a long while still. I have ordered a book for you by the American historian Carl L. Becker: The Heavenly City in Eighteenth Century Philosophy. It’s a little book about utopias of the enlightenment (published in 1939) and is supposed to be good.
In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 213-214. Author’s translation.
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. English in original.
Cf. Adorno to Horkheimer, 3/19/1945. (Author’s translation.)
See the author’s translation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion protocol from 10/18/1939:
“Adorno: […] I would accuse your prose of containing a moment of agreement with what is. Your prose is beneath the experiences you wish to convey, mine is above those I am able to convey.
Horkheimer: For both of us, form and content do not quite fit together. In your case, it looks as if there were no center of light at all. […]”
Adorno and Horkheimer, “Preface to the New Edition [of Dialectic of Enlightenment]” (1969), in: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002 [1987]), xi.
Horkheimer to Marcuse, 12/19/1942: “During the last few weeks I have devoted every minute to those pages on mythology and enlightenment which will probably be concluded this week. I am afraid it is the most difficult text I ever wrote. Apart from that it sounds somewhat negativistic and I am now trying to overcome this. We should not appear as those who just deplore the effects of pragmatism. I am reluctant, however, to simply add a more positive paragraph with the melody: “But after all rationalism and pragmatism are not so bad.” The intransigent analysis as accomplished in this first chapter seems in itself to be a better assertion of the positive function of rational intelligence than anything one could say in order to play down the attack on traditional logics and the philosophies which are connected with it.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 390-391. English in original.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Dialogue d’Ephemere. Oeuvres complètes, Garnier Frères, Paris 1880. Tome 30, p. 488.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Cf. Origenes gegen Celsus, IV, 26. Des Origenes Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. II, in: Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, München 1926, p. 326.
[“The End of Reason”:] Cf. Aristotle, Politics, New York 1890, Vol. IV, p. 507.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Cf. Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, Neunter Satz, Akademieausgabe Band VIII, p. 30.
See: Horkheimer’s response to Paul Tillich’s “Remarks on ‘Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung.’”
In the original, the sentence read: “Dem Rationalismus Thomas von Aquins standen Siger von Brabant und Roger Bacon entgegen, bis sein eigener Orden mit Duns Scotus empiristischen Tendenzen Raum gab.” [“The rationalism of Thomas Aquinas was opposed by Siger of Brabant and Roger Bacon, until his own order, with Duns Scotus, gave way to empiricist tendencies.”] Following Tillich’s remarks, Horkheimer would amend his own copy of the essay and cross out “mit Duns Scotus.” However, the error has been reprinted in all subsequent publications of the text, including the publication in Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Gottlob Ernst Schuzle, Aenesidemus oder über die Fundamente von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie. Nebst einer Verteidigung des Skeptizismus gegen die Anmassung der Vernunftkritik. 1792. In den Neudrucken der Kantgesellschaft Berlin 1911, p. 135.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Cf. Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Berlin 1928, pp. 182-183.
A reference to Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”: “The idea is something linguistic, it is that element of the symbolic in the essence of any word. In empirical perception, in which words have become fragmented, they possess, in addition to their more or less hidden, symbolic aspect, an obvious, profane meaning. It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication. Since philosophy may not presume to speak in the tones of revelation, this can only be achieved by recalling in memory the primordial form of perception. Platonic anamnesis is, perhaps, not far removed from this kind of remembering; except that here it is not a question of the actualization of images in visual terms; but rather, in philosophical contemplation, the idea is released from the heart of reality as the word, reclaiming its name-giving rights. Ultimately, however, this is not the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam, the father of the human race and the father of philosophy. Adam’s action of naming things is so far removed from play or caprice that it actually confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words. Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation. In this renewal the primordial mode of apprehending words is restored. And so, in the course of its history, which has so often been an object of scorn, philosophy is—and rightly so—a struggle for the representation of a limited number of words which always remain the same—a struggle for the representation of ideas.” In: The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (Verso, 1998), 36-37.
[“The End of Reason”:] John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. xvii, p. 1.
[Excerpt] From page 9 of draft “1g)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
Reason in service of self-preservation is a sharper, deadlier weapon than any that the animals have at their command. Its application makes the human being enemy and master of all earthly beings, not Übermensch but Übertier. The maxim of utility is ambiguous. It signifies what belongs to man by virtue of his genus-specific constitution and the shape of his needs, which only develops through social life.
[“The End of Reason”:] Cf. E. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, transl. by Reichel, London 1868, p. 125.
