Max Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason gathers essays and lectures written across roughly two decades, from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, and presents them in a single volume translated into English in the early 1970s. The pieces were composed alongside Horkheimer’s practical work — organizing the Studies of Prejudice, administering academic institutions, rebuilding the Institute for Social Research, and pressing for educational reform — and they return, from several angles, to a single preoccupation: what happens to reason when it stops asking what ends are worth pursuing and confines itself to calculating the means. The book moves between philosophical argument, social diagnosis, and historical reflection, with the long essay “The Concept of Man” and the lecture “The Future of Marriage” sitting beside studies of theism, the soul, Schopenhauer, and the German Jews.
“Reason is merely an instrument, and Descartes is superficial.”
The central claim is stated plainly in the Foreword. Reason once meant the activity of understanding and assimilating eternal ideas that served as goals for human life; it now means the work of finding means for whatever goals happen to be adopted at a given time, and it is thought superstitious to imagine that achieved goals might themselves be means to further ends. Reason, Horkheimer writes, comes into its own when it rejects absolute status and accepts itself as a tool. From there the book asks what this instrumentalization does to the people who live inside it — to their families, their marriages, their capacity for friendship, their sense of truth.
From the Concept of Man to the Trial of Eichmann
The Fate of Reason and the Purpose of the Book
Horkheimer opens with a historical claim about what “reason” has meant. Once it named the activity of understanding and assimilating eternal ideas that served as goals for human life; now its essential work is to find means for goals adopted at any given moment, and it counts as superstition to think that achieved goals are not themselves means to further ends. Obedience to God was once the means of winning his favor, yet it also rationalized subjugation, crusades, and terrorism. Since Hobbes, men shaped by the Enlightenment—theists and atheists alike—have treated the commandments as socially useful moral principles promoting a frictionless life, peaceful relations between equals, and respect for the status quo. Strip away the theology and “be reasonable” means: observe the rules necessary for individual and social survival, and do not think only of the present. Reason comes into its own when it rejects absolute status and accepts itself as a tool. Modern philosophy since Descartes sought a compromise between theology and science through the faculty of intellectual ideas, and Kant’s posthumous papers call the soul’s capacity for ideas divine. Nietzsche attacked belief in reason’s autonomy as backwardness, calling Kant retarded and reason merely an instrument. In 1900, the year Nietzsche died, Husserl published the Logical Investigations, a new effort to ground scientifically the perception of spiritual reality and the intuition of essences, extended by Max Scheler and others to moral structures. The enterprise was marked from the start by an effort to turn the clock back; an inner necessity led reason to surrender its status as spiritual substance. The task of theory today is to reflect upon and express this whole process—the socially conditioned drift toward neo-positivism or the instrumentalization of thought, and the vain efforts to rescue thought from that fate.
Horkheimer then explains his selection: pieces written since the mid-forties, amid practical activities—organizing the Studies of Prejudice, academic administration, revitalizing the Institute for Social Research, educational reform. Requests had concerned the period when critical theory took shape: essays for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, unpublished studies, and Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Adorno and long out of print. At the end of the Nazi period he thought a new day would dawn in the developed countries through reform or revolution; with the other founders of Scientific Socialism he thought bourgeois cultural gains—the free development of human powers, spiritual productivity—stripped of force and exploitation, would spread worldwide. His experience since has changed his thinking: the “communist” states using the same Marxist categories are no closer to that day than countries where individual freedom is not yet snuffed out. He therefore puts reflections on reason first, supporting the contention that the rule of freedom, once brought to pass, necessarily turns into its opposite—the automatizing of society and human behavior. Alfred Schmidt helped with selection and revision; the foreword is signed May 1967.
The Concept of Man: Kant’s Three Questions
Contemporary philosophers note that the problem of being as such is inseparable from the problem of man; in Europe, philosophy including existentialism reaches the doctrine of being only after the effort to win insight into man. Man the knower is part of the totality and can perceive being within himself, so understanding the question of being requires entering into oneself and one’s own thinking. Recent ontological philosophy follows older critical philosophy: classical German idealism began with the analysis of thought and the critique of reason, and the ontological trend turned first to the meaning of philosophical questions, then to man, then to being. Ontology may be rediscovering behind hidden being, as idealism did behind the thing-in-itself, the subject, spirit, and activity—though the tone differs today.
