Article from Margin Notes 2
In 1938, Max Horkheimer wrote a short prospectus for “A Dialectical Logic,” the first in a series of book-length projects proposed as part of a report on the activities of the Institute for Social Research (ISR). Although the report was written to fulfill requirements for receiving institutional support from Columbia University, it was also supposed to serve as a pitch to prospective sources of external funding for future ISR research. The report as a whole is strikingly high-concept, an early product of the desperate but ambitious grant writing practice Horkheimer and Adorno would refer to in their 1940s correspondence as “artistic begging.”
The guiding concern of the work is not a formalist epistemology, but a material doctrine of categories. In scientific and political discussions about social problems, there are certain categories which are used constantly, but which nevertheless give rise to differences of opinion as soon as a more precise definition is called for. Such categories include concepts like causality, tendency, progress, law, necessity, freedom, class, culture, value, ideology, dialectic, and so forth. […] These categories can only be preserved on the condition they are not embalmed but are instead kept alive through the continuous effort of relating them back to reality. […] Every determination of philosophical concepts involves the presentation of human society in its socially given condition.
"[Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts...]" (1938), *Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 12: Nachgelassene Schriften 1931-1949*. Ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 156-157. For the English translation commissioned by the ISR in 1938, see "An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program (1938)." *Substudies* (blog), 9 June 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/165428535/i-an-institute-for-social-research-idea-activity-and-program-1938>
Though consistent with Horkheimer’s earlier descriptions of the project,
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Horkheimer’s reference to Hegel’s Logic as a model has done less to disambiguate the original idea of the dialectical logic than to reinforce the suspicion among interpreters that the dialectical logic was impossible from the beginning. Given that Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947) originated, in part, from Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussions on dialectical logic, the question of whether the project was even possible has significant ramifications for understanding 1940s critical theory as a whole. Rolf Wiggershaus, for instance, draws an analogy between the unexplained relationship between the Science of Logic and the so-called Realphilosophie—the philosophies of nature and spirit, volumes II and III of the Encyclopedia—within Hegel’s system and the undeveloped connection between the speculative philosophy of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the empirical social research conducted by the ISR for their studies in anti-Semitism and prejudice.
Whereas Wiggershaus refers back to the original idea of the dialectical logic to question the coherence of the research program of 1940s critical theory, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr identifies a theoretical incoherence internal to the idea itself: “without intending to, yet by surrendering themselves to the course of their own investigations, [Horkheimer and Adorno] gradually drifted further and further from the Hegelian-Marxist idea of an agreement between logic and history.”
Like Wiggershaus,
And yet, as late as 1946, Horkheimer still planned to begin working on the dialectical logic in earnest, even going as far as identifying the project with the planned “second part” of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Ultimately, for both Wiggershaus and Noerr, the discrepancy between Horkheimer’s 1946 plans and the polemic in Dialectic of Enlightenment can best be explained as the symptom of a lag between long-term motive and hard-won insight, a sign of the lingering but waning influence of a dogmatic “Hegelian-Marxism” on critical theory, one Horkheimer had already effectively broken away from even if he hadn’t realized it yet.
Contrary to Wiggershaus and Noerr, I argue that the problem of mediating logic and history was not an implicit one lurking in the original idea of the dialectical logic but rather Horkheimer and Adorno’s explicit point of departure. The “open breach,” as Wiggershaus calls it, did not make the project of the dialectical logic impossible but possible. Noerr is right to stress that, throughout the 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno became increasingly outspoken in their opposition to theories that presupposed a tacit agreement between logic and history. However, the “drift” away from theories that assumed an agreement between logic and history began with the suspension of any assumed identity of logic and history Horkheimer and Adorno found in the works of Hegel and Marx themselves. From the earliest references to plans for the project in Horkheimer’s correspondence, the idea of a dialectical logic is premised on the non-identity of logic and history for the thoroughgoing historical materialist—it is also the primary contention the materialist critic holds against the metaphysician and the positivist alike.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, following Marx, the central categories of the modern historical and social sciences are always given twice, “in the head as well as in reality,” as belated expressions of forms of social being or partial expressions of individual aspects of social life.
[I]n drawing its own boundary, reason—as the social critique of reason—goes beyond itself. It fulfills the construction of the concept Hegel determined in Kant’s transcendental dialectic: by virtue of the contradiction inherent to circumscribing a narrow, contradiction-free region of experience for reason, it becomes the means of breaking out of the very region it circumscribes. The hopelessness of the fascist era is the despair and dissolution of hope as poor semblance in the face of the immediate possibility of its realization, to which hope weakly clings.
For the author's reconstruction and translation of the archival material, see "Sketches in Myth and Enlightenment (Winter 1942/43)." *Substudies* (blog), 14 February 2026. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/sketches-in-myth-and-enlightenment>
Read under the aspect of non-identity, the fragments for a dialectical logic acquire a consistency of their own, anti-systematic in that they “make a claim at least as far-reaching as that of the system itself, and thereby demonstrate its obsolescence.”
In the following second section, I outline an alternative reconstruction of the basic idea of the dialectical logic and its development on these grounds. Rather than treating the dialectical logic as an abortive preliminary exercise for Dialectic of Enlightenment, the project is reconsidered in light of three constituent elements neglected by previous interpretations: (1) the tripartite schema for a “material doctrine of categories”: reconstruction, application, anticipation; (2) the role of praxis as the historically mediating factor between logical forms and their real social content; (3) the progressive reformulation of the idea of the dialectical logic in terms of the philosophy and history of language.
In the third and final section, I offer my own thesis for how the fragments in the collection hang together as a whole. First, I present a case for the consistency of the fragments in terms of topics, literary form and style, and the basic methodological orientation of critical theory in the Marxian critique of political economy. In the process, I argue that the core of the project remains consistent from the early 1930s through the late 1940s, and that Horkheimer develops his early conception of the dialectical logic as a “material doctrine of categories” rather than abandoning it along the way. Finally, after suggesting a narrative arc to account for how the fragments fit together chronologically, I conclude with a short list of recommended “checks” to perform while reading the fragments which are meant to help readers get the most out of the collection.
In the 1938 prospectus quoted at the beginning of this introduction, Horkheimer highlights two moments of the dialectical logic: first, reconstruction of the historical genesis and transformation of certain categories of social thought; second, application of these categories to present-day society. These moments roughly correspond to the two levels of Noerr’s schema: reconstruction would consist in the articulation of a general logic of historical mediation of cultural-intellectual products by fundamental social-economic processes; application would consist in “a concrete use of the categories through an historical study” in the “analysis of contemporary society.”
Whatever freedom, value, or culture might mean today can only be presented if a critical position is taken towards the existing state of things, demonstrating the extent to which what exists today is freedom in the proper sense and to what extent, contrary to the ruling ideology, what exists is rather compulsion, insecurity, fear, and powerlessness.
In Eclipse of Reason (1947), Horkheimer reformulates the process application as the “double-edged” procedure of negation: the evaluation of certain categories in their application to present-day society requires the evaluation of society according to whether it lives up to these categories as ideals.
If it is true that we must know what freedom is in order to determine which parties in history have fought for it, it is no less true that we must know the character of these parties in order to determine what freedom is. […] The definition of freedom is the theory of history, and vice versa.
Horkheimer., *Eclipse,* 119.
Crucial for our purposes is the fact Horkheimer included a third moment in a subsequent revision of the text of the 1938 prospectus, which was repurposed later that year to serve as an abstract for a stand-alone project titled “The Philosophy of Western Society.” The abstract concludes:
Finally, the concepts and their concrete application will lead to a picture of the immanent tendencies in our society. The third part of the work, therefore, will contain a prospectus of the real potentialities for the future development of human existence. It will lay the basis for critical decisions which must be made not in the domain of “pure” science but in the field of praxis.
Max Horkheimer, "The Philosophy of Western Society" [1938], *MHA Na 657*, 297.
This pivot to the future and to praxis follows directly from Horkheimer’s treatment of the category of freedom in the 1938 prospectus. The past-oriented reconstruction of the changing historical significance of a given category of social thought and the present-oriented application of the category to given society, taken together, generate a structure of anticipation both open-ended and determinate. Whether future society will be legible in terms of categories like freedom depends on the practical intervention of those for whom they play an essential role in a theory of the present—that is, on whether “theory also becomes a material force.”
The idea of socialism is not ‘imposed’ on us by the available empirical material. […] The socialist theoretician constructs a model of a possible event which can only be actualized by the will of those involved. […] Regarding the question of the ‘downfall of capitalism’: It cannot be determined in advance which stage capitalism is in. This is a consequence of the unique role human activity plays in the sciences of society. The task of the “practitioner,” in this case, is to experimentally determine whether this phase of capitalism is truly ‘the last and highest phase’ or not.