[Excerpt] From page 5 of draft “1g)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
The principle of reason—to make no idol the ground of one’s actions—was already in antiquity bound up with the contradictions that have unfolded themselves in modernity. First and foremost is the opposition between individual advantage and reason. Socrates held the ‘Good’ in general, as universal, to be nonsense, no less than the ancient and the modern sophists. A good without relation to a determinate purpose is uninteresting; the Good is nothing other than the useful, the beautiful is nothing other than the practical. Benefits and harms are the measure of good and bad (cf. Zeller II, 1, 151-152). To promote the welfare of the state is good because it is to the benefit of the individual. Whoever would live among human beings must live in the state and observe its laws (cf. Ibid., 167); indeed, this is, at base, the whole doctrine of morality. Advantage, utility, the adaptation of the individual to the conditions of their existence—these are the determinate contents that the principle of reason has retained through modern history. The contradiction lies in the deference to form, as opposed to content, and in the denial of one’s own advantage, which is proven through death for the principle’s sake.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Les Essais de Montaigne, ed. Villey, Paris 1930, Tome II, ch. 12, pp. 491-94.
[“The End of Reason”:] De Maistre, Étude sur la Souveraineté, Oeuvres complètes, Lyon 1891, Tome I, pp. 367-77.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] A. Mathiez, Contributions à l’Histoire religieuse de la Révolution Française, Paris 1907, p. 32.
[Excerpt] 2 Notecards, draft “1k)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
[N1] The appeal to reason with which bourgeois democracy opposes National Socialism can only find a hearing among those who want a return to the old relations.; [N2] Materialism of the French Revolution, the same as Socrates.
Herrenstandpunkt: the racially defined and guaranteed position of the ‘masters’ or ‘master-race.’ The Nazi use of the term term ‘Herrenstandpunkt’ made explicit the connection between the Rassenideologie of the Third Reich and the early 20th-century German colonial policy in Namibia—the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples.
[Excerpt] Note, draft “1l)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
What is right in a determinate situation is linked in a peculiar way to what is right in my own life, indeed in the life of humanity. Identification of this ‘right’ with a determinate content is always only provisional; it is always possible to ask: is this content the right one, the rational one? It is precisely in this sense that philosophers have interrogated reason.
Cf. Adorno’s improvisational sketch of a materialist, historical-philosophical theory of the individual—in a discussion with Horkheimer on January 19th, 1939—in which Adorno interprets the drama of Oedipus as a conflict over the historical emergence of bourgeois private property: “A materialist interpretation of Oedipus would need to account for the disruption of the generation-relation, as in the case of the incest motif. It is possible that the taboo of incest itself is connected with the fact that the individual and his “appropriation” dissolves the nature of property from the age of myth, as manifest in the generation-relation, and survives into the bourgeois age. Perhaps the one who sleeps with his mother is doomed to be cursed by society because he takes for himself what belongs not to the individual but to the succession of generations, the lineage, as expressed in the relation between parents and son. Perhaps the real crime of Oedipus is in the end nothing but the fact he becomes an individual, that he possesses something. Perhaps the horror over his incest only reflects the horror over his presumptuousness.” (Author’s translation.)
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Letter to D’Alembert, 4. Februar 1757, Oeuvres, Tome 39, p. 167.
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Letter to D’Alembert, 2, September 1768, Oeuvres, Tome 46, p, 112. Translation adopted from “The End of Reason.”
[Excerpt] From page 21 of draft “1f)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
[The prevailing contempt for the concept of reason does not in any way extend to the rationality of purposive behavior.] It only affects the remainders of metaphysics or theology in rationalism. The interpretation of the principle of self-preservation common to philosophers from Socrates and Epicurus through Thomas Aquinas to Spinoza and Schelling is revealed as pure ideology. For according to this interpretation, the self-preservation of the human being as a spiritual, intellectual being should lie in the cultivation of a spiritual existence, in contemplation and wisdom. [Today, that being of spirit, the mind, appears not just to those in-the-know but also to the general public as a senseless word, so far as it is supposed to designate not the coordinating of ends and means, but an intellectual faculty or even an objective principle.] The illusion of a spiritual self-preservation is easily explained: in antiquity, it corresponded to the existence of a Bürger-class which increasingly outsourced manual labor onto slaves; in the middle ages, it was an expression of the superiority of the church; in the centuries following the Renaissance, the doctrine glorified the newly emerging scientific theory. But the discourse about ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ (Geist) has no meaning of its own, none whatsoever. This rejection of Geist has lasting consequences. For whom should an action supposed to have any utility at all if there is no “I”? [The body at any rate has only a rather questionable identity throughout the various stages of life.]
Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, translated from the first German edition by C.M. Williams; Revised and supplemented from the fifth German edition by Sydney Waterlow (Open Court, 1914), 23-24.
Cf. Horkheimer’s use of the same citation from Mach in his unpublished 1928/29 review of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] J.G. Fichte, System der Sittenlehre, drittes Hauptstück, §23, Werke, ed. Meiner, Band II, p. 686. Translation adopted from “The End of Reason.”
