Abstract
This chapter explains and defends the sort of materialism that was a core theoretical commitment of Marx and of the early Frankfurt School—in particular, Max Horkheimer—and which has been the subject of aggressive internecine criticisms on the part of later critical theorists, like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. The author offers grounds for thinking Marx’s and Horkheimer’s materialism both attractive and plausible. Section 10.1 establishes some necessary distinctions between substantive and explanatory materialism, Sect. 10.2 offers an account of Marx’s materialism, intended to hew closely to Horkheimer’s reading of Marx, Sect. 10.3 discusses Horkheimer’s understanding of materialism as a practical–theoretical commitment, and Sect. 10.4 concludes the chapter by offering some defense of materialism, chiefly centered around the normative importance of social labor, which both Marx and Horkheimer affirm.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For agreement that Horkheimer’s early materialism represents a form of what is now called “nonideal theory”, see Berendzen (2008: 713).
- 3.
It is unclear to me how Schmidt would define the substantive basis of Marx’s materialism in the sense I intend: in Chap. 1 of Schmidt 2014, the emphasis is on material conditions and labor, as I have suggested; in Chap. 2, however, Schmidt seems to suggest that it is Marx’s insistence on the independence of matter, of nature and its laws, from human consciousness and will that is basic (2014: 69–70). At the same time, the significance of the claim about the independence of nature is, for Schmidt, the permanence of labor in human life, understood as the metabolic interaction between humans and nature (2014: 83, 86). For what it is worth, I take the argument regarding matter and nature to be a secondary, “negative ontological” (as Schmidt calls it) consequence of the anti-idealist nature of Marx’s materialism, understood with reference to the basic conditions of human life.
- 4.
The reflexive form is not the product of translation: “Sie selbst fangen an, sich von den Tieren zu unterscheiden, sobald sie anfangen, ihre Lebensmittel zu produzieren, ein Schritt, der durch ihre körperliche Organisation bedingt ist” (Marx and Engels 1962: 21).
- 5.
As Schmidt writes, quoting The German Ideology: “An ‘opposition between nature and history’ is created by the ideologists in that they exclude from history the productive relation of men to nature. Nature and history, said Marx in criticizing Bruno Bauer, are ‘not two separate “things” ’. Men always have before them a ‘historical nature and a natural history’ ” (Schmidt 2014: 49).
- 6.
Eclipse of Reason is back in print in English and a number of Horkheimer’s early essays have been republished, some translated for the first time, in Horkheimer 1993 (a, b, c, d, e), which appeared with a companion volume of newer commentary (although much of this is actually translation of some of the major contributions to German reception of Horkheimer in the 1970s–1980s). On the other hand, as others have also noted, several of the authors included in this companion volume demonstrate a marked lack of charity in their treatment of Horkheimer, a somewhat puzzling feature in an anthology the declared intent of which is to stimulate renewed interest in Horkheimer’s work: see Regier (1995) and Abromeit (2011: 9, n. 26).
- 7.
- 8.
As Habermas himself observes, “Only twice did Marx express himself connectedly and fundamentally on the materialist conception of history [in The German Ideology, and in the “Preface to The Critique of Political Economy”]; otherwise he used this theoretical framework, in the role of historian, to interpret particular historical situations or developments… Engels characterizes historical materialism as a guide and a method. This could create the impression that Marx and Engels saw this doctrine as no more than a heuristic that helped to structure a (now-as-before) narrative presentation of history with systematic intent” (Habermas 1979: 131). As we will see, this is in keeping with Horkheimer’s account of materialism, as centered on the response to contingent, historical conditions, relative to which the more abstract and universal commitments are the less essential and binding. And, as Habermas has just reported, this would also more or less fit Marx’s practice. Yet Habermas does not accept this account, insisting to the contrary that “historical materialism was not understood in this way … I shall not, therefore, treat it as a heuristic but as a theory, indeed as a theory of social evolution that, owing to its reflective status, is also informative for purposes of political action and can under certain circumstances be connected with the theory and strategy of revolution. The theory of capitalist development that Marx worked out in the Gründrisse and in Capital fits into historical materialism as a subtheory” (Habermas 1979: 131). With respect to the full theory of social evolution, Habermas insists: “Marx conceives of history as a discrete series of modes of production, which, in its developmental-logical order, reveals the direction of social evolution” (Habermas 1979: 132).