Excerpt from the minutes of Discussion No. 5 (5/27/1936) in the ISR's Internal Seminar, "The Marxian Method and its Applicability to an Analysis of the Present Crisis." (1936) *MHGS, Bd. 15* (1995), 408-409. Author's translation.
With all three moments of the idea of the dialectical logic in hand, the problem of mediating between abstract logical forms and concrete experiential contents takes on a different character. The question becomes one of historical social practice, and the answer, in each case, concerns the changing historical relationship between theory and its practitioners. This is where the dialectical logic acquires its potential practical significance: the unity of theory and practice requires their difference not be forgotten.
One form of historical social practice becomes increasingly important for Horkheimer’s approach to the dialectical logic: spoken and written language. In a 1939 discussion of “Copula and Subsumption,” one of Horkheimer’s earliest fragments for the dialectical logic, Adorno objects to what he considers Horkheimer’s overly one-sided, negative assessment of the role of universality in logical operations of identification—namely, given the violence with which the universal is inflicted on particulars and individuals in the process, both logical and social, of judgment. Adorno criticizes Horkheimer for failing to do justice to the latent, utopian dimension in the universality of the copula: “It could always be that this kind of thinking, under the form ‘it is,’ contains within itself the only possibility of going beyond that which merely is. I cannot imagine a critique that would not also really be this sort of identification.” Almost two years later, Horkheimer returns to the topic—only this time, from the utopian side. In a letter to Adorno from 1941, Horkheimer advances his own speculative theory about a performative contradiction inherent to any language that serves particularist domination, shrouding it in universality: “Addressing another in speech essentially means recognizing them as a possible member of a future association of free human beings. […] The speech of the concentration camp overseer itself is an utter absurdity, regardless of its content, except insofar as it condemns the speaker himself.” Adorno responds enthusiastically, recognizing his own earlier objection to “Copula and Subsumption” in Horkheimer’s speculations: “I wanted to put in a good word, so to speak, for language. And your latest reflections on language seem to point precisely to this motif.”
Throughout the 1940s, Horkheimer’s fragmentary sketches on topics in dialectical logic would increasingly take their point of departure in language, understood as medium and record of the historical conflict between abstract logical forms and concrete social contents. In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer even defines the task of critical theory as a kind of critical philology, uncovering traces of the historical experience of class struggle, the perspectives of oppressors and oppressed, preserved and forgotten in our language today.
Though the dialectical logic appears to change drastically between Horkheimer’s earliest plans for the project in the 1930s and the last sketches he writes in the late 1940s, the underlying conception remains remarkably consistent despite its amorphousness.
The project is also consistent in terms of literary form and style. All of the texts remain fragments that vary in length from a three-sentence sketch to a ten-page essay. The dialectical arguments proceed by way of extremes, chaining together bold declarations and illustrating the abysses between word and thing, thought and act, in the linguistic equivalent of expressionist grotesques. In a 1949 conversation with Kracauer, Adorno defends the difficult style of presentation he developed with Horkheimer by characterizing their technique as follows: “The fault lines the fragments form together are the script that discloses their meaning.”
Horkheimer and Adorno’s conscious decision to adopt aphoristic form and style at the height of their theoretical collaboration in the 1940s was motivated by, and motivated in turn, a shared conception of critical theory on the model of the critique of political economy. In a 1939 letter, Horkheimer defends their common methodological orientation to a critic of Adorno’s recent work, explaining that whenever they struggled to find the relevant material or social-economic mediations that shape a given cultural or intellectual product, they preferred to leave a blank space instead of filling in the gaps with false solutions to the problem:
We are very conscious of the demand for economic mediation; just as we are of the immense difficulties that stand in the way of this. To replace it, however, with an intellectual-historical [mediation] of the kind you propose would mean falling behind the essay’s approach to the subject matter and adopting psychological-historical explanations wherever political economy fails to deliver. We prefer to leave the gaps in mediation like blank spots on a map, and to present the problem as an objective, social one.
Max Horkheimer to Hans Mayer, 3/23/1939. *Substudies* (blog), 6 March 2025. <https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158485476/13-marxism-and-method>
In 1943, Horkheimer reaffirms that the distinction between critical theory and the prevailing “pluralism” in the human and social sciences is “the critique of political economy, which established dialectical relations between the totality of the social sciences” in a way antithetical to the practice of contemporary “academic groups, a kind of dealing between the different rackets which confirm to one another that they are indispensable.”
Horkheimer argues for the necessity of this crossing given Lenin’s own four-part definition of dialectical logic: first, objects of inquiry must be examined in all of their “mediacies,” and according to the criterion of “comprehensiveness” as “a safeguard against mistakes and rigidity”; second, objects of inquiry must be “taken in [their] development, change, in [their] “self-movement” (as Hegel sometimes puts it)”; third, a full “definition” of an object of inquiry must involve the whole of human praxis, which serves as both a criterion of truth and an index of its practical wants; fourth, “dialectical logic holds that ‘truth is always concrete, never abstract.’ ”
As mentioned in passing above, when read chronologically, the fragments seem to suggest their own pattern of interpretation. The thematic focus shifts from the history of logical forms (of judgment), as in “Copula and Subsumption” (1939), to the relationship between logical forms and language, as in “Original Sin and Copula” and “Haupt- und Nebensatz” (1942/44), and finally to questions concerning the dialectical method and the fundamental categories of dialectical thinking, up to “the concept” as such, as in nearly all of the fragments written post-1944. These three thematic foci converge in “Trust in History” (1946). Since the other fragments either anticipate the essay or continue to inhabit its conceptual milieu, “Trust in History” is a virtual center of gravity for the collection as a whole and can therefore serve as an interpretive key. Consulting “Trust in History” whenever the other shorter fragments break off, often very abruptly, is strongly recommended. In lieu of a conclusion, I wanted to offer readers a list of “checks” they might find useful to perform while reading the fragments, an exercise I’ve come to rely on in my own work. First, check whether and how the three essential moments of the original conception of the dialectical logic (reconstruction, application, anticipation) play a role in the fragment. Second, check whether and how historical forms of social practice, including language itself, mediate between abstract logical forms and concrete social contents. Third, check whether and how “universality” or “the universal” undergoes inversions in value as its double-sided character, both repressive and utopian, is progressively developed.
Adorno, Theodor W. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. First published Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Aus einem Entwurf »Zur Neuausgabe« der Dialektik der Aufklärung, Frankfurt a.M., Februar 1969.” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (2003): 7–8.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969. Band III: 1945–1969. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005.
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. First published 1987.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Introduction to Heinz Krüger’s Studies on the Aphorism as Philosophical Form” (1956). Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), February 22, 2026. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/tw-adornothinking-in-breaks-1956.
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge, 2004. German original 1966; first English translation 1973.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Tagebuch der großen Reise, Oktober 1949: Aufzeichnungen bei der Rückkehr aus dem Exil.” Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (2003): 99. Author’s translation.
Crane, James, and J. E. Morain. “Introducing Racket Theory.” Critical Theory Working Group (blog), June 24, 2025. https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/.
Crane, James. “On Reading Critical Theory I: Perspectival Distortions.” Substudies (blog), May 9, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/on-reading-critical-theory-i-perspectival.
Crane, James. “Sketches in Myth and Enlightenment (Winter 1942/43).” Substudies (blog), February 14, 2026. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/sketches-in-myth-and-enlightenment.
Horkheimer, Max. Letter to Walter Benjamin, February 23, 1939. In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 16 (hereafter MHGS 16), 564–68. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995.
———. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 1974.
———. Letter to Erich Fromm, July 29, 1934. Substudies (blog), December 8, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-early-sketch-for-a-dialectical.
———. “Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics” (1932). Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), May 9, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/162852001/hegel-and-the-problem-of-metaphysics-1932.
———. “[Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts für Sozialforschung]” (1938). In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 12, Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (hereafter MHGS 12), 156–57. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985. For the English translation commissioned by the ISR in 1938, see “An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program (1938),” transcribed and edited by James Crane, Substudies (blog), June 9, 2025, https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/165428535/i-an-institute-for-social-research-idea-activity-and-program-1938.
———. Letter to Karl Landauer, March 18, 1935. Substudies (blog), December 8, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/181013997/letterhorkheimer-re-idea-for-a-dialectical-logic.
———. Letter to Paul L. Landsberg, December 23, 1939. Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), March 18, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158566797/letterhorkheimer-re-logic-in-the-tunnel.