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] J.G. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, §11, loc. cit., p. 121f. Translation based on that in “The End of Reason,” slightly modified.
[Excerpt] From page 32 of draft “1f)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
The super- and sub-ordination of the medieval ordo appears unprejudiced. Comte provides scientific justification for the patriarchal family and the dependency of women. “Should positive philosophy ever directly undertake,” he says (Cours IV, S. 403.), “to establish once and for all the indispensable hierarchy of the sexes, … it will proceed, as with every other important point, from an exact knowledge of human nature, supplemented through a deep appreciation of the whole of social development and of the general phase in which it now finds itself.” This would begin, he believes, “with the scientific correction of the pseudo-revolutionary theories of alleged equality” (Ibid., S. 405.). According to “positive biology,” the woman finds herself “in a kind of perpetual condition of childhood, which, when it comes to the most important aspects, distances her still further from the ideal type of the race” (Ibid.). Here, too, the founder of positivism turns back to Aristotle’s doctrine, according to which “the virtue of a man consists in commanding, that of a woman in obeying” (Politeia 1260a, 24-25.). And yet, this [patriarch] is no authority on whom one can pin their hopes in the decline of society. When the world has become hell through terroristic domination, the biological doctrine, which is based upon sympathy, must acknowledge the fact that the positive, morally proper inclination is opposed by a negative one, which sometimes, in the end, prevails over the former. This was the conclusion Freud, who agrees with Comte’s patriarchal theory on a number of other points besides, drew as well… [handwritten insert:] …with the dualism of Eros and death drive. All such doctrines are fundamentally pessimistic: human beings are to be explained solely as objects of the laws of nature; they do not trust insight [Erkenntnis] with the power to rectify human affairs. In positing the domination of blind nature and the domination of elites as one and the same, the dream of a free, human community is buried.
Cf. Horkheimer to Paul Guggenheim, 8/2/1941: “In these days of horror, the hope endures that men may know not what they do; indeed, that they fundamentally abhor it. The countless who become instruments of misery seem secretly to see through the world to which they belong, and to feel shame for the executions, expulsions, and other acts of service fate now compels from individuals and whole nations. Propagandistic phrases of justification tend to be banished from human conversations; among themselves, individuals, even the executors themselves, seldom call the invasion of smaller countries “self-defense” anymore, nor the murder of the Jews “cleansings.” Instead, they simply note that the existence of older persons of 72 or 82 in their place of refuge must be perceived “as an abnormality,” and that these persons “are in every respect… only a burden.” But if the justification for the deed only seldom worms its way into the speech of the doers themselves, then when such an “abnormality” forms in the mouths of the endangered, this evokes no less horror than when the deed is done, and with which they identify in advance. I do believe that “nothing is to be expected” from the Jewish associations you have connections with. In any event, I would have thought their members, even if dealing with strangers as little close to them as I am to you, would not claim that “our practice… has recently become extremely strict.” The reproduction of the ruling ideology, in which the rulers themselves do not believe, in the heads of the ruled is an old rule; but in the proximity of territories where the concept of humanity invariably goes hand in hand with that of foolishness, the Jewish profession of strictness is a new experience to me. Until I received your letter, I was still able to find some consolation in the fantasy that the most beautiful lands in Europe had retained their freedom despite all of the anti-Semitism now entrenched there. This joy is beclouded by the knowledge that those who owe the preservation their right to their homeland to such a happy accident now exploit it in the strictness of their conduct to those who have already been driven out of theirs, and the prophylactic refusal of any aid the latter might approach them with in direst need. In thought of certain Christians who, unlike your Jewish associations, incline towards a more humane practice than the “extremely strict” kind when dealing with the burdensome Jews, and to whom I am therefore indebted, I will for the time being continue to believe that the fixity of orientation you ascribe to them is not, without further ado, identical to abuse in outcome. However, it should not have been a mere “trifle” for you, but rather a duty, to first “find out” what precautions I had already taken and the reasons why a different arrangement was impossible until this point before you suggested that I had myself neglected my own duty in such serious matters. If, as a consequence of the impossibility of doing more than has already been done, the worst should come to be at some point in the future, at least I know where you stand.” In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 122-123. Author’s translation.
“murder-lust”: [Mordlust].
Cf. Horkheimer to Egon Wissing, 8/26/1941:
“[…] There is one point that has struck me in particular as of late: the role of consciousness as object of anti-Semitism. It is by no means the case that the Jews are hated solely because higher intelligence is attributed to them. The contrary is just as true. As representatives of monotheism and its secularized forms, for example morality, they are secretly—that is, without the anti-Semites needing to know it—experienced as stupid, or rather, as foolish. Upon closer inspection, it occurs to me that the putative ‘physical inferiority’ is actually a cover-representation for an intellectual one. The intellect as illness, as inferiority, as it was regarded to be by so many up through Klages. The intellect inflicts harm not so much upon the body as upon right, prudent, and rational conduct. Their ridiculous devotion to the one God makes the Jews—in the image of the anti-Semites, not in actuality—clumsy and dangerous at the same time. The murder of the insane holds the key to the Jew-pogrom.