Kant reduced the concern with man to three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? The third, at once practical and theoretical, includes the other two and leads to the highest good and absolute justice. Moral conscience rebels against the thought that present reality is final and that undeserved misfortune and wrongdoing have the last word; Kant therefore postulates eternity, and the postulate of a transcendental world is identical with judgment on the immanent world. What mediates is human life; the idea of a just order may have, and ought to have, an influence on the world of sense. Kant’s assurance that realization of the right order belongs to the infinite, intelligible world is meant to help bring about change in the finite world; hope is a constitutive element of his system. Set straight by Rousseau, Kant would have regarded himself as more useless than a common laborer if his meditations could not contribute to re-establishing the rights of mankind—typical of the eighteenth century. The embarrassment militant Enlightenment causes contemporary philosophy, the neglect of its constitutive elements in interpreting Kant, the passage from critique to positivism—all prove not advance but resignation.
In the period after Kant the material conditions for rational administration of the world improved beyond dreaming, yet the heirs do not draw the Kantian conclusion. In the Enlightenment free thought knocked the supports of stupidity from under institutions and gave the bourgeoisie self-awareness; now free thought is felt to be helpless. Mastery of nature has not brought self-realization; the status quo exerts an objective compulsion. Population growth, fully automated technology, the centralization of economic and political power, the increased individual rationality bred by industrial work—these inflict organization and manipulation, leaving only enough spontaneity to launch oneself onto the prescribed track.
The Family, Education, and the Loss of Interiority
Education is shifting from continuing the parents’ life through children toward producing successful, self-asserting individuals. The father no longer finds support in a special future for his children, evident in the liquidation of the remnants of the bourgeois class and the declining significance of individualist entrepreneurship. The characteristic social type is now the employee, whose relation to his children resembles that of an older, more experienced comrade; in advanced countries and strata, strictness gives way to toleration and readiness to help, tied to new educational ideas. The mother is increasingly pushed into work outside the home, making new claims on her psychic capacities and interests. The nineteenth-century upper-class family guaranteed a lengthy, protected childhood and, as a late reflection of feudal hierarchy, produced either security, trust, and direction or parental tyranny and filial resentment. Today’s family has surrendered many remaining functions to other institutions or to society at large.
The young man leaves the family less encumbered but pays with the loss of the interiority formerly developed through interaction during a long childhood. The earlier father was largely a free man: no leader or group made his decisions; within the law he was subject to no one, responsible only to his own conscience—his own master, so his rule need not be tyranny. In favorable conditions he exemplified autonomy, resoluteness, self-command, and breadth of mind, requiring truthfulness, diligence, reliability, intellectual alertness, love of freedom, and discretion—attitudes the child assimilated into conscience, eventually setting him at odds with his father during puberty. Today the child is thrown more directly upon society, childhood is shortened, and a different human mold results. As interiority withers, so do joy in personal decisions, cultural development, and free imagination. New traits mark modern man: technological expertise, presence of mind, pleasure in mastering machinery, and the need to belong to and agree with a majority or model group whose regulations replace individual judgment. Advice, prescriptions, and patterns replace moral substance.
Individual change is the reverse side of social change; the basis and meaning of bourgeois-family qualities are outdated. The large-scale merchant’s cultivated exchange with business friends, as in Wilhelm Meister’s time, is past, as is the old client–lawyer or client–doctor relationship. The civilian once expected the academic man to be a humanistically superior counselor rather than a professional. But the division of labor has grown complex, life is rigidly organized, and cultural differences between nations and classes have been leveled down, so wide-ranging educational formation is unneeded. Public and private relationships belong to the expert; eighteenth-century treatises on dealing with people are replaced by whole professions. Personal views, convictions, and a general yet differentiated education lose usefulness; with the dynamic urge gone, the corresponding dimension of human character disappears. Hence the struggle against reducing the university to a professional school is doomed to failure.