———. “The Marxian Method and Its Applicability to an Analysis of the Present Crisis”: excerpt from the minutes of Discussion No. 5, ISR Internal Seminar (May 27, 1936). MHGS 15, 408–9. Author’s translation.
———. Letter to Hans Mayer, March 23, 1939. Substudies (blog), March 6, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/i/158485476/13-marxism-and-method.
———. “The Method of Concept-Formation in Critical Theory” (1941). Substudies (blog), June 28, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/the-method-of-concept-formation-in.
———. “Notes on Lenin and Method” (1928/29). Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), March 20, 2026. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-notes-on-lenin-and-method.
———. “On Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (1928/29). Substudies (blog), October 24, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/max-horkheimeron-lenins-materialism.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “On the Critique of Language” (September 1941). Substudies (blog), November 8, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornoon-the-critique.
Horkheimer, Max. Letter to Friedrich Pollock, February 10, 1943. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17 (hereafter MHGS 17). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996. 423–24. English in original.
———. Letter to Friedrich Pollock, March 27, 1946. MHGS 17, 714–15. Author’s translation.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Rescue of the Enlightenment (October 1946).” Translated by James Crane. Substudies (blog), August 11, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/horkheimer-and-adornorettung-der.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “Two Unpublished Fragments by Horkheimer and Adorno” (1946). Translated by James Crane. Critical Theory Working Group (blog), September 30, 2025. https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/.
Horkheimer, Max. Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Translated by G. F. Hunter, M. S. Kramer, and J. Torpey. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Lenin, V. I. “Once Again on the Trade Unions: The Current Situation and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin” (1921). In Collected Works, vol. 32. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973.
Marx, Karl. “Abstract from the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/law-abs.htm.
———. “Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, Karl Marx, March 1843–August 1844, translated by J. Cohen, C. Dutt, et al. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.
———. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1973.
Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin. “Zum werk- und zeitgeschichtlichen Hintergrund der Dialektik der Aufklärung.” In Aufklärungskritik und Aufklärungsmythen: Horkheimer und Adorno in philosophiehistorischer Perspektive, edited by Sonja Lavaert and Winfried Schröder. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
———, and Eva-Maria Ziege, eds. Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft: Beiträge zur “Dialektik der Aufklärung.” Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019.
Schweppenhäuser, Hermann. “The Concept of Language and Linguistic Presentation in Horkheimer and Adorno” (1986). Translated by James Crane. Critical Theory Working Group (blog), April 22, 2024. https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2024/language/.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge: Polity, 1994.
Ziege, Eva-Maria. Antisemitismus und Gesellschaftstheorie: Die Frankfurter Schule im amerikanischen Exil. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009.
Adorno, Theodor W. “›Mammoth Motives,‹ Notizen zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie des Antisemitismus” (1944). MHA Na 655, 176–78. Horkheimer, Max. “The Philosophy of Western Society” (1938). MHA Na 657, 297. “International Institute of Social Research: A Report on Its History, Aims and Activities 1933–1938” (1939). MHA Na 656, 371.
The guiding concern of the work is not a formalist epistemology, but a material doctrine of categories. In scientific and political discussions about social problems, there are certain categories which are used constantly, but which nevertheless give rise to differences of opinion as soon as a more precise definition is called for. Such categories include concepts like causality, tendency, progress, law, necessity, freedom, class, culture, value, ideology, dialectic, and so forth. The equivocal and vague use of such concepts has resulted in the fact that whenever they seem to have been given an unambiguous definition in philosophy or psychology, the definition is in fact merely abstract—so abstract that no further meaning can be attributed to them. One influential philosophical school of the present, so-called logical empiricism, accordingly declares all such concepts utterly meaningless. True, these words have been terribly abused; at times, even misused for dogmatic and narrow-minded metaphysics. However, the prevailing fashion of simply discarding them can only reinforce the reigning confusion and helplessness of the intellect. In truth, all of these concepts have a correct meaning, though never one that can be defined once and for all with the very same words. Concepts cannot be treated the same way the Egyptians once did their corpses, as if by means of the technique of definition they could be embalmed and preserved intact for millennia. The desire for such security can never be fulfilled in the realm of spirit. The content of the foundational categories of the philosophy of history can only be determined by their exact relationship to the historical course of the present. These categories can only be preserved on the condition that they are not embalmed but are instead kept alive through the continuous effort of relating them back to reality. Whatever freedom, value, or culture might mean today can only be presented if a critical position is taken towards the existing state of things, demonstrating the extent to which what exists today is freedom in the proper sense and to what extent, contrary to the ruling ideology, what exists is rather compulsion, insecurity, fear, and powerlessness. Every determination of philosophical concepts involves the presentation of human society in its socially given condition. In this respect, the planned book will approach logic in a similar way to Hegel’s great work—namely, not a mere enumeration of abstract forms of thought, but rather a determination of the most decisive, content-laden categories of the most progressive consciousness of the present.
Discursive logic is completely focused on the opposition of universal and particular. According to it, language has to raise temporal events to atemporal concepts, multiplicity to unity; the business of language par excellence is subsumption. Science follows, formulating the invariants that recur in such events. Propositions that express invariants are called laws. Thus, discursive logic returns to a historyless actuality, however much the universal may subsequently be differentiated in relation to new special cases. The idea of a fixed order of kinds, the secret presupposition that, fundamentally, nothing changes, is inseparable from discursive logic. Language makes the new appear as old; it proves that all is given in the framework of that which has always been. Language stamps.
What this function has to signify, to what extent it’s objectively grounded—the truth of language has been up for debate since philosophy first began. According to the realistic conception, the universal, and indeed only the universal, exists. The first philosophers taught: there is but one great thing: Water, Fire, Air. Language makes the senses—according to which what is given is not the one but the many—see reason. It says: the tree is water, the house is water, the heavens are water, the only thing that exists is water. What the “is” signifies, the specific Being of the arché, is not discussed. Particular modes of existence cannot be thought. The distinction between the first Being and individual things is not, because individual things, taken for themselves, are not; because they are merely the first Being itself. All speech, however diverse it may sound, is fundamentally the same gesture of pointing to the individual with the one expression: Water—Water; Air—Air; and so on.
When later instead of just the one arché several were adopted, the affair became more complicated without, however, changing in principle. The individual thing was no longer the universal substance, but a mixture of substances. Take, for example, the concepts of ‘having’ and ‘properties.’ A thing has several properties; it is a mixture of several elements. Contradiction enters—without, however, becoming explicit. The same logical function is sufficient for relating all individual things to a single arché. If, however, this individual thing “is” fire in the same exact way it “is” water, the distinction of principles is negated. They have no being apart from being in the individual, which, for itself, is not. But the inherence is formulated through the copula, and discursive logic knows only the one. Language, in its Being, drives to monism and identity philosophy.
The successors of the nature-philosophers de-substantialized the substances; the relation of the one Weltding to the many individuals was transposed into that of the universal to the particular. Beyond the universal is not. As soon as one speaks, a particular is designated as a universal. Apart from this, one cannot speak, except, at most, to give names. In the traditional sense, cognition always refers back to an unchanging, timeless Being—even if the contrary is asserted. If the claim is abandoned that every proposition must adapt itself to the schema of subsumption, the subsumption of a particular subject by means of the copula under a preformed predicate-concept, then formal logic ceases to be universal. It is especially committed to the postulate that verbal statements must be capable of translation into substantive ones. Every event “is” a special case of its genus. The proposition “he hates” reduces the occurrence to abstract hate, which does not itself hate, but “is,” in the sublimated mode of being of the universal “is,” understood according to the thingly Being of the arché. According to formal logic, there is only one activity: “to be,” and “to be” is no real activity, no spontaneity, but rather the timeless duration of the genus derived from sheer thingly insistence, an eternal sameness.
Were the verbal statements not regarded as equivalent to the predicative propositions into which they are translatable, there would be as many logics as there are verbs. The logical relation of words would no longer be restricted to relationships such as encompassing and encompassed, universal and particular, substance and accident. There would be as many logical relationships as constellations in reality. Aristotle and Hegel are not distinguished with respect to the tendency to identify logic and metaphysics, but are distinguished in that the former encloses the world in simple and fixed boundaries and restricts it to the rigid hierarchy of a world that his logical laws reflect. Hegel, however, sought to raise differentiated, historical reality to speech through logic; but, of course, in the end, he sank it back down into the Eleatic night. Hegel’s logic too serves the philosophy of identity.
