Article from Margin Notes 1
For all its insight into the individual steps in social change and for all the agreement of its elements with the most advanced traditional theories, the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice.
—Max Horkheimer,"Traditional and Critical Theory", 1968.
In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.
—Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944-2002.
For the Marxist materialist, value judgement generally appears in two forms: as the return of the repressed in undecidable moral conflicts, and as the comprehensive judgement of the materialist. It can be argued, however, that for Max Horkheimer conflicts over moral wrongs and moral rights nevertheless take place in a worthless, wrong, false society or world. However, this assessment already implies that a value judgement has been activated in that which is judged as wrong, false, or worthless: the world qua society as a totality.
From the depths of this wrong world, Horkheimer’s essays on materialism, morality, and metaphysics trace the categories belonging to each field of argument back to the modern tension between ‘subjective’ and ‘social’ value judgments about what is considered socially and personally unbearable. In these texts, Horkheimer shows us how sociology and positivist philosophy repeat this core tension through the rejection of value judgement, which binds them to their negative doubles – idealist moral philosophy of unconditional obligation and proto-totalitarian romanticism of unconditional self-determination. Given Horkheimer’s concern in these essays with questions of the individual in relation to the moral law, how can we relate his arguments to the ‘second nature’ laws of the market? And how can we point out the probable error of the total abandonment of morality (as ethics) for the Marxist critical theorist and his aspirations, when confronted with the amoral morality of the actions and critique of socialism of the neoliberal philosophers?
Max Horkheimer’s account of materialism versus morals and metaphysics in his essays for the Institute for Social Research (IfS) like “Materialism and Morality” (1933) and “Materialism and Metaphysics” (1933) brings to the fore the crisis inherent in the critique of the Enlightenment. More specifically, it reveals the crisis in its establishment of moral principles understood as practical social imperatives – a tendency most explicitly exposed in Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral arguments through his concept of the Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit).
At the same time, the bourgeois moral field of the Enlightenment exercised a self-regulating and repressive subjection of its peers at a time when it enjoyed the egoistic transactive presumption of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
Engels called the German Labour Movement the heir to the German classical philosophy. It would be more correct to say that German (not only Marxian) Socialism represents the decadence of the school of idealist philosophy. Socialism owes the dominion it won over the German mind to the idea of society as conceived by the great German thinkers. Out of Kant’s mysticism of duty and Hegel’s deification of the State it is easy to trace the development of socialist thought; Fichte is already a socialist. In recent decades the revival of Kantian criticism, that much praised achievement of German philosophy, has benefited Socialism also. The Neo-Kantians, especially Friedrich Albert Lange and Hermann Cohen, have declared themselves socialists. Simultaneously marxians have tried to reconcile Marxism with the New Criticism. Ever since the philosophical foundations of Marxism have shown signs of cracking, attempts to find in critical philosophy support for socialist ideas have multiplied. (…) The weakest part of Kant’s system is his ethics. Although they are vitalized by his mighty intellect, the grandeur of individual concepts does not blind us to the fact that his starting-point is unfortunately chosen and his fundamental conception a mistaken one. His desperate attempt to uproot Eudemonism has failed.
Ludwig von Mises, *Socialism*, trans. J. Kahane, 6th ed, Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 2014), 430.
Von Mises was ably refuted by his Marxist opponents, the Austromarxists Max Adler and Helene Bauer, but seeing the nature of von Mises’s critique of Kant, Hegel, and Marx in the light of our present situation, we feel compelled to reflect on the possibility that the rejection of morality in Marx and the Marxists after him arose from (and, by its very nature, responded to) the need to avoid the liberal’s legacy of constant accusations that their project was excessively moralistic.
The question of morality in Marx has been interrogated many times, but that question has not generally been given a central role in the Marxist research on the Frankfurt School. Our argument here is that the critique of morality and metaphysics in Horkheimer’s early work uses – or rather, is based on – a Kantian form of values and judgements that allows (and sustains) his critique of specific moral and metaphysical trends of his time. This means that the critical rejection of the Kantian system and its (moral) categorical imperative was not fully achieved, nor was the Kantian system fully overcome. Rather, it was merely sublated, transported, or smuggled back through a moral transplantation of an anti-moral core. This Kantian legacy then appears as an antinomy at the heart of Horkheimer’s critique of morality, insofar as these critiques inherit the Kantian form, albeit in their own specificity: mediated by either Hegel’s or Marx’s sublations of the two systems. The Marxian sublation of the Kantian form is used to enable the negative but morally invested content of a critique of all the problematic aspects of the base and superstructure of our capitalist regime and the relational and dependency dynamics of its (Western and globalist) society: its political economy, its legal system, its ideology, and all its dominant forms of imperialism and class domination. (The apparent sublating and activating of the Kantian form by Marx and the paradoxes that it generates is explored by James Furner, as we will see further below.)