The Two Souls of Modern Man
Horkheimer begins with a split that runs through modern consciousness. Two conceptions of the soul stand opposed: the scientific view, which grants psychic functions but no substantial or immortal soul, and the residue of theological tradition. No serious study has ever fixed what the word “soul” actually means to contemporary people at their various levels of awareness. From ordinary experience he draws a rough picture. Most of the older generation, scientists aside, keep both modes of thought side by side—the empirical-objective and the traditional—so their reactions shift with the situation, private or professional. Advanced young people react skeptically and aggressively to the soul image, as to everything traditional; aware of the need such holdovers once satisfied and of today’s formalist lip-service, they feel the contradiction and refuse to gloss it over. The strictly scientific mind refers unanswerable questions elsewhere—to music, religion, metaphysics, cocktail parties. Youth’s mockery, even its exaggerated negation, amounts to a demand for truthfulness in the principles by which life is guided.
Belief in the soul finds dubious support not only in natural science but in philology and history. Theologians cite the Gospels to prove the soul’s eternity, yet it is unclear how far the word translated “soul” in the Old and New Testaments matches modern religious meanings. Horkheimer ventures no philological opinion but suspects the separable, body-outliving soul, and the two-substance doctrine of body and soul, arose independently of Scripture, apart from isolated anticipations. The claim that man, unlike the beasts, has a soul independent of the body, roots in ancient Greece rather than Judeo-Christian sources. Scholasticism had to wrestle with problems like how a soul separated by death can be punished in hell’s fire; Aquinas devotes a chapter of the Summa contra Gentiles to it. The ordinary reader of Matthew 25:41 imagines the whole man thrust into darkness; Thomas the Aristotelian speculates that the soul, the body’s vital form, individuated by the body and carrying guilt when it leaves, enters bondage to material fire—punished by subjection to bodily things, its inferiors. The Egyptian-Indian migration of souls, passing through Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Plato to the Church Fathers, here reaches into Scholasticism.
Early Christian hell-anxiety was bound up with anxiety for one’s own body, as the martyrs’ hope of blessedness was tied to expecting death as a quick, real passage from a lower to a higher spatial realm. The soul/body dualism of texts like Ecclesiastes 12:7 became vital to the Christian world-view only when doctrine came into sharp opposition with the new sciences—astronomy, ethnology, history, biology, physiology. Modern philosophy’s central preoccupation is elaborating theories that reconcile religious concepts with scientific progress. The Protestant decision to accept new information as knowledge and God’s word as faith served the same purpose. The first systematic attempt to justify the two substances compatibly with science, especially mathematics, dates from the seventeenth century and was Descartes’ work, the beginning of modern philosophy.
Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Enlightenment
Spinoza, a pantheist with no interest in personal survival, held that the wise man has no time for such problems; insofar as thought knows itself one with the absolute and permanent, it shares that character. Finite beings are not substances but ephemeral modifications, waves on the ocean of eternal being; they must pass away yet belong to the eternal, and existence’s purpose is to become conscious of this. The idea of the soul’s oneness with omnipresent substance, and the rejection of the isolated individual idolizing itself as absolute, points back to early Indian thought; Averroes and Pomponazzi represent the heretical union with the world-soul, and Hegel’s doctrine is not far from this annihilation—sublimation—of the individual. Leibniz, by contrast, maintained the substantial individual soul as his principle for explaining the world: immaterial monads are truly real, consciousness an attribute of the higher ones, and death merely a change in relations between monads, not the end of their lives. Horkheimer mentions these systems only because their efforts to satisfy both science and theological heritage evidence centuries of unrest and doubt about the immortal soul; they are historically significant but cannot help in our perplexity. The Enlightenment formulations remain relevant: Diderot’s dialogue, where the speaker refuses to talk of what he cannot know and, terrified by the idea of nothingness, raises his mind to the Supreme Being; Voltaire’s doubters asking what we are, whence we come, what we are doing.
