Postmetaphysical Conundrums: The Problematic Return to Metaphysics in Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason

Abstract

Largely overshadowed by the renown of his colleagues Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer’s contributions to the Frankfurt School are often downplayed as those of the mere director of the Institute for Social Research and the lesser coauthor of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Despite occupying this position of marginality within the corpus of Critical Theory, Horkheimer’s work stands as a significant and sustained attempt to develop an interdisciplinary and materialist research program as a methodological alternative to metaphysical philosophy. As J. C. Berendzen notes, one of Horkheimer’s most significant contributions to philosophy is his development of materialism as a viable postmetaphysical critical social theory.1 Likewise, Hauke Brunkhorst lauds Horkheimer’s “materialist destruction of philosophy” for opening the way to a “social-scientific transformation of philosophy” that takes leave of the problems of metaphysical philosophy.2 Even with such high praise for the strides his early work makes in establishing a tenable materialist, postmetaphysical philosophy, critics such as Georg Lohmann regard Horkheimer’s later critique of instrumental reason as engaging in a totalizing critique that undermines its own foundations, which raises once again the question of the precise role metaphysics plays not only in Horkheimer’s work but also in critique generally. In his essay “The Failure of Self-Realization: An Interpretation of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason,”3 written expressly for the 1993 collection of essays, On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives—which aimed to rectify the dearth of attention to Horkheimer’s work but is, however, composed of critical essays in concert with Jürgen Habermas’s characterization of the failures of Horkheimer’s Critical Theory4—Lohmann argues that Horkheimer’s narration of the rise of instrumental reason presents the end of metaphysics through an indictment of instrumental reason that must itself in some way rest on a metaphysical foundation if it is to justify its denunciatory claims. For Lohmann, this leaves Horkheimer in an untenable bind: either his critique rests on a metaphysical basis and thereby refutes his very narration of the rise of instrumental reason and the concomitant end of metaphysics, or his critique is without basis and expresses little more than a whimsical resistance to the surge of an increasingly rampant cultural nihilism. Either way, for Lohmann, Horkheimer’s position is fraught with aporia.5While Lohmann states that his overall aim in rereading Eclipse of Reason is to undertake the magnanimous task of rescuing the “critical intent” at work in it (FSR, 388), his reading fails to register a level of nuance vital to Horkheimer’s argument. I contend that Horkheimer indeed grounds his indictment of instrumental reason in forms of truth and reason. However, since Horkheimer locates the forms of truth and reason to which he appeals in the nature of nonidentity thinking, he assumes that he has circumvented the trappings of metaphysical philosophy. In this way, Horkheimer both anticipates and evades Lohmann’s dilemma. Yet this evasion, I maintain, leaves Horkheimer no better situated, as his position hypostasizes nonidentity thinking and in so doing establishes itself as an antimetaphysical philosophy, which is, simply, another variant of metaphysics. This conclusion though, in and of itself, still leaves us on the well-trod ground of Habermasian and post-Habermasian criticisms leveled against the critique of instrumental reason. Thus I further argue that what is most significant about Horkheimer’s establishment of a metaphysical philosophy in this case is not that it merely stands as another instance of “totalizing critique” but, more important, that it also violates the earlier methodological parameters he established for his interdisciplinary materialism as a postmetaphysical philosophy. This is disastrous for Horkheimer, since, as a materialist and postmetaphysical philosopher, he is committed to the position that metaphysics is both an obstacle to the alleviation of human suffering and an instrument of domination. By unwittingly lapsing into metaphysics, Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason succumbs to the very tyranny and domination it sought to obviate and undermines the original emancipatory purposes of his work. I aim to use the foundering of Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason on an unintentional lapse into metaphysical philosophy to signal the perils that lie in wait for any postmetaphysical philosophy that fails to steer a clear path between the antipodes of metaphysical and antimetaphysical positions.I turn first to Horkheimer’s materialist essays of the 1930s in which he sketches out his conception of, and objections to, metaphysics as well as how his conception of an interdisciplinary materialism offers an alternative to the transhistorical project of metaphysical philosophy. Next, I examine the place of metaphysics in the critique of instrumental reason as it is elaborated in Eclipse of Reason. I revisit Lohmann’s critique of Horkheimer to demonstrate that through the hypostatization of nonidentity thinking, which he intends to serve as a basis for the critique of instrumental reason, Horkheimer unwittingly establishes a transhistorical antimetaphysical philosophy that runs counter to his own aims. Lastly, I articulate the manner in which this perilous move calls on postmetaphysical philosophies to renounce conventional metaphysical foundations—both ontologically and normatively—if they are to avoid the incoherencies and contradictions of antimetaphysical positions.According to Horkheimer, metaphysics, as classically conceived, is concerned with securing an absolutely perfect understanding of ultimate