Horkheimer’s core dialectical proposal in relation to “the economy” will serve us here in presenting his account, in which the tensions over morality and ethics are played out in the materialist critique of the capitalist world:
The economy is the first cause of wretchedness, and critique, theoretical and practical, must address itself primarily to it. It would be mechanistic, not dialectical thinking, however, to judge the future forms of society solely according to their economy. Historical change does not leave untouched the relations between the spheres of culture, and if in the present state of society economy is the master of man and therefore the lever by which he is to be moved to change, in the future men must themselves determine all their relationships in the face of natural necessities. Economics in isolation will therefore not provide the norm by which the community of men is to be measured.
Max Horkheimer, "Postscript," in *Critical Theory: Selected Essays*, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (New York: Continuum, 1975), 249.
Later in this essay we will see Horkheimer’s claim that metaphysics has missed its historical chance and thus failed society – a lament for metaphysics similar to Marx’s earlier lament for philosophy. My argument here is that in order to critique morality, Horkheimer still required (and was methodologically dependent upon) the deployment of the structural element of practical moral philosophy as form, while simultaneously inverting – in a Hegelian-Marxist manner – the general content, thus delivering a new, updated and situated discursive field. This understanding allows us a twofold, dialectical notion of both the structure and content: an inescapability of the moral dimension embedded at the core of Marx’s project – which I will analyse here in relation to Horkheimer’s critique – and its outcome as a different morality, which emerges as a negative moral and ethical (new) field of concern for specific points, produced without necessarily being recognised or described as such. In this way, we can see how Horkheimer presented the moral field, in its inherently Kantian aspect, as preserved in elements of its form and structure, in which its accustomed (bourgeois and traditional) content was discarded and replaced by specific spatio-temporal and socially situated materialist concerns. After the Kantian turn, however, the Hegelian revolt against the limitations, flaws, and rigidities of that system showed us how the notion of continuous movement and historical progress was an insufficient reason for a complete denial of a function of our understanding of the works of our mind.
The problem of the mind and the subjective, as it is understood in the field of Freudian psychology, brings with it the notion of ideology and reification that had so troubled Horkheimer (and Adorno). Both had to grapple with the task of producing a new field of specific critical theory based on materialist paradigms and a critique of what is and what is not morality or metaphysics.
Even exchange value in the economy is not based on free valuation but rather ensues from the life process of society, in which use values are determining factors. The undialectical concept of the free subject is foreign to materialism. It is also well aware of its own conditionality. Apart from personal nuances, this latter is to be sought in connection with those forces which are devoted to the realization of the aims stated above. Because materialist science never takes its eyes away from these aims, it does not assume the character of false impartiality, but is consciously biased.
Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 46--7.
There is a relationship and a tension between the personal subjective capacity for thought and judgement and the socially constructed form, and this was the concern of Kant, Hegel, Marx and Horkheimer.
The structure of needs in various forms of society, in particular social groups, and in individuals is changeable and can be explained only in relation to a specific time and a concrete situation. The known and unknown devotees of the materialist outlook have for centuries given up their freedom and their lives in the struggle for the most varied goals, but especially in solidarity with suffering men. They prove that a concern for personal physical well-being is no more closely associated with this kind of thinking than with any other. In rejecting the illusions of idealist metaphysics, they have surrendered every hope of an individual reward in eternity and, with it, an important selfish motive operative in other men. Repeated attempts to interpret such selfless dedication to the causes of humanity as a contradiction to materialist convictions lack every philosophical justification. What leads to such misunderstandings is the simplistic psychology which lies behind most doctrines that profess an absolute morality.
Max Horkheimer, "Materialism and Metaphysics," in *Critical Theory: Selected Essays*, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell (New York, NY: Continuum, 1933), 44.
Horkheimer’s reflections above play with the inescapability of the moral (and ethical) constitutive elements of the subject of man, understood as a species being, as Marx had it, in general, and in particular in its progressive inescapability in relation to the exercise of a critical theory associated with the Marxist standpoint and materialist methodology.