Nominalism believes itself far removed from these difficulties. According to nominalism, the copula has only the subjective function of memory. “He is an executioner” means he’s displayed certain traits here and there. The “is” says nothing about him nor about his victim, but describes the relation between my present impression and my memory. I am only ever thinking, only ever speaking about the relation between my impressions and my ordering-system, but never really about other human beings themselves. According to realism, language points to some spectral reality behind time, whereas in nominalism the copula fulfills the function of affixing signs or markers to appearances that bring the event into connection not with reality but to our system of signs or markers as a whole. Language no longer signifies anything outside itself; the reference to the fixed order of kinds, which both school retain in their conception, has no meaning outside this very kind of referral. In speech, especially in science, nothing is truly meant and expressed, but merely “operated.” According to nominalism, language is mute. There is no specific relationship of word and thing in the sense of expression, significance, meaning, and so forth. One can—according to the older nominalism—investigate the psychological relations of value-representations and other phenomena of consciousness; one can—according to the newer nominalism—establish the physical relations of words, brain processes, facial movements, and other things, each of which is the concern of a different specialization. The distinction, however, between an object and something that would not be an object at all is meaningless. What follows from nominalism is the omnipotence of positive science and, indeed, the impossibility of putting it into question. Kant’s attempt to simultaneously recognize and delimit physics and nominalism went far beyond nominalism. His assertion of the autonomy of the person is burdened with all the problems of realism. It returns the transient reality of the empirical human being to the level of eternal Being.
The nominalists would rather not pose the question of the truth of language in language. Instead, they would much rather describe what takes place in science or popular judgments. They replace philosophy, the critique of specialist knowledge, with apology. They are without bias and adapt their representations of logic to whatever use the professors make of it; they pick up their examples of cognition from the latter. If the scientific community were to conduct itself differently, no doubt these philosophers would find it to be just as good. On the basis of such experience, they subsume thinking under the concept of “operating,” which is perfectly suited for precisely such linguistic commerce. The so-called ‘rules of the game’ of thinking, which nominalism touts as laws, the axioms of formal logic, depict something crucial about actual language as much as the physical law of inertia depicts something crucial about an actual revolution.
The dispute over universals has nothing whatsoever to do with the universality of discursive logic. With few exceptions, both parties have taken it for granted that the reduction of the new to the familiar is the function of language. In language so understood, all of the concepts one might need to grasp anything are already available. Even the ars inveniendi is bound to the mathesis universalis, just as the forces of production are bound to the form of existing society. The defense of language against barbarians transforms into enmity against spontaneity. The “is” in the proposition about the executioner means, at bottom, that his property is grounded in the nature of the thing, that it cannot be otherwise. In the sense of the Platonic myth, he chose the character of the executioner for himself before he was born and now leads the life of the executioner by necessity. The addition of a temporal index that limits the quality to a moment or to a year or to a decade or etc., leaves the function of the “is” wholly unaffected. In this case, the inescapable refers to the given span. He cannot change; for it is not his changing but his being that functions as copula. At best, the propositions that ‘A’ is an executioner at point [I.] and ‘A’ is a minister at point [II.] can both be correct. The identity of ‘A’ cannot be maintained in a strict sense; because, according to discursive logic, ‘A’ must equal ‘A’ (“if two quantities are equal to a third, then they are equal amongst themselves”), it would have to follow that ministers are executioners. Contradictions are far removed from such logic; it eliminates the identity of the person and stands by the immutability of the system. The concepts remain separated, whatever might occur in reality. The “is” in the language of discursive logic stems from the Being of a spectral nature.
Today, human relationships correspond to the use of language. The question—which, according to Schopenhauer, outstrips all others in importance—is asked: what one is. One has conversations whose only meaning is finding this out, and the state apparatus has the tendency to adapt this logic. One is a Red, a Jew, a Fascist, a Coward, a Trotskyist, a Foreigner—and one’s happiness and unhappiness hang in the balance of such a verdict. One is to be subsumed, seized, classified, imprisoned, and killed accordingly. Discursive logic celebrates its triumphs: the determination and classification, the “statement,” the provable statement really counts for something. And what could be easier to prove than what costs someone their head. What could save them—tends to be insight into other orders.
Adorno: The entire way of posing the question presupposes the ontological dignity of the copula. The decisive thing would be an analysis of the copula with the aim of determining whether there is such an ontological dignity of the copula and how it relates to the claim of the positivists that the copula has absolutely no content.
Horkheimer: In the history of logic and of German idealism, [the idea is that] the copula would really lead to the essence of the concept of the subject. Example: This is a human being. The concept of the genus functions as the essence, and the copula has the function of placing the individual under the essence and [at the same time] conferring reality to the essence. The subsumption of the individual under the essence amounts to the annihilation of the individual. “[The] real is simply the essence.” The individual is canceled out in speech. That is how it is in Hegel: that which is no longer subsumable is worthless existence.
Adorno: The grounding though is that the meaning of being principally presents a determinate relation of the kind that every time one says “it is,” it is asserted that “it” falls under something that was already there.
Horkheimer: It’s about the interpretation of being, namely with the attempt [to understand] what really happens when one says of something, “it is.”
Adorno: The moment of identity is, at base, already hidden in being as the subsumption of the particular under the essence. That which here and now ‘is,’ ‘is’ self-same. The concept of being is thereby entirely reduced to the function of identity.
Horkheimer: Objection: if I say, “that [fellow] is an irate man,” I am only bringing something to the attention of others. By intention, I am not subsuming, but rather only indicating the new under the form of what was already there.
Adorno: Your theory is a monstrous attack on language. Is what lies at hand in language not dialectical? If I name something, is that always merely an analytical function? Does the copula always mean the self-same in all possible cases?
Horkheimer: If it doesn’t always do that, then we arrive at a kind of pluralism: sometimes the copula has that function, and sometimes it does not, so what I call uniform logic is broken apart. How should the other relationship be? I honor language very highly; I take it very seriously.
Adorno: In Hegel there is also the motif: everything is what it is, and, for that very reason, not what it is.
Horkheimer: That is, however, at base only an everlasting process of rectification, an ever more concrete and differentiated identification. The whole system still comes down to the subsumption of everything that is, and thus to being. In Hegel, “is” can only really be predicated of being itself. Even now, I still have the notion—which I really ought to get rid of—that language claims to designate that which is.
Adorno: It could always be that this kind of thinking, under the form “it is,” contains within itself the only possibility of going beyond that which merely is. I cannot imagine a critique that would not also really be this sort of identification. The logic in which we live is a kind of wall before reality. We are so enclosed within it that any escape from it other than one which would, at the same time, remain inside it is impossible. Your text awakens the feeling that we would really need to have a different language.
Horkheimer: I think that is only one side of the matter, but it is extremely difficult to describe the other. The nominalist exit is bad, a bad regress into the infinite.
Adorno: The manuscript differentiates between ontology and nominalism. I would say that if this analysis of the copula applies, then the difference between ontology and nominalism itself would be inapplicable. They both involve recognizing, subsuming.
Horkheimer: That’s how it is in my work.
Adorno: But this would also mean that we cannot differentiate between ontology and nominalism at all.
Horkheimer: They both accept the structure.
Adorno: Then what does it mean to speak of ontology and of a metaphysical concept of being, if being is nothing other than the function of identity? How can we ascribe substantiality to the concept of being?
Horkheimer: Language reduces itself to pointing.
Adorno: Can we really give ontological weight to the concept of being, as you are urging, if being is only a subsuming under that which was already there?
Horkheimer: It seems to me, however, that there is still something else tucked away into this being, namely the reference to the thing, the natural thing. If one were to speak of the being of the genus, of the known or of the old, then this would involve the permanence of eternal nature, in which—in a certain sense—everything should remain old.
Adorno: The logician can still resolve that by labeling this element of being as mere fetishization of the function of identity and excluding it.
Horkheimer: The order is, however, the reverse: there is not first of all the function of identity, which is then fetishized; rather the belief in eternal or substantial being is first, and then, only insofar as this is taken as the ground of the matter, can the function of identity be constituted at all. The gods were not invented on the basis of what was actual, rather they had to be presupposed in order for the concept of a univocal reality to be upheld at all. I do not mythologize identical being, but I can only attribute a meaning to identical being if I go back to such processes.
Adorno: Constellation of logic and myth: logic is mythical. Logical thinking is pre-logical thinking. The compulsion of logic as system is the moment of compulsion in nature, to which we have succumbed. There are, therefore, effectively two possible interpretations of logic:
The copula means nothing: positivists, blank space.
Language is given over to blind nature through becoming fixed. As I wrest this one thing away from nature and single it out as a being-for-itself, I thereby push it back into nature, as in this I say nothing other than: this is the very nature under which I subsume it.