reality. Traditionally, this is understood in terms of the inquiring subject trying to discern with perfect clarity the fundamentally unified and universal structure of reality that underlies the totality of being. As a consequence, a central component of metaphysical thinking, and the epistemological position that it assumes, is the tendency to pursue an ideal correspondence between knowledge and the known—or rather, an identity between the concept of the object and the object of the concept. In this way, the knowledge of the knowing subject and the fundamental structure of reality should perfectly coincide.More significantly, Horkheimer claims that metaphysicians engage in the project of metaphysics not merely for its own sake but also out of a desire to provide an absolutely certain foundation for normativity. As Horkheimer notes: The effort to make his personal life dependent at every point on insight into the ultimate ground of things marks the metaphysician.6The metaphysician thus believes that, in the being he seeks to discover, a basis may be found for shaping the individual’s life. . . . Ultimate reality is regarded as normative, however, not only in those systems where religious origins of the dependence relationship still show in the form which precept takes, but also in all cases where harmony between the individual’s existence and its ground as discovered by metaphysics is regarded as valuable. (MM, 18–19)For Horkheimer, one of the hallmarks of metaphysical thinking is an attempt to ground both ethics and a basis for normative critique in an understanding of ultimate reality.Horkheimer, however, has two objections to the project of metaphysics. First, he claims that the task of trying to ascertain the fundamental structure of reality turns us away from the problems of this world and focuses us instead on another, and quite possibly illusory, world. This, in effect, cultivates an insensitivity to the wretchedness of the world and our time, and distracts us from seeking its causes and altering its conditions. Rather than place a higher value on changing the immediate and concrete material conditions of human existence in this world, metaphysics relegates the social problems of this world to an inferior position relative to the project of absolute knowing. Consequently, for Horkheimer, the task of metaphysics by its very nature devalues human existence in favor of another world and thereby ignores the plight of humanity. Second, and more important, Horkheimer claims that, under the guise of universality, metaphysical theories have been employed throughout history as a way to justify the demand to recognize what are merely the particular interests of individuals and social groups. As Horkheimer states: “Ruling and ruled classes alike have not been satisfied to present their claims simply as expressions of their particular needs and desires. They have also proclaimed them as universally binding requirements grounded in transcendent sources, as principles in accord with the eternal nature of the world and man” (MM, 22). In other words, social classes are rarely content to present their specific needs as an expression of their own personal agenda and instead often present those needs as universal and binding laws of nature. For this reason, Horkheimer characterizes metaphysics as an instrument of domination—that is, as a method for imposing one’s own interests on others and for soliciting their obedience in the process of doing so.Critically suspicious of the project of metaphysics, Horkheimer casts doubt on the very possibility of procuring a cognition of the eternal and unchanging structure of ultimate reality, arguing that the claim that there is an absolute order and an absolute demand made upon man always supposes a claim to know the whole, the totality of things, the infinite. But if our knowledge is in fact not yet final, if there is an irreducible tension between concept and being, then no proposition can claim the dignity of perfect knowledge. Knowledge of the infinite must itself be infinite, and a knowledge which is admittedly imperfect is not a knowledge of the absolute. (MM, 27)For Horkheimer, the project of metaphysics problematically assumes an eternal and unchanging structure of reality as well as a knowing subject that can, through reason, transcend the particularities and specificities of space and time to access this essential structure. In other words, Horkheimer understands metaphysics as a transhistorical project aiming to secure what is unconditioned. However, such a project seems infeasible to Horkheimer. Neither nature nor the subject appears to possess the immutability attributed to them by metaphysics. Instead, advancing his interdisciplinary materialism as a methodological alternative to metaphysics, Horkheimer operates with a conception of the knowing subject as deeply situated within its historical and material conditions and as thereby constituted by those conditions.The methodological difference between Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism and metaphysics is here worth emphasizing. Whereas metaphysical philosophies advance absolute and universal claims about both the knowing subject and reality, the position advanced by an interdisciplinary materialism concerning the knowing subject and reality is not regarded as claims about the timeless and enduring nature of either but is instead explicitly held as hypothetical and provisional principles postulated for understanding our historical moment as well as for guiding and orienting inquiry. The importance of understanding Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism distinctly as a method, to distinguish it from metaphysics, is similarly emphasized by Brunkhorst: The other limit is the historicity of real subjects. Entirely in the sense of historicism, the contingent historical horizon of the “respective concrete situation of the actor” is an insuperable given for them. Everything is historically conditioned. Nor