In this sense, to understand that to criticise what configures a so-called “wrong world” is in itself a moral act involving a value judgement, even if it is a fully committed and profound exercise of a critique of morality, morals and moralising as bourgeois instruments. Since its predicate is the “wrong” of the world, this judgement (of being wrong) takes us back to the Kantian judgement and the Hegelian and Marxian disputes. And therefore to ask whether those inherited Kantian orientations between ethics and law, which the Marxists had taken up after Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s morality, had brought into their core forms a kind of systematic moral versus a moral glitch. Furthermore, it can be frankly said that it is not possible to see how an emancipatory and systemic social revolution could come into being and realise its project without its own set of categorical imperatives, its ideas of values and norms; of what it stands for and against, of what it has changed and wants to change, regulate or legislate for. We do not mean by this the Kantian afterthought of what the revolution does once it has won its place as a new institution, but the moral imperatives against slavery or class division and subjugation that have driven such revolutions. Perhaps here the return to a closely studied aspect of Kant’s philosophy can be understood as a necessary step for the researcher.
This dependency must be something that can be explored in materialist terms, i.e. without falling into an idealist, pre-Marxist discourse on morals. One example between many of the cases rests in Horkheimer’s “Materialism and Metaphysics“: “The various materialist doctrines, therefore, are not examples of a stable and permanent idea. The economic theory of society and history arose not out of purely theoretical motives, but out of the need to comprehend contemporary society. For this society has reached the point where it excludes an ever larger number of men from the happiness made possible by the widespread abundance of economic forces.”
In this study, I will examine how these specific legacies and critical tensions concerning morality, morals and ethics mentioned in the introduction above came into play in Horkheimer’s critique of morality and metaphysics in the context of the project of the early Frankfurt School. I will also consider the inherent dichotomy of form and content – and its complicated aspects – at play in his materialist critique of morality. The questions posed in this essay are negative, as we reflect on a lack and an explicit negation – the disavowal of morality – that has followed the Hegelian transformation of morality into Ethical Life. For these purposes, I have engaged mainly with two other authors: James Furner, who proposes rescuing autonomy from Kant for further Marxist methodologies that include ethics, and Gillian Rose, whose critique of Adorno and the Frankfurt School gives us insights into navigating these inherent problematics of morality and ethics from both her work on Adorno and Hegel. In The Melancholy Science, British philosopher Gillian Rose argues that Adorno’s critique of morality takes the standpoint of the critical moralist and shows how, for Adorno, morality thus becomes form, or what she, following Adorno, terms as style.
My approach to the tensions latent in the Marxist abolition of morality owes much to Gillian Rose’s approach to dealing with antinomies in her promotion of the Hegelian speculative standpoint and addressing the intrinsic conceptual difficulty she posits in the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung.
The anti-moral critique mobilised by neo-liberal discourses and their anarcho-libertarian appeal to a fully abstracted and all-embracing concept of freedom (for the liberation of markets and the crushing of the welfare state against what they see as the unjustly repressive application of human rights) has been the subject of particularly clarifying Marxist critiques, such as Jessica White’s The Morals of the Market.
James Furner’s work Rescuing Autonomy from Kant: A Marxist Critique of Kant’s Ethics elaborates that there are a series of theses inherent in the Marxist rejection of morals, which he unfolds across four theses and three parts intending to defend “a new way of thinking about the relation of Marx’s project to Kant’s ethics.”
On one of the various accounts of Marx’s own use of the categorical imperative, Furner quotes Marx’s introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to illustrate Marx’s use of the categorical imperative: “[t]he critique of religion culminates in the doctrine that the human being is the supreme being for the human being, and thus with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which the human being is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable being.”
The case of the Kantian disavowal of “autonomy at the level of the community” is key to this study. One question is how the isolated subject, which Kant presents as part of a community of equals in his imperative not to treat the other as a means, can be transformed into a fully conforming community, which he seems to deny. This tension within the Hegelian “I that is we” contained in Marx’s critique of Kant can be revisited here to understand how the subject in Kant is not understood as solitary or separate from society. If we closely read the passage from Furner quoted above, we find how Marx’s critique of Kant’s ethics – based on freedom as the autonomy of a human community – is deployed as a “rival” conception of autonomy to the individualistic concept of Kant. For us, this conceptual situation opens at the same time to the possibility that such a quality, viz. being a “rival,” does not necessarily have to imply one-sided opposition; rather, it becomes closer to a perfected form of dialectical sublation. Thus we can see, in one way or another, how Marx’s “mischievous”
To reconcile the idea that Marx’s is similar to that of Kant’s, in viewing freedom as autonomy, with the thought that Marx condemns capitalism at the system-level and in terms of community, Feenberg would have to reject the claim that Marx viewed autonomy a quality of a ‘rational individual’, in favour of the idea of self-legislative human community. Marx’s commitment to autonomy could then be thought to align with his concept of social revolution.
Furner, *Rescuing Autonomy from Kant*, 114.