But one finds scarcely any argument in Habermas to support this sweeping interpretation which, as he admits, does not conform to Marx’s priorities as a theorist: we are to make nothing of the fact that, despite his central theoretical commitment purportedly being located in a highly abstract and universal theory of social evolution, Marx almost exclusively directed his attention elsewhere and to the development of forms of argument which indeed fit somewhat awkwardly with his rare metatheoretical pronouncements. To the contrary, as Schmidt observes: “In the 1850s, as [Marx] turned his attention to an almost overwhelming amount of social-historical material (and thus began preliminary work on Capital), he became aware of the uselessness of a rigid linear schema of successive historical stages. Marx is concerned not only with ‘the uneven development of material production relative to, for example, artistic production’ but also with the considerable disproportions and cleavages that he confronts ‘within practical-social relations themselves’… These passages should make it clear that the philosophy of history constitutes only one—albeit indispensable—aspect of Marx’s thinking about history. It consists more of a radical humanistic impulse which gladly embraces and grows out of substantive investigations than of a doctrinaire developmental schema” (1981: 15–19). As Schmidt also notes, when Marx perceived a Russian commentator to have interpreted him as offering an “historical-philosophical theory of a general developmental path which is prescribed as a fate for all peoples regardless of their historical situation”, he protested that “such a ‘universal key’ to history is mistaken” (Schmidt 1981: 19).
- 9.
I am less certain that Habermas’ judgment is fair to Marcuse. As Abromeit reports, in 1936, Horkheimer and Marcuse each sent letters to Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and others, announcing their joint intention to produce “a source book that contains the materialist theories of Western philosophy from classical antiquity to the end of the 19th century”, a project for which Marcuse had lead responsibility (Abromeit 2011: 243; quoting Horkheimer 1985–1996: V. 15, 517). The project was never completed, but Marcuse and Horkheimer appear to have been in substantive agreement about what it would involve. Nevertheless, there are pronounced differences between the materialist theory of the early Horkheimer and that of Marcuse, but that is a topic which I cannot pursue here.
- 10.
Of course, as Horkheimer himself sarcastically notes, “metaphysics” has been used to describe a great variety of things as well: “It is difficult to come up with a formulation which will appeal to all learned gentleman and their views about ultimate things. If you are reasonably successful in your attacks on some such pompous ‘metaphysics,’ you may expect all the rest to say that they always had something altogether different in mind. And yet it seems to me that there is some sense in which metaphysics means insight into the true nature of things” (1978: 45). As Berendzen puts it, “metaphysics”, in Horkheimer’s usage, refers to “a kind of intellectualized, theoretically elaborated attempt at coming up with a synoptic view of nature and human experience” (2008: 698). While Hegel makes for an obvious example, Stirk (1992) suggests that Horkheimer, in the 1930s, principally had in mind the work of neo-Kantians like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, as well as “life philosophers” like Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann.
- 11.
- 12.
In his discussion of the relationship between Horkheimer and Rawls, Berendzen neglects this important difference: that the form of constructivism recommended by Horkheimer’s combination of ethical theory and social theory is importantly more like Habermas’ in this sense than like Rawls’ (see Berendzen 2010: 1031–32). I am also not convinced that Horkheimer’s materialism is best understood as resting on a minimal, realist foundation—in the metaethical sense—as Berendzen suggests, as opposed to being constructivist “all the way down”. Such a position is both difficult to reconcile with Berendzen’s own compelling reading of Horkheimer’s materialism as a pragmatic “stance” and, in any case, metaethical realism in the standard sense adopts what Horkheimer would likely see as an undialectical attitude toward the objectivity of moral facts. In a letter to Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer once wrote “The most unpleasant discovery to which materialism leads is that reason exists only as long as it is supported by a natural subject” (Dubiel 1985: 1), and I suspect he would similarly tie the normativity of the facts of suffering to the existence of subjects capable of solidarity (see, e.g., Horkheimer 1993c: 158, where he asserts that the “materialist fighter”, as Dubiel puts it, prefers to struggle against the existing social order rather than to accommodate himself to it, not because of an external command or an inner voice; the reason lies “only in his wishes and desires, which will one day disappear”).