is that meant as transcendental philosophy: it is only a refutable supposition, which has taken its leave of philosophy. Therefore . . . Horkheimer’s materialism is essentially methodological materialism. It has a decidedly scientistic streak. It accepts the distinction between “is” and “ought.” Fallibilistic and oriented toward the sciences of experience, this materialism seeks to expose its own hopes to disillusionment. Along with Dilthey, it regards metaphysics as a mere hypothesis. It is a resolute attempt at a transformation of philosophy into science but not simply in order to have the specialized disciplines step into the place of philosophy. Methodological materialism takes the primacy of experience as its point of departure.7There are two primary reasons for emphasizing this methodological difference between Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism and metaphysics. The first involves the potentially self-referential and ultimately contradictory nature of the position Horkheimer must avoid. If he were to posit the historically conditioned nature of both the knowing subject and the world as absolutes or as reflecting the inherent and timeless nature of things, then his position would immediately lapse into a variant of metaphysics—that is, Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism would be guilty of engaging in the very same transhistorical project of which he charges metaphysics and would, of necessity, undermine itself.8 As his essays from the 1930s demonstrate, Horkheimer takes considerable pains to distinguish between his position and that of metaphysics. The second reason is that understanding Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism as a method—as self-reflexively hypothetical and provisional—similarly helps guard against the dogmatic tendencies inherent in metaphysics, tendencies Horkheimer is explicitly interested in avoiding. In this precise connection, Horkheimer notes, “Throughout its history materialism has held to this theory of knowledge [relying on sense experience], which serves as a critical weapon against dogmatism” (MM, 42). Thus the principles and concepts advanced by Horkheimer, if they are to refrain from transforming into transhistorical and absolutist dogma, must maintain a self-reflexively hypothetical and provisional status.Given, however, that Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism rejects metaphysical absolutes for historically conditioned subjects and objects, it would seem that his interdisciplinary materialism runs the risk of being little more than either a form of skepticism or a form of relativism. If we cannot know truth absolutely, or an absolute truth, then it would appear that we are unmoored from any means by which to determine the validity of concepts. Yet, anticipating such criticisms, Horkheimer asks, “Is there really only a choice between acceptance of a final truth, as proclaimed in religious and idealistic schools of philosophy, and the view that every thesis and every theory is always merely ‘subjective,’ i.e., true and valid for a person or group or a time or human beings as a species, but lacking objective validity?”9 This dilemma, for Horkheimer, is a false one. Explicitly rejecting both skepticism and relativism, Horkheimer characterizes his interdisciplinary materialism as an alternative to both the naivete of the metaphysics of truth and the absurdities of an academic, and relativistic, skepticism.First, in Horkheimer’s estimation, G. W. F. Hegel satisfactorily addresses philosophical skepticism via the notion of “determinate negation” (OPT, 184). A skeptic would argue that because a series of concepts can never represent an object accurately, the project of knowing is inherently flawed and ill-fated from its very inception. Hegel, however, argues that the series itself is a process of increasingly accurate depictions of the object and not a series of failures. When an element of an object invalidates our concept of that object, we do not simply abandon the concept tout court; the negation of the concept is not absolute. In other words, a “determinate negation” is not a disjunction in which the book is on the shelf or the book is not on the shelf. Rather, the negation of the concept is specific, playing a determinate part in the construction of the new concept.10 For Horkheimer, Hegel’s concept of “determinate negation” militates against skepticism.Yet, in Horkheimer’s estimation, we must move past Hegel, since he remains caged within idealistic, dogmatic, and metaphysical philosophy. For Hegel, “The goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion.”11 In this way, according to Horkheimer, just as Kant’s theory of knowledge succumbs to Hegel’s critique, so Hegel’s critique of Kant succumbs to Karl Marx’s: [In] contemplating his own system, Hegel forgets one very definite side of the empirical situation. The belief that this system is the completion of truth hides from him the significance of the temporally conditioned interest which plays a role in the details of the dialectical presentation through the direction of thought, the choice of material content, and the use of names and words, and diverts attention from the fact that his conscious and unconscious partisanship in regard to the problems of life must necessarily have its effect as a constituent element of his philosophy. (OPT, 187)In other words, Hegel disregards the historically conditioned character of thought and succumbs to Marx’s claim that all thought is conditioned by its time (OPT, 186).Consequently, whereas Hegel advocates a closed dialectic that will one day resolve itself in absolute knowing, Horkheimer advocates an open dialectic: The open-ended materialistic dialectic does not regard the “rational” as completed at any point in history and does not expect to bring about the resolution of contradictions and tensions, the end of the historic dynamic, by the full development of mere ideas and their simple consequences. It lacks