In a sense, Furner’s study ends up implying that the question of ethics for Marxist theorists (and this will include Marxists such as Horkheimer) is still unresolved and relevant today.
The famous categorical imperative set out in Marx’s introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is, as Furner notes, “remarkable.” Furner argues that the comment is so “remarkable” precisely because Marx invokes “a concept coined by Kant, the ‘categorical imperative’, in the introduction to critique aimed at Hegel – aimed, indeed, at the very text in which Hegel describes Kant’s ethics as an empty formalism.” He goes on to state that this “should give pause to the kind of hand-waving that insists that Marxism cannot take anything from Kant’s ethics because Marx regarded Hegel as having exposed its empty formalism.”
The very possibility that Hegel’s thought was mystified by Horkheimer is relevant here because it is that of an effective diremption and separation (by making an artificial distinction between system and method) of what we might otherwise understand as a sublation of methodologies. Gillian Rose situates the discrepancies related to moral methodologies originally found in Adorno, which are useful for assigning a parallel case for our concern with Horkheimer and the case of the mystification of Hegel:
“On the whole, both non-Marxist and Marxist sociology have mystified Hegel’s thought. […] Marxist sociology has mystified Hegel by making a distinction between a ‘radical method’ and a ‘conservative system’. As a result of this artificial distinction, the centrality of those ideas which Hegel developed to unify the theoretical and practical philosophy of Kant and Fichte has been obscured.”
Rose, *Hegel Contra Sociology*, 44--5.
Rose also makes a very significant point about how, “in their very different ways, both the non-Marxist and the Marxist critiques of Hegel [had attempted] to drop the notion of the ‘absolute’, but, at the same time, [had unavoidably retained] the social import of Hegel’s thought.” And how, “in the case of Marxism, the attempt depends on extracting a ‘method’ whose use will reveal social contradictions.”
However, for us, the aim to place morality as judgement and value-determining reason at the core of the critical activity of Marxism, and of the IfS’s proposed project of Marxist critical theory, is not equivalent to reinstating the conventional understanding of moralising. The objective is to rethink the function of moral value judgement as a human element of a form of sensual evaluation that transcends the context of its instrumentalisation by the bourgeoisie. As this is a case of identifying (as forensics of) ethics in Marx and consequently in Horkheimer, we will only highlight some indicative paradoxes and cite some of the arguments that can prompt further questions and studies on the potential existence of a negated yet existing moral foundation for Marxism. In order to achieve this we will examine how Horkheimer employs a dialectical and critical approach to contrasting and comparing different concepts, applying the principles of historical materialism to investigate the differences between metaphysics and materialism, and between morals and materialism.
I will start here with Adorno as a preliminary for approaching Horkheimer. In The Melancholy Science – specifically the chapter “Morality and Style,” which outlines Rose’s vision of Adorno’s crypto-morals – Rose states that Adorno “shared Nietzsche’s programme of a ‘transvaluation of all values,’ ” and that, for Adorno, “ ’Morality’, ‘values’ and ‘norms’ do not imply a moral dimension distinct from other dimensions but characterise the construction and imposition of ‘reality.’ ”
The morality of thought lies in a procedure that is neither entrenched nor detached, neither blind nor empty, neither atomistic nor consequential. The double-edged method which has earned Hegel’s Phenomenology the reputation among reasonable people of unfathomable difficulty, that is, its simultaneous demands that phenomena be allowed to speak as such – in a ‘pure looking-on’ – and yet that their relation to consciousness as the subject, reflection, be at every moment maintained, expresses this morality most directly and in all its depth of contradiction. But how much more difficult has it become to conform to such morality now that it is no longer possible to convince oneself of the identity of subject and object, the ultimate assumption of which still enabled Hegel to conceal the antagonistic demands of observation and interpretation.
Theodor W. Adorno, *Minima Moralia*, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Radical Thinkers 1 (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 46.
Rose observes a series of inherent antinomies between value judgements and judgements of fact and, identifying (the/or a) problem of diremption in classical sociology, concludes that, “any sociology which separates judgements of fact from judgements of value is bound to be inconsistent.”
So far, we have situated the case and the questions that affect the issue of bourgeois morality, both in their scientific and philosophical-critical background, along with the notions and assumed conclusions and judgments on the issue of ethics and morality. Focusing on the specific case of Horkheimer, the sources and insights that triggered the idea of the paradox inherent in the critique of morality in the younger Horkheimer’s materialist social research will be unfolded. First, a series of important passages will be introduced that work in relation to those by Adorno cited above and to Horkheimer’s self versus his statements in the two essays that will be presented later.