Schopenhauer’s Clear-Sighted Pessimism
Schopenhauer saw things too clearly to exclude historical improvement, foreseeing the end of almost all hard manual labor more precisely than most economists of his day—and suspecting what could follow: blind devotion to success and a setback for a peaceful course of events, the dialectic of such progress. Like some left-wing Hegelians, he rejected the State’s divinity. For him the good state is the quintessence of reasonable self-interest, protecting individuals from each other and citizens from other states; it is no moral institution but rests on force. He agreed with the founders of socialism that at the highest stage mankind would need no state, yet saw no prospect of it. He deified neither state nor technology. The development of the intellect rests on that of needs; hunger, the urge to power, and war have been the greatest promoters of knowledge. The idealistic fable of the ruse of reason, extenuating past horrors by pointing to good ends, actually babbles the truth that blood and misery stick to society’s triumphs.
In the century since his death, history admitted he saw into its heart. Around the middle of the last century there was still something like European solidarity, urbane intercourse among nations, discretion toward small ones. Then came the shift from balance of power to ruthless competition; stiffer competition spurred technology, the armaments race began, rulers and ministers appeared in uniform. The anarchy of nations led to world wars and a frantic urge for power in all nations—Schopenhauer’s prognosis. Domestic concentration of power is outdistanced by competition abroad; material interests, the struggle for existence, prosperity, and power are the motor, and history is the result.
The Enemy of Nationalism
Schopenhauer offered no philosophic rationalizations for experiences of terror and injustice; history frightened him. He detested violent political change brought by nationalistic enthusiasm. Not having lived to see absolutism’s decay in its acute phase, he took no interest in a change of system; he preferred, as Goethe writes, to converse “with clever men, with tyrants” rather than join demagogues and fanaticized masses. His hatred of “patriots” sprang immediately from the threat to his economic independence, but indirectly aimed at nationalism and the nationalistic age then beginning. He shared Goethe’s lack of enthusiasm for Prussia’s so-called wars of liberation and Hegel’s fear of the French revolution of 1830. The great enlighteners were wary of The People as highest value; Lessing suggested men should recognize when patriotism ceases to be a virtue. “The Nation” was the word with which new forces opposed to absolutism stirred up the people. Schopenhauer gave Germans credit for not indulging in national pride as the English did; later Germans made up for it, and he was startled to meet this demagogy, “this game of insidious swindlers.” National pride, like individual pride, is easily injured; revenge is blind and devastating. Fanaticism was once distorted religion; since St. Just and Robespierre it took the form of exaggerated nationalism, which strong men in the saddle call up to rationalize murky instincts. When those in power have nothing to offer, they loose peddlers of nationalistic community, this mirage of Utopia, feeding the sugar pill of cruelty. Historians distrust generalizations and reflect on differences among ruling systems, so the reign of terror in twentieth-century Europe seemed an accident; anyone predicting it in Schopenhauer’s day would have been decried as a blind pessimist. He was a clairvoyant one.
His fear of incipient nationalism is a sign of his modernity: to take no bribes from the Zeitgeist.
Group Identity and the Sources of Jewish Response
Horkheimer opens by insisting that groups carry more than explicit doctrine. Catholics, Protestants, Jews—and any group bound by something other than faith—develop patterns of thought, association, inclination and revulsion that reach well into non-religious life. German dialect groups differ not only in speech but in concrete forms of thought, gesture and emotional reaction grown up with language across history. The child does not inherit this naturally, as a mistaken theory would have it; he sees it embodied in his mother and father and makes it his own. Every man carries from the start the potentialities actualized in those unlike him, and grasping this is the whole point of efforts at mutual understanding. The same holds for the two Christian confessions, whose bloody onslaughts lie further back than the recent persecution of the Jews.
Jewish responses to emancipation spring from two sources: the historically conditioned nature of the Jew, which could not simply vanish once emancipation arrived, and the idiosyncratic reactions of different milieus. Small differences become pretexts for projecting repressed guilt and hatred. One response was assimilation—the effort to be like the Germans, ending if not in baptism then in adaptation at every point. Conscious adaptation overreached itself: many assimilated Jews of the German Empire were a shade more loyal to the Kaiser than other citizens, and no less critical of their fellow-Jews from the East. People note the Jew’s analytico-critical attitude and his partiality for intellectual professions, citing the Talmud; but a key source is the seriousness with which the newly accepted Jew took bourgeois society—the obverse of assimilation. Some of the most uncompromising Jewish critics of that society were baptized, so deeply did they identify with the order that they measured it against their own ideal. The Marx–Jenny von Westphalen relationship and the Marx–Engels friendship seem symbolic of this atmosphere. Marxist theory, Horkheimer digresses, shows more bourgeois-individualistic traits—then highly conservative—than totalitarian collectivists suspect. Assimilation and criticism are two moments of the same emancipation process.