Horkheimer: It seems to me that, in this world, language always relates everything to an order just as bad as that which the world itself presents. A better language only seems possible in a better world—in which it would, however, no longer be necessary. You can always argue that language as a whole does indeed convey something that goes beyond this.
Adorno: Hegel says that being as the function of identity is actually nothing at all, just as in positivism. He concludes from this that being is at the same time nothing. Isn’t it precisely because being is nothing but this subsuming, precisely because it ‘is not,’ that the thorn is thereby added to it, to the principle of subsumption posited in itself, which makes it otherwise?
Horkheimer: In saying “that is that,” it is really negated once again. It becomes—but no more—it is. The dialectic of being, nothing, and becoming occupies, in a certain sense, a unique place in the Hegelian dialectic as a whole. Hegel says: when we subsume something, this is only possible because the genus is a kind of intersection. The positing of being and its identification with nothing is, however, much more abstract than everything that comes later.
Adorno: The beginning of Hegel’s logic means: being, simple being without any further determination. No proposition. He sets up the copula in its abstractness, without relating it to a tode ti [‘a this’]. I don’t believe Hegel began with being by accident. The meaning rests on the withdrawnness of the being of the tode ti.
Horkheimer: The secret, the highest category for him and for the entirety of discursive logic is being; the copula must be subsumed under itself.
Adorno: Either nothing or nature is hypostatized. You have said it is a miracle that we can say or think anything at all that isn’t technical-administrative. I would say that the complete nothingness of this “is” is the fact that being is nothing other than subordination under something determinate, such that it has, in a certain way, turned against the operation that is thereby performed. Also implicit in logic is that this subsumption is nothing. This non-being of subsumption means that every individual identity is afflicted by an illness. Hegel recognized that this concept of being, having no content, is completely void, that every finite subsumption is false or inadequate.
Horkheimer: But in Hegel, there are continuous corrections. Every isolated proposition is false. Language, however, reinstates its rights once more, it makes up for it in the end. For if it did not, propositions would lose their sense.
Adorno: Hegel was very clever not to put the existential claim at the beginning of the logic. In actuality he was doing phenomenology! When he talks about being at the beginning, this is precisely an attempt to not predicate being of being itself. In a certain sense, we cannot get out of discursive logic, but in another we can nevertheless go beyond it.
Horkheimer: The aversion to speaking is linked to the aversion to predicative thinking.
The crux of the problem of language is hidden in the copula. At bottom, language is incomprehensible because the copula is incomprehensible.
One side of the copula is relating everything new to the fixed hierarchy of kinds, the silencing of history. There is something akin to reconciliation in this: the fear of the totally foreign and isolated is dispelled. It is brought under the protection of what lasts.
It is this reflection that first grants the logical categories their meaning. Positivism removes the poison from questions like “What is truth? What is universal and particular? What is thinking?”—here too, the answer lies in definition, as all judgments are merely analytic. Such evasion can only be countered by pointing to the fact that there is a relationship to power at stake in these questions. The questions really do demand an answer to whether and to what extent categories participate in the highest good. It is not for nothing that the theory of the neoplatonists, that concepts are emanations of God, was held in high respect by the sharpest minds for centuries. It betrays an abyssal insight into the relation between logic and theology.
Being and Power are indissoluble; even the Stoics and Spinoza knew this. No great European philosopher has been able to dissolve this relationship. Kant’s synthetic judgments a priori are an attempt to rescue truth without anchoring it in power. He paid for this with the metaphysical obscurity of his concept of pure original apperception and the absence of any principles for the discovery of the categories, the two greatest weaknesses of his theoretical philosophy.
However, an abyss has opened between Being and Power in history, and so truth exists only in negation. This insight is the heart of Hegel’s philosophy—so far as it does not, like Baron von Münchhausen, pull itself out of the water by its own pigtails and, with the deification of determinate negation, with its assumption into the absolute, return to neoplatonism. Transcendental logic did not ignore the doctrine of original sin and, despite its ontological method, became the critique of ontology. Conversely, dialectical logic wanted to be ontology, whereas its method was the clearest expression of breaking with it. In restoring history, in good Christian fashion, into the guaranteed vehicle of truth and redemption, it reinstated the copula in all its injustice.
Dependent clauses belong to the juristic, argumentative phase of thinking. Primitives and totalitarians talk in independent clauses. “The Jew will be burnt.” In differentiated social systems one at least says, “the Jew, if he does not convert…” “the slave, who has stolen…” or “a murderer, whosoever he be…” There is a connection between humaneness [Humanität] and dependent clauses. As dubious social practice left its mark on all areas of spirit, the concept of the universality of law, as it was mediated in such dependent clauses, pointed out ideology, and so pointed beyond it. When dependent clauses fall, the idea of universality that exists in their mediation falls with them.
Even so, philosophy cannot exempt itself from the tendency towards the independent clause; it is able to reverse this development as little as any other byproducts of decline. Its adherence to outdated linguistic custom lends philosophy a character of harmlessness and the existing order a sheen of humaneness. Argument, restraint, and artful construction lose their weight. The style of theory becomes simpler, though because in doing so it denounces the very simplicity it consciously adopts by mirroring the barbaric process. The style approximates the rackets with the force of hatred and thus becomes their opposite. Its logic becomes as summary as their justice, as crude as their lies, as conscienceless as their agents—and, in this opposition to barbarism, becomes specific, exact, and scrupulous. The distinctionless designation of the essential being of society as the embodiment of rackets is infinitely differentiated, since it summarily denounces the distinctionless brutality against powerlessness. The generalization and simplification of philosophy, which, in the eradication of even one innocent, forgets that the millions who allowed this to happen survive it, displays no lack of subtlety. In omission of the dependent clause that relativizes the mutilation of humanity, it attributes absoluteness to the horror that emanates from this. The subtlest shade of pleasure is sacred to philosophy. In the lack of any in-depth description of the apparatus, in the absence of syntactic conjunction for the why and because and when of the night in which one victim is like the other becomes eloquent in philosophy. Reformism reaches for statistics; for cognition, one concentration camp is enough.
Any description of the concentration camp that draws fine distinctions between different categories of inmate and the respective kinds of abuse to which they will be subject, any description that follows closely the official motives and statistics in the reports from those institutions of hell, as if they were just one more object of study for political science—already participates in its apology, like the Catholic clerks who propagated the legality and ecclesiastical order of the Inquisition. Since the war began, the atrocities ‘over there’ have been handled summarily, even when with caution. But they aren’t the reason that war broke out. Domination declared war because it was threatened, not because the dominated were murdered. The atrocities were not the impetus, not by any means; it was rather the unworkable demands made on capital. Just think of how much more convenient it would have been if they could come to an agreement with reasonable hangmen, with the hangmen they already have at home. They forget that fascist practice only condescends to specification in the face of actual power, not when confronted with the unarmed competition. Before weakness, domination becomes totalitarian. Powerlessness can be subsumed so easily. The worthy competitor is only fought openly where no understanding between well-matched forces is possible. In himself, he is entitled to a dependent clause.
On close inspection, Hegel’s doctrine that the concept is the “inner side” of the thing itself, performed as the idealist dialectic, transforms into the materialist of its own accord. It’s like certain optical illusions: if you stare at them long enough, they reverse into another figure, just as much the image you see before you as the one you were just looking at. Turning Hegel right side up, from head to foot, was only so compelling because he was already standing.
The individual is not a natural but a spiritual being. It necessarily involves reflection on itself as a principle separate from others, possessing a special connection to itself as distinct from life in general. Without the “I,” there is no individual.
Leibniz was intimately familiar with this relation. Indeed, he made his monads the elements of the universe, which they reflect. But insofar as naked monads, unconscious of themselves, from which dead things are composed, merely exhibit a negative, suffering, they are only monads in possibility, individuals in-themselves, in contradiction to their own essential being, pure activity as mere suffering. With this contradiction, the biological and historical process of development is set into motion that ultimately brings them to consciousness. Knowledge alone overcomes the contradiction and makes the living substance into what it originally is—individual.
The real, which Leibniz called “monad,” Hegel called “concept.” The concept becomes aware of itself as the individual acts and learns, through its participation in the universal process of development, what it is. Through the subjectivity of individuals, the substantial is actualized. Yet this historical process perpetuates itself in the death of individuals. Substance endures not as individual but as genus. Hegel turns the ephemerality of the individual into the ground of its own relative worthlessness. The principle by which the contradiction finally reveals itself is not the substantial form of the individual, but rather the totality per se. Insofar as the individual thinks the truth, it remains something abstract, not simply because of the social coinage of his thoughts, but because of the boundedness of his factual existence.