the aspect of the idealistic dialectic that Hegel described as “speculative” and at the same time as “mystical,” namely, the idea of knowing the ostensibly unconditioned and thereby being oneself unconditioned. (OPT, 209–10)Instead, for Horkheimer, “materialism . . . maintains the irreducible tension between concept and object and thus has a critical weapon of defense against belief in the infinity of the mind” (MM, 28).Second, materialism’s rejection of a metaphysical absolute does not entail that a measure for truth cannot be established and that it is therefore a form of relativism. As in the sciences, generally accepted criteria—or, in Horkheimer’s words, “available means of cognition” (OPT, 192, 203)—are in place at any given time for determining the truth value of propositions. Horkheimer appeals to the example of medicine. Thus we might say that while the concept of cancer may change over time and eventually become meaningless as we currently understand it, it has a precise meaning in our present, and only one of two conflicting claims as to the presence of cancer in a patient will be correct. As Horkheimer states, “Truth is decided not by individual’s beliefs and opinions, not by the subject in itself, but by the relation of the proposition to reality” (OPT, 194). In this way, there is a generally accepted body of knowledge and a rigorous method for establishing truth, and one either correctly or incorrectly appeals to and applies these. “From this follows the principle that every insight is to be regarded as true only in connection with the whole body of theory, and hence is so to be understood conceptually that in its formulation the connection with the structural principles and practical tendencies governing theory is preserved” (OPT, 204). In other words, while on the particular level of specific instances of cancer, one either diagnoses correctly or incorrectly; when the very concept of cancer is called into question, this itself takes place in the greater context of a theoretical framework and will have to resolve itself within this framework. Here Horkheimer is accounting for what we might today call a “paradigm shift” within a specific discipline12 or a discursive rupture.13 Concepts and theories can indeed be brought into play that call into question the entire body of knowledge heretofore regarded as established in a discipline—for example, the Einsteinian reframing of Newtonian mechanics or our understanding of disease. Yet these debates themselves take place in the context of a greater theoretical framework, in the context of methods and aims that superseded and directed the very nature of those debates.Quite clearly, Horkheimer is affirming a combination of the correspondence theory of truth and a coherence theory of truth, holding these as staving off the difficulties of skepticism and relativism.14 Yet, rather than naively thinking that either reaches the unconditioned, Horkheimer emphasizes the historically conditioned character of the knower, her tasks, and what she seeks to understand. Thus theory is always related to sociohistorical practice, even those theories that, on the surface, appear most theoretically abstract. In this way, while there is no “absolute knowing” for Horkheimer, not all claims to truth are equally valid. Within the generally accepted parameters of knowledge at a given time, there are criteria and methods for distinguishing true claims from false claims, even if those claims once held true may one day prove to be false from a refined and newly established understanding. So Horkheimer can confidently claim: Recognition of the conditional character of every isolated view and rejection of its absolute claim to truth does not destroy this conditional knowledge; rather, it is incorporated into the system of truth at any given time as a conditional, one-sided, and isolated view. Through nothing but this continuous delimitation and correction of partial truths, the process itself evolves its proper content as knowledge of limited insights in their limits and connection. (OPT, 184)In this connection, we here return to the Frankfurt School’s Marxist roots. For Horkheimer, what clearly distinguishes his interdisciplinary materialism from metaphysics, skepticism, relativism, or science is that it deliberately aims to understand the current forms of social domination that arise under the capitalist mode of production so as to change them. In other words, the “need to comprehend contemporary society” calls for an “economic theory of society” (MM, 45). Nor should this be understood in a narrow and reductive sense, as Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism has, since its inception, drawn on psychoanalysis and empirical social research to understand “the connection between the economic life of society, the psychical development of individuals, and the changes in the realm of culture in the narrow sense.”15 Since the very object of inquiry for an interdisciplinary materialism is highly mobile and fluid—society is a multifaceted, complex, and dynamic phenomenon—an interdisciplinary materialism must of necessity take into account not only the fluidity of its object but also the necessity of remaining adaptable in its concepts. As Horkheimer says elsewhere, “The various materialist doctrines, therefore, are not examples of a stable and permanent idea” (MM, 45). Thus an interdisciplinary materialism rejects transhistorical metaphysical theories of the unconditioned and opts instead for the mutability of understanding produced through an open dialectic. Stating the benefit of the open materialistic dialectic, Horkheimer claims: By ceasing to be a closed system, dialectic does not lose the stamp of truth. In fact, the disclosure of conditional and one-sided aspects of others’ thought and of one’s own constitutes an important part of the intellectual process. Hegel and his materialist followers were correct in always stressing that this critical and relativizing characteristic is