Liberal Judaism and the Zionist Break
Judaism as a confession was another element: since the earthly fatherland won out over the heavenly one, the confession is meant solely for private life. Unlike Judaism as a principle determining individual and social life, liberal Judaism prides itself that its communities form part of the national state—a free association of citizens sharing interests. In orthodox communities something of the ancient life-style survives, especially in postwar Germany, where the Jews gathered are mainly those driven there by persecution and war, mostly from lands where Jewish isolation was abolished later than in western Europe. Participation in new prosperity affects even their relation to tradition; the transformation of religion into confession proceeds apace.
A radically different reaction is the new Jewish nationalism of Zionism. Unlike the critico-negative spirit running down to Mahler, Freud, Kraus and Einstein, Zionism sprang from despair at success along that line. Herzl knew Russian, Austrian and German anti-Semitism and felt the hatred of the Dreyfus trial in France firsthand; raised in an assimilated circle, he lost faith in pluralism amid a nationalistic, militaristic world. His forebodings seem justified: as technology develops, populations increase, and peoples harden into organized power blocs, the European civilization of the nineteenth century has little prospect of surviving the latter twentieth. Anti-Semitism may have religious origins but is no longer essentially religious—it is a means of manipulation, a weak point open to attack by more vigorously organized foreign nationalism, and since military striking power depends on the population, anti-Semitism assures it. Herzl held that Jews needed assimilation to the ways of the nations in general—a territory and patriotism of their own. The Jewish State marks the movement’s beginning and voices doubt that European states could take pluralism seriously or leave the individual free to follow his own principles. Zionism is Judaism’s radical yet resigned reaction; the saddest aspect of contemporary history is that it has proved a true prophet.
The Resemblance the Persecutors Acknowledged
Horkheimer returns to resemblance as a reason for irrational hatred. Resemblances exist, acknowledged by men of insight and by the persecutors themselves. A quoted passage holds that Germans, like Jews, will let themselves be oppressed but not exterminated, keeping their cohesiveness even when deprived of a fatherland. The insane dictator said: has it not struck you how the Jew is the exact opposite of the German in every respect, and yet as closely akin to him as a blood brother? Germans became free citizens late and created a centralized state late—Plessner’s title The Belated Nation. Once admitted to competition, Germans won high place through mercantile proficiency and scientific brilliance otherwise attributed only to Jews; English industrialists’ complaints at the turn of the century read like German letters about Jewish acquisitiveness. Americans know the German capacity for assimilation; Horkheimer knows Germans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who quickly learn to speak German with an American accent—diligence betraying both talent and weakness. The deeper point: because Germans reached statehood late, they applied their energies to economics and power late. While France entered its Revolution, thought had its heyday in German lands under absolutism—the nation of poets and thinkers—while English and French philosophy tended toward nominalism and positivism, directed at shaping the real world.
The Case Against the Eichmann Trial
The internal grounds for the arrest and trial are inadequate. The claim that the trial will teach Israel’s youth and other nations the true nature of the Third Reich is rejected: if such knowledge must come through sensationalist reporting rather than the solid literature already available in every major language, its prospects are poor. A mind impressed only by headlines lacks depth and will not retain what it reads. The effects of repeated trial references to the elimination of the Jews are hard to foresee; the young the authorities hope to win may suspect the dead are being used as a political or pedagogical tool, even for a praiseworthy national purpose. That paralyzes the opposition of good to destruction, since it uses the enemy’s own intellectual weapons. Criminal trials for calculated ends belong to the arsenal of antisemitism, not Judaism.