The difference between the Leibnizian and Hegelian systems is the difference between pantheism and theology. The question is: whether the progression of the dialectic beyond the individual to the genus, from the individual to the course of history as a whole, from the particular life to the closed totality, is not, in fact, the same as stepping back from the good into the bad infinity, from the essential into sheer quantity. (Which must, for Hegel, add up!)
The dialectical method could easily be understood as one of ‘the golden mean.’ Some proposition—for example, ‘true thinking is that of madness’—is spoken. This provokes a counter-thesis, which cancels [zurücknimmt] the concept of ‘madness’ and determines what kind of ‘madness’ or what features of ‘madness’ were meant. One could just as well have asserted the reverse, that healthy common sense is true, such that common sense would then be cancelled, to the point it no longer bore any resemblance to English philosophy. Accordingly, the much-vaunted sublation of opposites would in reality be the sanding-off of extremes, steering towards some juste milieu.
This view is not as entirely incorrect as we dialecticians would like to imagine. The description strips the method down to a minimum—which, of course, decides everything. What guides the dialectician in cancellation or negation is neither aversion to extremes nor inclination to plausibility, but is rather the fact that he never comes to terms with the existence of hopelessness and horror. This generates the scope and direction of the negation. The determination of truth-as-madness is incorrect because madness is as much in harmony with what exists as is healthy common sense. Madness, therefore, is not negated insofar as it is extreme, but insofar as it is identical with its opposite—that is, insofar as it is not extreme at all.
The same can be shown for all dialectical theorems. That the dialectical method, which is one of extremes, approaches the golden mean when stripped down to a minimum, has its counterparts in other areas, for example, in the aesthetic and the political.
The quickest way to determine the difference between dialectical and undialectical thinking is as follows: in undialectical thinking, concepts are established by definitions, and any new cognition results in the expansion of their real scope; in dialectical thinking, however, new cognition constitutes an attack on the significance of the concept itself. Concepts need not, therefore, be tossed out as old scrap.
Of course, the distinction only becomes intelligible if it is made clear that in dialectical thinking each concept stands for the truth. The dialectical progression only ever comes about through negation of the absolute claim of concepts and judgments; thus, concepts and judgments which make no such claim are, in logical terms, sheer nonsense. At bottom, undialectical thinking has the same intention, only, in its resignation, it has given up and forgotten. In ceasing to reflect on the movement through which thinking is actually constituted, in relegating such concern to psychology, which, in absence of such reflection, is just as nonsensical, the integrative development, i.e., spirit, is driven out of concepts, which are transformed from thoughts into mere containers, things—not even signs, since a sign is only a sign at all by virtue of the intellectual intention it awakens. (Susanne Langer overlooks what’s decisive.)
What is becoming more manifest in social reality with each passing day was latent within bourgeois thinking from the beginning: the liquidation of development. One need only consider the concept of truth. Once defined, for example, as adaequatio intellectus et rei, there is nothing more to be learned about or beyond this highest idea at which all intellectual interest aims. In relation to this idea, the sole task left to thinking is the mechanical testing of whether a given proposition does or does not correspond to it; the conditions for this procedure are compiled in so-called logic. Opposed to this stands the assumption that we cannot yet know what the truth is, because cognition [Erkenntnis] is not finished. According to the latter view, the intellectual process consists not in the mere augmentation or correction of individual truths, one in which the purely formal concept of truth would itself remain untouched; rather, the material progression of the process affects the formal category, i.e., the distinction between formal and material is continuously sublated.
What holds for the concept of truth does for other concepts as well. Both are intimately connected. Apart from their essential identity with truth, fulfilled in each case through intellectual mediation, the relation between each concept and its object is governed by the concept of truth as well. If, however, this is not conclusively [abschlußhaft] fixed through definition, the relation between each individual concept and its object can no longer, therefore, be fixed through conclusive formal-logical propositions. The structure of logic is swept up in the course of objective cognition, just as, conversely, each step of objective cognition bears the problematic of the scope and significance of its advance with respect to conceptual relations of the highest order.
Not only does this reinforce the weight of the empirical, on which the ultimate questions now depend, but also reins it in, since these questions, with all of their demands and concerns, are henceforth implied in each act of empirical cognition. It should not be imagined that so-called empirical research is abandoned in dialectical logic. If what is called empirical research today is nothing more than the barren product of abstraction as represented in the bad separation of formal logic and material experience, and which tends, particularly in the social sciences, towards empty activity, then concrete thinking first comes into its own in the liquefaction of that opposition. Whereas in “research,” the subject matter is supposedly viewed without prejudice, but is actually viewed according to the schemata established through the economic division of labor, dialectics experiences in each instance the subject matter solely sub specie its philosophical interest, and, for that very reason, in relative freedom from the distortions of industrial conceptuality. For dialectics, appearance is always the perception of nature cut off from adequate expression, which dialectics itself would help to remedy.
The dialectical spirit has a different relation to naïveté than the undialectical. The latter relates to naïveté in simple opposition: always and immediately seeking to discover conditions, causes, components, relationships of a given feeling or thing, and, even before it has discovered these, confronts givens with the anticipatory certitude that they are merely the effect of something else; that everything immediate and particular is merely a sign of the mediated and universal. The latter, that is, prescribes reification, in contrast to the naïve, who remains at the mercy of appearances.
Dialectics, however, distinguishes. It transforms naïveté without annihilating it. Like science, it too ‘gets behind’ the things, but it also preserves—and, indeed, rescues—the enchantment that emanates from them. Knowledge of relationships, transience, and illusoriness does not become a motive to apathy, as it does for Stoicism. This is the consequence of Hegel’s fundamental principle that in each successive mediation the preceding stage, i.e., the more immediate, should be sublated. There is more to this instruction than something ‘logical’ in the older sense. It implies that in the true enlightenment, that which is identical to philosophy, mythology is not shouted over and drowned out. Rather, its power is appeased, brought to rest.
Dialectics, like reflective behavior in general, resists the worship of the dead, but is nevertheless no stranger to the foolishness of handling things gently even when they cannot feel anything. In the refusal of blind domination of nature, the dialectical spirit escapes domination by nature, without, however, cutting things off from the possibility of enchanting it. The preservation of naïveté in thinking is what Kant gave the name of intellectual intuition and wanted to reserve for the Godhead alone. His successors sought to recover it for human beings by creating the dialectical method. If therapeutic psychology were what it should be, it would concentrate its efforts on uncovering the moments in individual and historical life through which power (in the figure of the father or the political ruler) made human beings incapable of devotion to things to leave them all the more securely at the mercy of things. In this function, psychology would become an instrument of philosophy once again.
For the thinking of the enlightenment, society appeared as an association [Vereinigung] of human beings for the sake of their self-assertion in nature. “Necessity brings human beings together and associates them,” says Montaigne, who is able to appeal to the old empiricists for this. “This accidental association is afterwards transformed through laws… .”
Early on, people were divided into two classes: the first, those divine men who sacrifice their self-love for the public good; the second, the miserable ones who loved only themselves: everyone wanted and wants still to belong to the first class, although, at the bottom of their hearts, everyone belongs to the second; and the most cowardly and selfish cried out louder than all the others that everything must be sacrificed at the altar of the commonwealth. The desire to command, a kind of arrogance, as detectable in a schoolyard bully or village mayor as in a Pope or a Caesar, is a powerful spur to human industry, for through it men are brought to heel by others.
Voltaire. *Traité*, 233.
The darker drives, the antagonisms between human beings, develop their forces, intensify production, and facilitate civilizational progress. As Machiavelli instructed, the advantages of class struggle between the nobility and the people should not be underestimated.
They do not consider that in every republic are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great, and that all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion […] For whoever examines their end well will find that they have engendered not any exile or violence unfavorable to the common good but laws and orders in benefit of public freedom.
Niccolò Machiavelli, *Discourses on Livy*, trans. H.C. Mansfield & N. Tarcov (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16.
The idea of the creative violence of oppositions has dominated bourgeois philosophy since Heraclitus. In his Logic, Hegel calls it the power of the negative; in his Philosophy of History, the cunning of reason. The concept of society, presented here in its first steps, and which these theorists first raised to consciousness—namely, the harmony of social and individual purposes, of the universal and the particular—is actualized through the objective process of history. Marx’s theory applies this conception to capitalism. Just as earlier social forms generated the conditions for higher, more organized social forms, more satisfactory social relations for a greater share of humanity, so the present-day social form develops all of the elements needed for the final fulfillment of the concept of the right society and with it the concept of the human being. Working class politics should strengthen these economic tendencies and drive them forward to the point of their reversal. In a discussion of the role of factory legislation as a defensive means for the industrial proletariat, we read the following:
If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the working class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on the other hand, as we have already pointed out, that extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the concentration of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. It destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of capital is still partially hidden, and replaces them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed. […] By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and there by ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.