In Horkheimer’s case, the texts used here belong to different temporalities, and could indeed be the outcome of a process, even of a regression in his thinking. In any case, they provide interesting comparative material to help us make our case. Horkheimer was acutely aware of the problem that being openly moralistic would bring to a practising Marxist. In the fragment “Change of Thought” from Dämmerung (written 1926-1931), Horkheimer states that,
Among Marxist thinkers, the avowal of moral motives, particularly compassion which is the secret mainspring of their thought and action, is looked down upon, not only because they are ashamed of it but also because it has been their experience that such a confession usually becomes a substitute for practice. Consciously or not, they assume that the moral impulse either manifests itself in actions or in words. That is the reason they mistrust the latter.
Max Horkheimer, "Change of Thought," in *Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926--1931 and 1950--1969*, trans. Michael Shaw, A Continuum Book (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 34--5.
Here Horkheimer makes it clear that for the Marxist the profession of moral motives, especially compassion, is looked down upon. He states clearly, however, that “compassion is the secret mainspring of Marxist thought and action;” and thereby brings to us the substantiation of what has always been suspected: Marxism implies a morally and ethically grounded standpoint strongly linked to both social compassion and outrage, which, as an affect, draw the subject to a not (merely) selfish solidarity in its implicit social empathy. It is particularly useful to look at its negation when considering how compassion is derided in bourgeois ethics. This theme was more fully explored in the second “Excursus” chapter of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, a chapter which was written by Horkheimer.
As we see, the case for “moral motives” as the “secret mainspring of [Marxist] thought and action, [which] is looked down upon, not only because [Marxists] are ashamed of it but also because it has been their experience that such a confession usually becomes a substitute for practice” facilitates an understanding of why, even for Horkheimer, declaring himself susceptible to morals was not considered desirable at the time when he was pushing for a Marxist methodology embedded in his project for the Institute of Social Research. It also shows why for Marx and Marxists after him, theory became categorically separated from praxis, and words in themselves became a source of mistrust.
When it is emphasized that there are needs and qualities other that hunger and power they point to sober reality where everything turns on the satisfaction of the most primitive needs. In so doing, they tend to transform the bitterness in that comment into an apology. Under such circumstances, the assertion that in today’s reality the ideal merely serves as ideological camouflage for a bad materialistic practice easily turns into the realism of certain journalists and reporters: “Don’t bother us with culture. We know that that’s a hoax.”
Horkheimer, "Change of Thought," 35.
A closer examination of these particular descriptions in Horkheimer’s work reveals a series of statements that illustrate the tensions and contradictions inherent in the form and methodology of a Marxist critique of morality.
The fragment “Skepsis and Morality” shows a dynamic in which moral imperatives are mobilised by the subject who is against morals, i.e. Horkheimer. This appears in a critical and negative sense, as the unavoidable appeal to an ‘ought’ to that which is clearly explained here: “But when it is said that Marx and Engels did not “prove” socialism, not pessimism but the commitment to practice which theory needs, will follow.”
Horkheimer further expands on the connection or bipolarity implied in the position of scepticism versus morality; his remarks are worth quoting at length:
What the transition from one part of a system to another is for the bourgeois scholar, a “problem” like so many others, something to which “justice can be done” on a few sympathetic pages in a textbook, i.e., the resolution of the question whether class society continues or is successfully replaced by socialism, is something that will decide if mankind progresses or perishes in barbarism. The position a person takes here not only determines the relationship of his life to that of mankind but also the degree of his morality. A philosophical system, an ethic, a moral teaching which merely treats our outdated, progress-inhibiting property relations, the existence of a class society and the need to transcend it as “part of a larger picture” rather than identifying itself with that need is the opposite of morality, for the form morality has taken in our time is the implementation of socialism.[… ] [Bourgeois professors and literari] calmly look on the legal rape of countless children, women and men in capitalist societies and even more in their colonies, and ingest their share of the loot.
Horkheimer, "Skepsis and Morality,", 36--7.
What the core of the paragraph above reveals is not a mere digression, but a defining assertion, namely that “the form morality has taken in our time is the implementation of socialism.” If this was written between 1926 and 1931, what do we make of the “form” of morality that implied the socialist project? As we know, following Rolf Wiggershaus, in the 20s and 30s the proposal of a new interdisciplinary methodology such as that of sociology, especially when based on Marxist curricula, was practically and materially considered to be socialist.
In the fragment “Two Aspects of Materialism,” we can find the left-wing, critical Marxist moral perspective by looking at some of its imperatives: “Tolerance – since everything has to be the way it is – protest against everything being the way it has to be.”