Expectations about the Eichmann revelations are equally mistaken: persecution and mass murder are basic themes of world history and seldom frighten off future Fuhrers. Terrorism becomes repugnant only briefly after defeat; abhorrence passes. After Waterloo no one dared defend Napoleon, yet when Louis Philippe’s economic miracle came, Napoleon’s casket was brought to Paris and the infamous man mounted the imperial throne until the Prussians defeated him again; by century’s end France was regarded as protectress of freedom. The power of forgetfulness is great and grows with communications. Horkheimer deeply distrusts the term “reparation,” alien and reminiscent of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition; that Eichmann could atone by human standard is a grotesque mockery of Jewish sacrifice. Open revenge is more understandable—had a bereaved person ambushed and killed him in Argentina, he would act as a sympathetic human being. The carefully staged trial offends right feeling. Punishing Eichmann is beneath Israel’s dignity; refusal of violence as proof of truth is a perennial Jewish trait, and injustice has become a mode of experience, suffering and hope inseparable. Jews never glorified suffering, only experienced it; suffering colors remembrance of the dead with infinite tenderness, not sainthood. The court is incompetent, Eichmann should be returned whence he was spirited away, and the trial is a repetition—he will cause harm a second time.
Feudal Lord, Customer, and Specialist
Bourgeois culture took over feudal dignity, honor and freedom, transferring them to every individual, especially the well-off; hierarchy became a freely adopted form. Classical bourgeois England, Voltaire and Goethe wanted unqualified respect for the nobility. The marketplace reveals bourgeois manners; “service” retained traces of the servant-relationship. After the Ancien Régime collapsed, noble manners revived—Molière’s Bourgeois Gentleman. “The customer is always right” derives from the age of the absolute ruler; respect for the customer became education. Alongside ruthlessness went adaptability; the customer was wooed and flattered, gaining a little freedom and self-respect.
What Instrumental Reason Does to a Life
The book’s most concrete work is its portrait of a personality being remade. Horkheimer traces the change through the family first. The nineteenth-century bourgeois father was, in favorable conditions, his own master — subject to no leader or group, answerable to his own conscience — and so his authority could exemplify autonomy, resoluteness, and breadth of mind rather than mere tyranny. The child absorbed those attitudes into conscience and eventually turned them against the father in puberty. That whole mechanism is going slack. The characteristic social type is now the employee, whose relation to his children resembles that of an older, more experienced comrade; strictness gives way to toleration, childhood shortens, and the child is thrown more directly upon society. As interiority withers, so do joy in personal decisions, cultural development, and free imagination. What replaces them is technological expertise, presence of mind, pleasure in mastering machinery, and the need to belong to a group whose regulations substitute for individual judgment.
This is where the book’s treatment of equality becomes uncomfortable. Horkheimer is no defender of the old hierarchy, but he notices that as the principle of equal exchange penetrates the family, marriage becomes a bargain between partners each evaluated by society’s criteria, and the personal sphere is rationalized precisely at the moment the culture based on exchange feels threatened. The same logic reaches friendship, which loses practical value once individuals no longer pursue self-determined goals, and love, which bourgeois marriage had always underwritten with taboos. Even leisure is pre-organized: time gained through technology is scheduled in advance, and the machinery of mass opinion — newspapers, radio, cinema, television — guides men as they relax. Work accustoms each person to react to signs, and signs guide him everywhere, so he unlearns spontaneous response. Horkheimer borrows Duhamel’s formulation: if the machine grows more like man, modern civilization presses man toward greater likeness to the machine.
The Broken Promise of Enlightenment
Running beneath the social diagnosis is an argument about philosophy’s own retreat. Kant reduced the question of man to three — what can I know, what ought I to do, what may I hope — and the third, at once practical and theoretical, carried the others toward the highest good and absolute justice. Moral conscience rebels at the thought that undeserved misfortune has the last word, so Kant postulated eternity, and that postulate is itself a judgment on the world as it stands. Horkheimer insists this was meant to help change the finite world, not to console it; Kant, set straight by Rousseau, would have counted himself more useless than a common laborer if his meditations could not help re-establish the rights of mankind. The embarrassment militant Enlightenment causes contemporary philosophy, and the passage from critique to positivism, prove not advance but resignation. Material conditions for rational administration of the world improved beyond anything Kant dreamed of, yet his heirs decline to draw his conclusion.