Of course, I enthusiastically concede that an account of discourse that is compatible with Horkheimer’s materialism will also differ from Habermas’ in important ways: in particular, it will deal in a direct way, as Habermas does not, with the material conditions which make discourse and the individual competence for discourse possible. For a more detailed critique of Habermas’ puzzling position on this, see Borman (2011: Chap. 4).
- 13.
As Berendzen also notes (2008: 700), Horkheimer sees metaphysics both as a “symptom of the social arrangements that cause suffering” and as a distraction from and thus a cover for those very social arrangements, protecting them from critique and change.
- 14.
For agreement on the centrality of the refusal of theodicy to Horkheimer’s thinking, early and late, see Schmidt (1993: 28). Of course, this commitment is not unique to Horkheimer but is clearly found in Adorno as well. On the other hand, as Abromeit discusses, it was a significant point of disagreement between Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin (see Abromeit 2011: 231–32).
- 15.
“Materialist theory certainly does not afford to the political actor the solace that he will necessarily achieve his objective; it is not a metaphysics of history but rather a changing image of the world, evolving in relation to the practical efforts toward its improvement. The knowledge of tendencies that is contained in this image offers no clear prognosis of historical development. Even if those who maintain that the theory could be misleading ‘only’ in regard the pace of development, and not its direction, were correct (a frightful ‘only,’ since it concerns the agonies of generations), merely formally understood time could, after all, turn around and affect the quality of the content, i.e., humanity could be thrown back to earlier stages of development simply because the struggle had lasted too long” (Horkheimer 1993b: 44). See also Horkheimer (1978: 35–37), where he insists that socialism in no way follows mechanically from the economic “laws” discovered by Marx, that “[o]ne has to fight for socialism, in other words” because “it will not be realized by a logic that is immanent in history but by men trained in theory and determined to make things better. Otherwise, it will not be realized at all”.
In this light, Honneth’s repeated complaint that Horkheimer subscribes to a problematic “philosophy of history” must indeed seem surprising and implausible (see Honneth 1993: passim). Surveying the various arguments he directs at Horkheimer and Marx, it seems Honneth regards the philosophy of history as having two principal and unacceptable characteristics: the postulation of “a unified species-subject” in history (1993: 190) and/or the postulation of a single, unitary process as the basis of history—to wit, the development of the forces of production, the technical mastery of nature—which unfolds behind and explains all of the myriad phenomena of historical change (200-01). Honneth offers very little textual evidence for his belief that Horkheimer endorses either of these positions. For a detailed discussion of Horkheimer’s texts which convincingly argues against his endorsement of either a metasubject of history or an inexorable historical process, see Schmidt (1993) (also, Dubiel 1985: 33), and for more of Horkheimer’s own clear statements on these issues, see (1993d: 374, 388).
- 16.
That is, rather than independently analyzing the dialectical relationship between labor—understood by Habermas as a reflection of accumulated instrumental knowledge of nature—and interaction—understood as actions coordinated on the basis of agreement or shared norms—Marx and Horkheimer reduce the latter to the former.
- 17.
There is also something seriously disingenuous about Habermas’ position here given that he has disqualified as a reasonable desire for the members of any society, as a consequence of his theory of social evolution, the desire for the democratization of their economic life (see Habermas 1987b; Borman 2011: 101–2).
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Borman, D.A. (2017). Materialism in Critical Theory: Marx and the Early Horkheimer. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_10
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