The idea of unbroken harmony between reality and reason belongs to the liberalist phase. It corresponds to a social economy marked by a plurality of individual entrepreneurs. The image of their interests as harmonizing and producing a frictionless functioning of the whole economy was applied to society as a whole and its various social classes. The monopolistic phase goes even further in denying class conflicts, but the struggle in the world market between a few power groups has become so much the principal theme of the period that instead of harmony between individuals, such concepts as tragedy, heroism, and destiny have come to be the main categories for a philosophy of history. The material interests of individuals are considered unimportant, something less to be fulfilled than to be overcome.
Horkheimer "Materialism and Metaphysics," 12--3.
Exactly as it is criticised and exposed by Horkheimer here, we can find a resonance in the critique of neoliberal morals proposed by Jessica Whyte in The Morals of the Market, where she makes clear the connection between these philosophies of human harmony and manifest destiny as an alibi for the neoliberals’ ability to get away with the criminal aspect of their policies.
The case that Horkheimer makes against metaphysics is a critique of its idealisation of and bias towards figures of authority based on their longevity and the greatness of the past. It is not explicitly stated, but the authors and tendencies criticised in his essay may be the conservative, perennial values we tend to see in academia. In Horkheimer’s essays, a very present and saturated signifier of what morality means is at work, and it is accused of being a mere by-product of bourgeois thought. However, this is difficult to assess without looking at the possible origins of these misrecognitions, displacements, and self-obscurations in relation to the interpretation of morality. If we consider the general arguments put forth by Neo-Kantian socialists such as Herman Cohen, we can discern how they appear to originate in Hegel’s critique of Kant’s concept of the divided subject and its principles of non-contradiction, which were subsequently adopted by Marx and other Marxists. For us, morality is not just a set of rigid bourgeois conventions. Morality since Kant, however complicated by Hegel’s critique, involves the possibility of conflicting discourses and principles in different senses and contains the possibility of activating emancipation, revolution, and social change for the ‘best.’ However, this is not a majoritarian view of morality, especially among Marxist theorists. In the contemporary globalised society, ‘morality’ has transcended its traditional field of explicit value judgements to include the kind of position that rejects value judgements.
This brings us back to the question of the materialist rejection of value judgements and the autonomous subject of subjectivity, which in any case tells us that the so-called moral sciences, implicit in what should or should not be accepted as right or good, are never one-sided or even double-sided. Returning to Freud’s work here is necessary, especially to his treatment of negation and denial in “Die Verneinung,” where the processes by which the analysand’s dogged subjectivity is committed to negating what is otherwise obvious for the therapist and analyst.
Horkheimer declares his Hegelianism by making clear that the problem with theory is separation, compartmentalisation, and abstractedness and its telling parallelism to the “empty form of philosophy” characteristic of positivism. As he states, “Hegel himself […] did not separate truth and knowledge from the temporal; on the contrary—and this is the secret of his depth of thought—he made knowledge of the temporal as temporal the content of philosophy.”
This section will examine how Horkheimer employs the Hegelian technique of presenting historically situated accounts of social phenomena in order to elucidate his own materialist perspective. A core value judgement related to the present, which represents the Hegelian actuality and unity of space and time for Horkheimer, is his statement on his negative standpoint, “I can say what is wrong, but I cannot say what is right.” This dictum demonstrates that a value judgement (“what is wrong”) carries within it the raison d’être of the Marxist methodologies that form part of Critical Theory. This precise locating of a ‘here and now’ or a ‘then and there’ described as “wrong” appears as a moral imperative for an autonomous mode of action.
The modern break from the religious mode of authority and the production of a self-regulating subject of a higher social class that organises and divides taxonomically the social realm is introduced in Horkheimer’s “Materialism and Morality” as capable of claiming an unchallenged unconditional validity. The ‘use utility’ for those principles, as Horkheimer writes, is bound to be for “a rationally grounded morality (…) all the more necessary to dominate the masses in the state when a mode of action diverging from their life interests was demanded of them.”
Horkheimer’s pointing at morality as equal to religion for mediating an ideology that translates into a “mode of action diverging from their life interest,” like that of following the Ten Commandments, shows how it is so objectively required that focusing on the moral as a sublated religion needed to be conceptually crushed. Under this pressure and this emergency, one forgets to establish the notion that ours is also a moral judgement, a critical moral judgement that claims its legitimacy against the religious element in the moral instance. Hence the confusion regarding the various interpretations of Kant and Hegel here, because, as we will see further down, Kant can be brought back as a thinker of revolution.