The essays on religion push the same point further. Without God, Horkheimer argues, absolute meaning cannot be preserved; the death of God is the death of eternal truth. Yet he has no patience for theism that uses eternal justice as a pretext for temporal injustice, and he observes that professed atheists have sometimes identified more deeply with the commandment to love one’s neighbor than believers do. What he wants to rescue is the thought of something other than the world, over which nature’s fixed rules have no dominion — the spiritual basis of the civilization, held to by those who resist. Theism, he suggests, is becoming actual again in its decline.
Schopenhauer as the Teacher for Modern Times
The figure who holds the book’s second half together is Schopenhauer, and Horkheimer’s reading of him is deliberately unfashionable. Schopenhauer saw the historical situation too clearly to miss the coming end of hard manual labor, and he suspected what could follow: blind devotion to success and a setback for any peaceful course of events. He rejected the divinity of the state, calling the good state the quintessence of reasonable self-interest, resting on force and no moral institution at all. He detested nationalism and the fanaticism of unity, preferred conversing with clever men and tyrants to joining demagogues and fanaticized masses, and regarded world history skeptically as the unchanging and permanent. Anyone predicting the twentieth century in his day, Horkheimer notes, would have been decried as a blind pessimist; Schopenhauer was a clairvoyant one.
What makes him a teacher rather than a curiosity is that his doctrine of blind will strips away the treacherous gold foil old metaphysics gave the world, and in doing so preserves the negative instead of short-circuiting it the way positivism does. Positivism is right against metaphysics: nothing unconditional guarantees truth. Theological metaphysics is right against positivism: every spoken statement makes an impossible claim concerning truth whether or not the speaker intends it. Without thinking about truth there is no knowledge of its opposite — the abandonment of mankind — and without that knowledge no sorrow, and without sorrow no happiness. From the recognition of universal abandonment, Horkheimer argues, a solidarity can arise that owes nothing to reincarnation or calculation: the merciless structure of eternity could generate a community of the abandoned, as injustice and terror produce a community of resisters. He is careful about the idols that replace the old faith. Humanity hypostatized as absolute becomes a demonic idol, and he says plainly that the revolutions since 1789 reduced their humanistic content and increased nationalism, that Lenin and his friends opened the way to a terroristic totalitarian bureaucracy no closer to freedom than the empire of the czar.
A Pessimism That Keeps Its Hope
The book’s final movement turns to the Jews of Germany, and it is here that Horkheimer’s method shows most clearly. He refuses the easy account. Alongside explicit doctrine, he argues, groups develop patterns of thought, gesture, and emotional reaction that a child does not inherit but takes over from watching his parents; every man carries the potentialities actualized in those who differ from him, and grasping this is the goal of mutual understanding. Jewish responses to emancipation had a twofold source — the historically conditioned nature of the Jew, which could not simply vanish, and the reactions of particular milieus. Assimilation overreached itself: some of the most uncompromising Jewish critics of bourgeois society were baptized, so deeply had they identified with the order that they measured it against their own ideal. Zionism he treats as the radical, resigned reaction, born of Herzl’s loss of faith in pluralism, and he calls the saddest aspect of contemporary history that Zionism proved a true prophet.
The essay on Eichmann is the book’s hardest passage, and it does not go where a reader might expect. Horkheimer distrusts the staged trial, doubts that headlines teach anything lasting, warns that using the dead as a pedagogical tool hands the enemy his own weapons, and says that punishing Eichmann is beneath Israel’s dignity — that refusal of violence as proof of truth is a perennial Jewish trait, and that had a bereaved person ambushed him in Argentina he would have acted as a sympathetic human being. The power of forgetfulness is great and grows with communications; persecution and mass murder are basic themes of world history and seldom frighten off future Führers.
What survives all this is not optimism but a stubborn refusal of resignation. Horkheimer ends by hoping that some men will resist in the coming period of docile masses governed by clocks, as past victims did — including Christianity’s founder. If young people recognize the contradiction between the possibilities of human powers and the actual situation of the earth, unobscured by nationalistic fanaticism or theories of transcendental justice, identification and solidarity may still become decisive. The road there leads through knowledge — of science, of politics, and of great literature. Few ideas, he concludes, are needed more than those which, facing utter hopelessness, know more of hope than any others.