a necessary part of cognition. But being certain of one’s own conviction and acting upon it do not require the assertion that the concept and object are now one, and thought can rest. To the degree that the knowledge gained from perception and inference, methodical inquiry and historical events, daily work and political struggle, meets the test of the available means of cognition, it is the truth. The abstract proposition that once a critique is justified from its own standpoint it will show itself open to correction expresses itself for the materialists not in liberality toward opposing views or skeptical indecision, but in alertness to their own errors and flexibility in thought. (OPT, 191–92)As should now be evident, an interdisciplinary materialism operates wholly outside the confines of a project that occupies itself with securing the unconditioned. Instead, Horkheimer’s interdisciplinary materialism abandons the old paradigm of measuring its concepts against the ideal of absolute knowing: “Since that extra-historical and hence exaggerated concept of truth is impossible, which stems from the idea of a pure infinite mind and thus in the last analysis from the concept of God, it no longer makes sense to orient the knowledge that we have to this impossibility and call it relative” (OPT, 192). Rather, as noted above, an interdisciplinary materialism moves closer to the methods and practices of science without reducing itself to them.16 Hence an interdisciplinary materialism uses concepts as hypotheses formulated on the basis of the best and most rigorously accumulated knowledge at the time, but it holds those concepts open to revision and continual scrutiny, guided always by the concern to ameliorate the material and historical conditions of suffering in contemporary society.17 As Brunkhorst characterizes it, “The most general fundamental principles of the materialists—constitution-theoretical, even ontological-sounding theses such that ‘all that exists is material’—have a merely hypothetical status, dependent of fallible experience.”18 Again, this is not to suggest a retreat into either relativism or nihilism. Rather, it is an attempt to advance a method for determining the most adequate theory of the current historical condition while remaining open to the dynamic nature of the objects of inquiry and the requirement to remain flexible in the need to adjust theory. Unlike metaphysical philosophies, which take themselves to be the one and only true form of inquiry, interdisciplinary materialism employs the open dialectic to remain vigilant against dogmatism while remaining open to amending its conceptual formulations.Even more significant, since an interdisciplinary materialism indeed operates outside the confines of the traditional project of metaphysics, it also therefore rejects the notion of a metaphysically grounded normative position of action or critique. Horkheimer further elaborates this position in his essay “Materialism and Morality.” There he again casts metaphysics as concerned with securing absolute moral principles: “As distinctive as the systems of Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Enlightenment may be, they all bear the marks of an effort to use the eternal constitution of the world and of the individual as the basis for establishing some determinate manner of conduct as being appropriate for all time. They therefore make a claim to unconditional validity.”19 He similarly rejects such attempts: “Morality does not admit of any grounding—neither by means of intuition nor of argument.”20 Instead, under Horkheimer’s conception, an interdisciplinary materialism aims to reveal and understand how moral systems reflect the sociohistorical conditions from which they arise. For Horkheimer, “Materialism sees in morality an expression of life of determinate individuals and seeks to understand it in terms of the conditions of its emergence and passing, not for the sake of truth in itself but rather in connection with determinate historical forces.”21 Horkheimer aims to demonstrate how the Kantian moral system, with its emphasis on a disinterested accord with duty, reflects economic and social relations under capitalism. Significantly, however, he is quite clear that his interdisciplinary materialism bars methodologically the possibility of providing an absolute foundation for morality itself. Horkheimer openly admits that an interdisciplinary materialism is without a traditional ground for its moral and normative position: “This materialist view has the negative significance that it rejects a metaphysically grounded morality” (MM, 44). Nonetheless, an interdisciplinary materialism is not a form of quietism: “It has always meant to materialists that man’s striving for happiness is to be recognized as a natural fact requiring no justification” (MM, 44). At its core, interdisciplinary materialism, then, refuses to postpone changing this world in favor of theorizing about another. And, in keeping with the historically conditioned character of both subjects and objects, Horkheimer further contends: Politics in accord with this goal [the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice] therefore must not abandon these demands, but realize them—not, however, by clinging in a utopian manner to definitions which are historically conditioned, but in accordance with their meaning. The content of the ideas is not eternal, but is subject to historical change—surely not because “Spirit” of itself capriciously infringes upon the principle of identity, but because human impulses which demand something better take different forms according to the historical material with which they have to work.Again, the guiding aim of an interdisciplinary materialism is to alter the material conditions of this world in which people suffer and to develop a theoretical position that can most effectively realize this aim. More precisely, we find since at least the start of the twentieth century a disproportionate amount of suffe