The concept of negation is one thesis to be followed in order to assess how limited the potential for acknowledging its moral imperatives was for the task of Critical Theory at the time. Another thesis will be the absolute identification of morality with its satiated signifier, to a point where it is not possible “not to be against” it, intending to retrieve it for other purposes. In Hegel’s critique of Kant from “The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, its Place in Moral Philosophy, and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law,” we see how Hegel develops a series of concepts against Kant’s Morals as that of his “rational immoralism.” Identifying the dialectical inversion at work in Hegel when he regards Kant’s formalist principles as perverse, deceptive, and immoral would be fundamental to understanding the set of problematics inherited by Marx and Marxism against morals, ethics, and morality more broadly. For Hegel, Kant’s moral categories are a form of sophistry by which all sorts of rules of wickedness (once abstracted) can be adopted and justified on the grounds that they are not self-contradictory, and that thus “something specific” can be made into a categorically imperative duty.
Horkheimer, too, advises us to take the side of materialism against Kant and his idealist, Enlightenment utopia. When these articles were written in the early 1930s, he argued for the necessity of superseding the utopian flavour of theoretical social morals: “The materialist theory of society is needed as a means to supersede the utopian character of the Kantian conception of a perfect constitution.”
After all, the disparate interests of the individual are not ultimate facts; they do not have their basis in an independent psychological constitution, rather they are based on both the material relations and the real total situation of the social group to which the individual belongs. The absolutely incommensurable disparity of interests derives from the disparity of the relations of ownership; human beings today stand against one another as functions of various economic powers, of which each reveals to the others contradictory developmental tendencies.
Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 27--8.
Horkheimer follows these indications by bringing up Kant’s organismic dreams of society perfected by reason, a gesture that recalls Marx’s critique of the abstract character of Kant’s thought and the emptiness of its proposed structures, which are then filled by the now common and obviously false world of actuality:
Kant employs the image of the organism in order to indicate the frictionless functioning of the future society; nothing in this suggests the faintest denial of the role of rational thought. Today, by contrast, the image of the organism characterizes a system of dependency and economic inequality, one which can no longer justify itself before the world’s expanded critical understanding and which therefore requires metaphysical phrases in order to reconcile people to it.
Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 28.
We can grasp from this Horkheimer’s reasons for criticising the use of the concept of organism to promote social inequality and dependency. We can also discern in Horkheimer’s words a backhandedly positive view of what Kant was originally doing. For von Mises, on the contrary,
A society is only possible if everyone, while living his own life, at the same time helps others to live, if every individual is simultaneously means and end; if each individual’s well-being is simultaneously the condition necessary to the well-being of the others, it is evident that the contrast between I and thou, means and end, automatically is overcome. This, after all, is just what the simile of the biological organism is supposed to make us perceive. In the organic structure no parts are to be regarded only as means and none only as ends. According to Kant the organism is a being ‘in which everything is end and reciprocally also means’. Now Kant was thoroughly familiar with the nature of the organic, but he did not see – and in this he lagged far behind the great sociologists who were his contemporaries – that human society is formed according to the same principle.
von Mises, *Socialism*, 432.
There is indeed no better way to understand the hostile, antagonistic interpretations of Kant, Hegel, Marx (and Horkheimer by extension) than having a close reading of the arguments (akin to psychological warfare) put forward by such a nemesis as von Mises.
Returning to the topic at hand, this close connection between the concept of organism and that of reason in society echoes the young Marx’s concept of man as a species being. Marx believed in the conditions of possibility for the evolution of society towards a communist community, as defined in The German Ideology.
Horkheimer, coming full circle, then states that, “the idea of morality, as it was formulated by Kant, contains the truth that the mode of action informed by the natural law of economic advantage is not necessarily the rational mode.”
Following this, Horkheimer claims that “Whoever is in the economic situation of the bourgeois and is incapable of experiencing this whole conflict [of individual interests] has not kept pace developmentally, and lacks a type of reaction belonging to individuals of this period.”
Morality, therefore, is by no means simply dismissed by materialism as mere ideology in the sense of false consciousness. Rather, it must be understood as a human phenomenon that cannot possibly be overcome for the duration of the bourgeois epoch. Its philosophical expression, however, is distorted in many respects. Above all, the solution of the problem does not lie in the observance of rigidly formulated commandments.
Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 22.
Horkheimer recognises that there is a problem, a conflict, which cannot be resolved by observing strict, rigid commandments, but he also recognises that the problem is temporally bound.