Marx, *Capital: Volume 1*, trans. B. Fowkes (Penguin, in association with New Left Review, 1976), 635.
Progress is, according to this theory, not unbroken, for just as every revolutionary period is preceded by periods of decline and tyranny, so the socialist one is preceded by a period of the direct, unconcealed domination of capital: fascism. The goal, however, despite all relapses, is just as surely laid out in advance for history as it is in the theories of bourgeois progressives: the rational self-preservation of associated humanity in confrontation with hostile nature.
Trust in history has replaced trust in God. It retains the conceptual realism of the Middle Ages in the sense that man fulfills his own concept through activity adequate to the course of history. While this concept is no longer linked to the concept of a Highest Being in a hierarchy of emanations, it is legitimized today through the authority of self-expanding rational civilization. However consciousless the economic, social, and psychological mechanisms that condition progress might be, the uniform direction in which their effects unfold constitutes an objective norm and bestows a significance to human interests beyond their status as subjective fact. Construction of a better society is just as much a matter of destiny for the revolutionary as integration into existing social relations is for the bourgeois. Such a conception, through which the enlightened individual imagined he could outrun the meaninglessness of existence, represents a desperate synthesis. It contains the element of heteronomy: something given, something blind is supposed to guide the human being. And in this, it is akin to the belief in fate, to any myth. Actions are to be ordered according to the course of time: its wisdom is conformism. Its every deed, service to the overpowering, all-conditioning mechanism; its idol, mute facticity. However, by holding history to be the actualization of the human being, its principle is at the same time universal: the fulfillment of a principle which is valid for everyone. It is not just that something factual should be achieved, but something spiritual that should be actualized. Insofar as the trust in history is grounded on the concept of the human being and, therefore, theory is not completely betrayed for practice, it holds open a vision of the right society. No subject can make a concept the ground of its action without at the same time, though it might forfeit its life as a result, making the claim in such a way that every other subject can affirm it as their own. This is the idea of the unity of truth which lies at the foundation of Kantian idealism. The concept negates the false principle of individuality by assuming the oppositions in which domination fixes individuals as untrue. The same judgment that postulates domination as the existing order [das Bestehende], as what holds power, by the same token denounces it as bad, for in its conceptuality, in its claim to be valid for all, it points beyond domination. In recognizing the origin of such oppositions from uniform actuality, it holds open the vision of a better one—in which the true might unfold. Wherever a conceptual judgment denies humanity, it contradicts itself. No word can be used to degrade that does not condemn the speaker. An inkling of this survives in the belief in history insofar as it posits the concept of the human being. It is a form of humanism, the last before its passage into barbarism. In it, something of what was pronounced dead by positivism and galvanized by fascism still draws breath: language. By relating actuality to concept, it revealed at the same time the abyss between the figure captured by the word and its redemption.
But language relates to the universal ambivalently. It subsumes under concepts which are the same for all. But this predicated universal—valid as comprehensive, familiar, and fixed—is not adequate to the thing it ought apply to. The predicate seeks to concretize the subject through something abstract, to determine it through something undetermined. The name of the subject is provisional; the predicate would help it find the right one, the name that would unlock its secret. The judgment is an attempt to help beings express what they cannot say in their muteness. This is the meaning of language, that towards which it always intends, despite its weakness. Dialectical negation holds fast to the idea of truth in the face of the weakness of discursive thinking; it would do justice to the subject of the judgment, the particular, even though the universal essence the judgment equates with the particular always spells the latter’s doom. The specific negation, advancing with each specific thesis, negates the copula, because the identity established by the copula involves the logical suppression in the subject of what it cannot unfold in practice. The concept under which the subject is subsumed is adequate to the subject only to the extent the subject is already circumscribed and imprisoned. Hence, Bergson banished the copula from metaphysics; dialectics, however, would convert the insight into the inadequacy of the individual judgment into the vehicle of its completion, instead of denying life such expression altogether. The inadequacy lies in the conclusiveness [Abgeschlossenheit] of the predicate. The conceptual universal, the qualities, the physical, biological, psychological forms, are, in each case, the law according to which the particular ‘goes to ground’ [zugrunde geht], they express the finitude of the particular: because the subject is an animal, a human being, a man, it must come to nothing. Judgment apprehends the living as mere nature, even where it conceives of the particular not through physical but social categories, such as ‘Nation’ or ‘State.’ Nevertheless, the concept is not external to what it comprehends. What in a single breath the copula posits as opposite and equivalent to the subject as his own essence indirectly betrays something of the secret of his longing, one which nevertheless cannot be named. In the concept, fulfillment and suffering are undivided. Its fixity faithfully mirrors that of the society which serves life only by suppressing it, develops human beings only by mutilating them, and knows no ‘homeland’ as protection except by repressing the protected. This insight pervades Hegel’s Logic: it develops the categories of the absolute as so many figures of decline. Its betrayal lies in the peace it makes with the content of such truth. Like Aristotle, it ultimately posits the finite as equivalent to what survives, the good as equivalent to what remains, and the forsaken as equivalent to the same categories through which it is forgotten. The Logic, a work which, like no other, is shot through with the injustice of judgment and so too of actuality, reposes into the system of judgments and belies the seriousness of the dialectic through the assumption of nothingness, pain, and death into the divine realm of the Idea. Through the Logic as a whole, the individual is supposed to recognize himself within and reconcile himself to the fate laid out before him by totality, no matter the hardship this may entail. By way of spirit, the individual is supposed to become one with the same order that spells his downfall. This is the goal of truth. The contradictions of history represent the opposition of the particular and the universal as it is driven to overcome itself, something Hegel still hoped for through politics until his Phenomenology. From the vantage of contemporary history: he let his hope wane and settled for the relative humanity of the welfare state as the basis for fulfillment. From then on, he located this fulfillment in the thought—on the grounds of what had been historically achieved—of reconciliation in the realm of spirit, in culture.
And so, like all bourgeois philosophy, his became one of resignation, of stoicism. With Schopenhauer and Judaism, he shares the insight into the forsakenness of the individual; with Nietzsche, he says ‘Yea’ to it. Modern existential philosophy, Heidegger’s courage-to-be before transcendental angst, is yet another version of the same stoicism, the old amor fati, the worship of the world. Every individual step of the Hegelian dialectic, so long as it is incomplete, consists in the sublation of inadequate predication. The subject that knows itself only as thing, man, has, with such judgments, not yet arrived at itself. In the end, however, the knowledge formed through all these negations is supposed to be the absolute judgment: the adequate concept. Divine truth is the insight into the division of its becoming, the totality of its determinations; truth is the last stage, whereupon the penultimate stage and all that came before it are raised to the concept. Accordingly, the truth, despite all objectivity, is merely intellectual. It actualizes itself in the one step history does not take, the step that thinking—in the shape of religion, art, philosophy—must make all on its own. The elevation of thought to perfection itself instead of its determinate negation has always meant the transfiguration of the powers of this world into the innermost being of all that lives. Thought repeats the very injustice that imprisons it. When the concept exhausts the truth, no room is left within the living except for what power encloses it; all is given as conquered through the system, through the concept, and the rest is cast aside as nothing, non-actual, accident. Hegel struck upon the spirit of language like no other: in expressing the determinacy of the finite, it spells pain and annihilation for the finite. The particular pays for its reflection as divine through language: it is thereby identified with the universal, with doom, with the figures of domination in nature and history and, in the end, with war. Whoever says Being must necessarily mean Power and Death as well. And when his judgment is made in earnest, when the particular is viewed as having utterly gone over into Being, he has already sealed its fate as Nothing, as what has justly ‘gone to ground’ [zugrunde geht]. The identification of language with truth is the work of the devil, just as the separation of truth from language is mute despair. This is the highest insight their interpenetration offers. However much the universal is determined in thinking for the sake of justice to the particular, however much every determination strives to give the particular more precise expression, the net of determinations reflects the web of fate.