Naturally, this valuation of monotheistic consciousness as folly also conceals a deep reverence. Or, rather, a superstitious fear that one’s own deeds are false and corrupt. That they are not just as spellbound by the purposes and goals in the service of which life today runs its course turns the insane into uncanny spectators who must be removed. In killing the witness, the evil deed is undone.
In this connection, pain plays a special role. The insane one appears as detached, as standing-outside, to live in another world, far removed from the compulsion of the present. Pain calls the human being back to the present (think of the variety of procedures for waking from sleep!), reducing them to a defense-mechanism, to the sole aim of escaping it. Pain binds the whole human being under the spell of its own purpose. That the heretics should recant was merely the rationalizing of the torture; in a much deeper sense, they were supposed to become like their tormentors: namely, to experience the supremacy of the practical purpose in itself. Time and time again, it was to prove that freedom is not possible.”
Author’s translation:
[“Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung”:] Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, §61, op. cit., Band VII, p. 235. Translation adopted from “The End of Reason.”
[“The End of Reason”:] Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, art. Bien, op. cit., Tome 17, p. 579.
[“The End of Reason”:] Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, New York 1922, Vol. I. p. 459.
[Horkheimer’s citation:] John Dewey, “The Psychology of Conduct” in Intelligence in the Modern World, edited by Joseph Ratner, p. 759.
[Horkheimer’s citation:] Diderot, “Fragments Échappés du Portefeuille d’un Philosophe,” Oeuvres Complètes, Assézat, Paris, 1875, tome VI, p. 448.
English: Fragments from a Philosopher’s Wallet, translated by Ariane Brouillard (Märchenhaus Press, 2025)
[Horkheimer’s citation:] [Ibid.]
[Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste.] Literally: “Everyone is their own neighbor.” Alternate English idiom: “Every man for himself.”
[Horkheimer’s citation:] Emile, Buch 4, Werke, Bd. 3, pp. 338–339.
“We have reached the moral order at last; we have just taken the second step towards manhood. If this were the place for it, I would try to show how the first impulses of the heart give rise to the first stirrings of conscience, and how from the feelings of love and hatred spring the first notions of good and evil. I would show that justice and kindness are no mere abstract terms, no mere moral conceptions framed by the understanding, but true affections of the heart enlightened by reason, the natural outcome of our primitive affections; that by reason alone, unaided by conscience, we cannot establish any natural law, and that all natural right is a vain dream if it does not rest upon some instinctive need of the human heart.” In: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile. Translated by Barbara Foxley (J.M. Dent & Sons: London, 1911) [link]
Alternate formulation, crossed out in “1h)”: [The unity of divine reason, that which is subject to no powers of earth but rather prescribes their laws to them, is the ideal representation [Idealvorstellung] of the time in which, according to those later myths, …]
[Excerpt] From page 4 of draft “1j)” of “Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung” in: MHA 638.
To the animals, Aristotle attributes all faculties of the soul, even judgment and phantasia, but not rational insight. Since the 16th century, the distinction between human and animal grew so extreme, it reversed into its opposite. Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza declared the animals automata, and the physicians of their time took them at their word, banishing, as would their modern scientific successors, the riddlesome plus that was left over for human beings—the thinking soul—into the realms of poetry or, more shamefacedly, theology. … In this, materialism was superior to the rationalists: by nullifying that distinction the latter had still, whether sincerely or out of fear, wished to save, materialism reinstated the solidarity of the creature, and, in its denial of reason, bore witness to reason against its defenders.
However, the present-day denial of reason in philosophy, which has since won such widespread recognition, speaks as little against the decisive role of the concept in bourgeois culture than Machiavelli’s moral-free understanding of theory, which has since seized the masses under fascism, speaks against the weight of moral ideas in the consciousness of recent centuries. That the highest concepts in modern philosophy have not only been glorified but also discredited at the same time is a distinguishing characteristic of this epoch. [The moderns] wanted to build on truth, but could not renounce the cunning of repression. Their concept of reason bears the hallmarks of this contradiction everywhere. [...]
This is a great post. I've often reflected on THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT and its relation to the development of the human mind as Homo sapiens have made their historical development from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and on to class ruled civilisations of one sort of another. In this regard, the work of Christopher Boehm has been useful, especially his cross cultural studies of Paleolithic societies adopting 'reverse hierarchical dominance' power structures which allowed humanity to survive before their discovery of how to use domestication of certain animals and plants.