We can judge the power of this idealistic and rigid metaphysics by its call for a mobilisation of stoicism, because this is the morality that the capitalists and the neo-liberals who followed them have managed to plant everywhere, somehow winning on the correlation of forces between stoicism and solidarity. The notion of rigid commandments, which appear as cold Kantian oughts, reveals a misconception about the possibility of morality. Here is what Horkheimer thinks about the categorical imperative:
“In the attempt to actually apply the Kantian imperative, it immediately becomes clear that the general interest the moral will is concerned about would not be helped in the least. Even if everyone were to comply with the imperative, even if everyone were to lead a virtuous life in its sense, the same confusion would continue to reign. Nothing essential would be changed.”
Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 22.
One of the overt concepts mobilised by the neo-liberal credo is freedom, which departs blindly and abstractly from necessity. This kind of freedom is also mobilised by the discourses that sustain fascism, past and present.
In fascism too, then, freedom appears as a Kantian imperative, completely devoid of context and totally self-serving as a mere abstract principle. The capitalist, bourgeois, fascist, and neo-liberal notion that necessity should be evacuated along with the social context and the notion of a free association of individuals is also a key issue. Horkheimer illustrates the moral implications of the submission not only to the economy but also to the laws and categories implicit in the reproduction of a dominated class:
The acquisition of moral principles was important for members of the higher social strata, since their position constantly demanded that they make intervening decisions which they had earlier been absolved of by authority. At the same time, a rationally grounded morality became all the more necessary to dominate the masses in the state when a mode of action diverging from their life interests was demanded of them.
Horkheimer, "Materialism and Morality," 16.
We can see, following the critique of Kantian morality that Marxists maintain – keeping in mind the self-denial pointed out by Furner – that the problem with Kantian, rationally-based morality is its potential for an abstraction that can be applied in both directions: to the self-regulation of a particular class (here the bourgeoisie) and the domination of the masses (as a produced and reproduced class). The double-edged quality of the Copernican turn and system was further explored by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the work produces a scenario pitting Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx against each other in a dialectical critique of Kantian reason.
In his critique of metaphysics, Horkheimer largely focuses on Jaspers’s and Dilthey’s historical and psychological typology of worldviews to diagnose what is wrong with the separation from the absolutised categories of the Kantian legacy of bourgeois liberal thought. The important thing for our current discussion, however, is Horkheimer’s analysis of bourgeois liberalism, which depicts the classical denial and negation that follows the bourgeois liberal consciousness when it becomes a false consciousness and a totalising metaphysical system: “…bourgeois liberalism voices its critique of the claim to absoluteness made by its own thinking […] The equality of rank given to various metaphysical ideas and the awareness of their radical historical conditioning are proof of a high degree of detachment from the power of categories originally absolutized by bourgeois liberal thought.”
The negation of morals in Horkheimer called the attention of Eric Oberle, who in his work Theodor Adorno and The Century of Negative Identity explains that, in the 1930s and 40s, “the Frankfurt School theorists were engaged in defending the scientific value of metaphysical reflection and in criticising all theories of truth as adaptation, Pragmatism included.”
As some contemporary scholars have observed in the context of the Frankfurt School, albeit focused on Adorno, their praxis challenged the very foundations of their own critiques, as they employed a transdisciplinary approach to examine the complex issue of political economy.
This leads us directly to the later developments of neoliberalism and its discourses (based on rights and libertarian morals of the market) and how its highly skilled technocrats have based their success on a great instrumentalisation of jurisprudential ethics with narratives charged with revolutionary morals that only recognize freedom and never commit to duty.
If we take Horkheimer’s need for a Critical Theory in a world about which he will only state what is “wrong” as the basis for his direction, focus, and choice of issues to explicate and critique, then it is not possible for us to say that Horkheimer has successfully avoided being influenced by a very strong moral motivation and judgement.
The understanding of moral principles predicates the normative grounds behind (moral and ethical) feelings of solidarity in the face of human suffering due to wars under the regime of the military industrial complex, naturalised global famine, mass homelessness, modern slavery, and new forms of class warfare. Those are necessary when Critical Theory is deployed to argue in (Marxist) social and political critiques. This is where James Furner’s argument or defence that there is an ethics inherent in Marx’s work may apply:
[…] viewed as an argument against all morality, the ideology argument is self-undermining. This is because any proponent of the ideology argument must acknowledge that there is an impartial reason to institute social arrangements that reduce or eliminate false consciousness. Yet this is to acknowledge an impartial reason, the very quality that is said to make moral motivations ideological. One cannot argue against all morality by appeal to an argument that commits to a moral claim.
The question here is what way of thinking involves the objective of exposing a negative (wrong, false) reality implicated in the so-called totality of the world? What way of thinking would be necessary for the subject and its critical collective formations to deal with a (negative) truth against which they will all work or even die for?
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