Only by mediating this insight does language transform from a magical-mimetic technique into thinking. The concept is then neither, as in realism, a reproduction or reflection of the divine Idea nor, as in nominalism, a mere artifice or device without significance. The universal, object of the concept, becomes a negative for language; what it expresses, denunciation. By subsuming, it specifies suffering. When language names the universal, what binds human beings together is less that the universal by which they are captured in actuality recaptures them in thought, but rather that it says what holds them all in thrall. In such function alone does language shake the walls between human beings, behind which the identical is warped into the equality of the mutilated, the uniformity of the dominated. Skepticism and relativism, with all their knowledge of the conditionality of truth through the psychological individual, have always, through establishing the inadequacy of the concept, reinforced the absoluteness of its claim, albeit against their will. They are the sages of negation. Their summary procedure differs from dialectics in the generality and abstractness of the negation; dialectics relativizes the determinate judgment through the determinate antithesis and seeks, through its own limitation, to redeem the unlimited claim by which it points beyond itself. Fulfilling such a claim in itself—this is the meaning of every work of art. The work of art is, unlike the judgment, a totality: it means to enclose the truth inside itself, to reflect being as a whole. The work of art wants, like the judgment, to express what actuality is. And yet, whenever this is attempted, whenever, for example, the 9th Symphony is translated from musical into spoken language, the poverty of both is revealed. Where aesthetic means cannot reach, logical means fall short as well. Indeed only in this, the discrepancy between intention and fulfillment, is the promise unredeemed revealed. The repetition of the words ‘Man’ and ‘humanity,’ ‘brotherhood’ and ‘identity,’ is even more powerless than the duration of the work of art. In the absence of dialectical progression, the concept remains an abstract, harmless utopia. Language has always resisted the attempt to grasp the concept of the human being as something positive, to extract from it a principle beyond its reality; the attempt leads back to Stoicism, and, in the last instance, the idea of self-assertion. The highest point philosophy in such form beholds is a society in which agreement has been reached for the sake of maintaining dominion over all that is non-human all the more securely: the ideal of European philosophy, an exclusionary ideal in all its warmth and friendship. Human language points to no absolute goal. The principle opposite actual fact—which humanism believed it discovered in the concept of the human being, and whose fulfillment it ultimately saw in history—cannot be grasped by any concept. Unnamed, it lies at the ground of language and its concepts. The human beings who preserve themselves through society, as prescribed by their concept, practice domination, even if the councils were to function so perfectly that the state truly withered away and only surrounding nature were to suffer the blindness of human beings. The power human beings wield in becoming equal to their universal concept recoils on the human heart. The universality that faith in history contained as its truth was not the collective, but rather the emancipation of the living from its compulsion. The community of suffering was formulated in the concept. To sight freedom in the concrete thought of unfreedom: this is the reconciling force of determination through negation. Trust in history, however, passes into such negation: into consciousness of the deficiency of language, which only helps the living find expression by making it the concept with which it coincides, just as the justice system need only address someone who once committed a crime as a “criminal” to destroy them once and for all. And this trust is not in progress, whether historical or logical. The progression of determination is no recipe language can always rely on, however much depends on it. The universal concept of the human being contains a memory evaporated in those of “the Jew” or “the German”; the proposition that lingers on determinations so exact heralds less the abolition of suffering than one which dwells on the abstract.
With the advance of enlightenment, ever wider stretches of the world are subject, in extension as much as in intensity, to the fixed concept. The test of the concept is always an increase in power, and not of personal power, belonging to one single person alone, but in the sense of a power at universal disposal. The concept is a tool like any other. The conditions of its production and application correspond to those of other means of production. It is, so to speak, the tool come into its own, the tool kat exochen. The tendency, particularly associated with ‘the concept’ in the sense used by Bergson, to mistake what is preserved in memory, the available store of collected data in one’s possession, for the truth itself—today, this tendency appears before enlightenment itself, whose motor it once was, as a remnant of magic. It was once believed that with a lock of his hair, the absent enemy could be held in thrall; now, one imagines that because they hold the thing in thrall through its conceptual formula, that the formula is the thing itself. The quid pro quo is evident, and yet the whole question of the vocation of the human being is one and the same as that of an inner relationship between means and ends, practice and truth. However mad the fetishization of the means, the immediate positing-into-one [Ineinssetzen] of purpose and instrument, may seem, its antithesis, their radical separation, would necessarily nullify any hope humanity might have of arriving at the truth in any sense; even the greatest of philosophies only brand the identity of concept and being as mythical semblance [Schein] to the extent it has not been mediated—that is to say: as unearned, unappropriated, conceptless. Even in these greatest of philosophies, it is taken for granted that civilization will, as a matter of fundamental principle, catch up with the truth. Hegel considered his work as evidence that the Kantian abyss itself was bound to make Kant’s own philosophy a farce.
Concept is tool, tool is plan. So long as the plan is not one of humanity, end and means diverge. The entrepreneur of the Victorian style was a planner; he was alienated from the powers of society, the fluctuations of commodity prices, the vicissitudes of economic cycles, wars, and revolutions, because other plans were suddenly ratified at the cost of his own. The market could, therefore, only appear as regulator because none of the individual planners who met there were actually strong enough to prevail, and between classes and nations, the market was something more ephemeral still. The more tightly organized the subject of the plan in itself, the stronger the plan. With the thoroughgoing organization of humanity according to a common plan, alienation ends, for nothing human is alien to it any longer. The process reaches its completion when the universal plan is no longer forced onto the individual as external violence, as even when the plan is ideologically disguised as one’s own. The plan cannot be the administration of one by another, such that the distinction of the one from the other, as presupposition of the whole, eludes the concept. This was Marxist reason, the free association of humanity, free from the unplanned effects of social power. Only then, when each in their conduct becomes a means of the whole, do they also become an end to the whole and to themselves. Once the means is fully recognized as an end, we are freed from the domination of means.
However questionable the construction of classical—as well as proletarian—idealism may be, it is inherent in that first thought that, in the concept with which it sought to master beings, imagined it had touched upon truth, indeed in the first inkling that the expansion of human power is related to “right” living. The question is whether cognition is as fatefully chained to dominant conceptuality as it appears to be to such a logic, a logic which is itself so chained in its consistency. Attempted escapes from this logic—pure mediation, which is nevertheless straitjacketed by categories of domination; non-resistance, which bears the mark of dubious magical practice on its forehead; the humbug of sacred knowledge—none of these are truly tempting. The only rescue for thinking tired of the triumph of the means is to extend it to the point of its reversal. It is not true that enlightenment is at an end.
Horkheimer, Max. “Bewahrung der Naivetät in der Dialektik” (1945). In Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, vol. 12, Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (hereafter cited as MHGS), 301–2. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985.
———. “Der dialektische Begriff” (1945). MHGS, 12:299–301.
———. “Diskussion anschließend an das Manuskript von Max [Horkheimer] über Kopula und Subsumtion” (1939). MHGS, 12:494–98.
———. Eclipse of Reason. 1947. Reprint, New York: Continuum, 2004.
———. “Erbsünde und Kopula” (1942/44). MHGS, 12:277–78.
———. “Goldener Mittelweg” (1945). MHGS, 12:297.
———. “Haupt- und Nebensatz” (1942/44). MHGS, 12:279–81.
———. “[Idee, Aktivität und Programm des Instituts für Sozialforschung]” (1938). MHGS, 12:156–57. Cf. the Institute’s original 1938 English-language typescript, “An Institute for Social Research: Idea, Activity, and Program,” transcribed and edited by James Crane. In “Collection: The Idea of an Institute for Social Research: Reports 1938–1944.” Substudies (blog), June 9, 2025. https://jamescrane.substack.com/p/collection-the-idea-of-an-institute.
———. “Kopula und Subsumtion” (1939). MHGS, 12:69–74.
———. “Magie des Begriffs” (1949). MHGS, 12:323–25.
———. “Prinzip des Individuums.” Undated; editors assign a probable date of 1942. MHGS, 12:318–19. Because the dating of the fragment in UBA Ffm Na 803, “NY Notizen [I],” is 1945, in the absence of any indication of an earlier date of composition, the date 1945 has been retained [translator’s note].
———. “Umschlag der idealistischen Dialektik” (1944). MHGS, 12:286.
———. “Vertrauen auf Geschichte” (1946). MHGS, 12:119–27.
Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942.
Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, in association with New Left Review, 1976.
Montaigne, Michel de. Essais. Edited by Pierre Villey. 3 vols. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1930–31.
Voltaire. Traité de métaphysique. In Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Louis Moland, vol. 22. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879.
Horkheimer, Max. Letter to Friedrich Pollock, March 21, 1944. Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Archivzentrum, Frankfurt am Main. Nachlass Max Horkheimer, UBA Ffm Na 581, fol. 287r. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/horkheimer/content/pageview/6544976.
Here are some more articles you might like to read next: