God, but they do not deny his existence. In all of the Institut’s writings, the standard was a society made rational, in the sense that German philosophy had traditionally defined that term. Reason, as the passage above indicates, was the “critical tribunal” on which Critical Theory was primarily based. The irrationality of the current society was always challenged by the “negative” possibility of a truly rational alternative.
If Horkheimer was reluctant to affirm the complete identity of subject and object, he was more certain in rejecting their strict dualistic opposition, which Descartes had bequeathed to modern thought.85 Implicit in the Cartesian legacy, he argued, was the reduction of reason to its subjective dimension. This was the first step in driving rationality away from the world and into contemplative inwardness. It led to an eternal separation of essence and appearance, which fostered the noncritical acceptance of the status quo.86 As a result, rationality increasingly came to be identified with the common sense of Verstand instead of the more ambitiously synthetic Vernunft. In fact, the late nineteenth-century irrationalists’ attack on reason had been aimed primarily at its reduction to the analytical, formal, divisive Verstand. This was a criticism Horkheimer could share, although he did not reject analytical rationality out of hand. “Without definiteness and the order of concepts, without Verstand” he wrote, “there is no thought, and no dialectic.”87 Even Hegel’s dialectical logic, which Critical Theory embraced, did not simply negate formal logic. The Hegelian aufheben meant preservation as well as transcendence and cancellation. What Horkheimer did reject was the complete identification of reason and logic with the limited power of Verstand.
Throughout its history, the Institut carried on a spirited defense of reason on two fronts. In addition to the attack by the irrationalists, which by the twentieth century had degenerated into outright obscurantist mindlessness, another and perhaps more serious threat was posed from a different quarter. With the breakdown of the Hegelian synthesis in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new stress on empirically derived social science had developed alongside the increasing domination of natural science over men’s lives. Positivism denied the validity of the traditional idea of reason as Vernunft, which it dismissed as empty metaphysics. At the time of the Frankfurt School the most significant proponents of this point of view were the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, who were forced to emigrate to the United States at about the same time.88 In America their impact was far greater than the Institut’s because of the congruence of their ideas with the basic traditions of American philosophy. In later years Horkheimer took pains to establish the similarities between such native schools as pragmatism and Logical Positivism.89
His first major broadside against Logical Positivism came in 1937 in the Zeitschrift.90 Once again his sensitivity to the changing functions of a school of thought in different historical contexts was evident. Originally, he argued, empiricism as practiced by Locke and Hume contained a dynamic, even critical, element, in its insistence on the individual’s perception as the source of knowledge. The Enlightenment empiricists had used their observations to undermine the prevailing social order. Contemporary Logical Positivism, on the other hand, had lost this subversive quality, because of its belief that knowledge, although initially derived from perception, was really concerned with judgments about that perception contained in so-called “protocol sentences.”91 By restricting reality to that which could be expressed in such sentences, the unspeakable was excluded from the philosopher’s domain. But even more fundamentally, the general empiricist stress on perception ignored the active element in all cognition. Positivism of all kinds was ultimately the abdication of reflection.92 The result was the absolutizing of “facts” and the reification of the existing order.93
In addition to his distaste for their fetishism of facts, Horkheimer further objected to the Logical Positivists’ reliance on formal logic to the exclusion of a substantive alternative. To see logic as an analogue of mathematics, he held, was to reduce it to a series of tautologies with no real meaning in the historical world. To believe that all true knowledge aspired to the condition of scientific, mathematical conceptualization was a surrender to a metaphysics as bad as the one the positivists had set out to refute.94
What was perhaps worst of all in Horkheimer’s eyes was the positivists’ pretension to have disentangled facts from values. Here he detected a falling away from the original Enlightenment use of empiricism as a partisan weapon against the mystifications of superstition and tradition. A society, he argued,95 might itself be “possessed” and thus produce “facts” that were themselves “insane.” Because it had no way to evaluate this possibility, modern empiricism capitulated before the authority of the status quo, despite its intentions. The members of the Vienna Circle might be progressive in their politics, but this was in no way related to their philosophy. Their surrender to the mystique of the prevailing reality, however, was not arbitrary; rather it was an expression of the contingency of existence in a society that administered and manipulated men’s lives. As man must reestablish his ability to control his own destiny, so must reason be restored to its proper place as the arbiter of ends, not merely means. Vernunft must regain the field from which it had been driven by the triumph of Verstand.
What made Horkheimer’s stress on reason so problematical was his equally strong antimetaphysical bias. Reality had to be judged by the “tribunal of reason,” but reason was not to be taken as a transcendent ideal, existing outside history. Truth, Horkheimer and his colleagues always insisted, was not immutable. And yet, to deny the absoluteness of truth was not to succumb to relativism, epistemological, ethical, or otherwise. The dichotomy of absolutism and relativism was in fact a false one. Each period of time has its own truth, Horkheimer argued,96 although there is none above time. What is true is whatever fosters social change in the direction of a rational society. This of course once again raised the question of what was meant by reason, which Critical Theory never attempted to define explicitly. Dialectics was superb at attacking other systems’ pretensions to truth, but when it came to articulating the ground of its own assumptions and values, it fared less well. Like its implicit reliance on a negative anthropology, Critical Theory had a basically insubstantial concept of reason and truth, rooted in social conditions and yet outside them, connected with praxis yet keeping its distance from it. If Critical Theory can be said to have had a theory of truth, it appeared in its immanent critique of bourgeois society, which compared the pretensions of bourgeois ideology with the reality of its social conditions. Truth was not outside the society, but contained in its own claims. Men had an emancipatory interest in actualizing the ideology.
In rejecting all claims to absolute truth, Critical Theory had to face many of the problems that the sociology of knowledge was trying to solve at the same time. Yet Horkheimer and the others were never willing to go as far as Karl Mannheim, who coincidentally shared office space at the Institut before 1933, in “unmasking” Marxism as just one more ideology among others. By claiming that all knowledge was rooted in its social context (Seinsgebunden), Mannheim seemed to be undermining the basic Marxist distinction between true and false consciousness, to which Critical Theory adhered. As Marcuse was to write, Critical Theory “is interested in the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths, of previous philosophies.”97 Yet curiously, when Horkheimer wrote his critique of Mannheim in the pre-emigration years,98 he chose to attack him primarily for the absolutist rather than relativist implications of his sociology of knowledge. Especially unfortunate in this respect, he argued, was Mannheim’s “relationism,” which attempted to salvage objective truth by arguing that all partial truths were perspectives on the whole. By assuming that such a total truth existed in the synthesis of different viewpoints, Mannheim was following a simplified Gestaltist concept of knowledge.99 Underlying it all was a quasi-Hegelian, harmonistic belief that one could reconcile all perspectives, a belief whose implications for social change were quietistic. Unlike Marx, who had sought social transformation rather than truth, Mannheim had covertly returned to a metaphysical quest for pure knowledge.100
Moreover, Horkheimer charged, Mannheim’s concept of the “Being” that determined consciousness was highly undialectical. To Horkheimer,