12. Exkurs: Die Frankfurter Schule - Zentral- und Landesbibliothek ...

Husserl, Heidegger, Funke und die deutsche Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert
Horkheimer, Max (1895-1973)
Together with Theodor W. Adorno and HERBERT MARCUSE, Horkheimer
was the foremost representative of the ‘Critical Theory’ associated
with the Institute of Social Research (or ‘Frankfurt School’). Horkheimer
became director of the Institute in 1930, organised its move into exile from
Nazi Germany and supervised the return of the Institute to Frankfurt in
1949. Horkheimer’s programmatic essay on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’
(1937) enshrined the ambitions of the Institute. It described the necessity
of integrating philosophy and social science, and of developing a relationship
of integrity between critical theory and political practice. In later years,
Horkheimer’s vision became increasingly dark and gloomy. His later writings
evidence the difficulty - even the impossibility - of fulfilling the original ambition
and programme of the Frankfurt School. The result is an increasingly
sharp critique of ‘enlightened’ reason and western rationality. The Dialectic
of Enlightenment (1947), written in collaboration with Theodor W. ADOR-
NO, was the first and most powerful - if fragmentary - statement of this theme.
After the war, Horkheimer’s politics became more liberal but his view of society,
more pessimistic. (His debt to Schopenhauer became clearer and clearer.) Whereas
the Dialectic of Enlightenment had shown up the problematic, darker side of The
Enlightenment Project, Horkheimer felt more and more constrained to defend the
legacy of the Enlightenment against its erosion under late capitalism. The critical
impulse which forms a crucial element in the enlightenment conception of Reason
had been eroded. Rationality had been reduced to instrumental reason, wholly devoted
to the calculation of relating means to (usually unquestioned) ends. Positivism
and society’s uncritical approval of scientific rationality was one symptom of
what Horkheimer and Adorno referred to as ‘identity thinking’. The triumph of
commercialism and the resulting domination of concrete use values by (abstract)
exchange value was another. Both led to the suppression of difference and particularity.
Consistent in Horkheimer’s life work is the attempt to sustain a critique of
reason conducted in acknowledgement of suffering, a critique in the name of the
entirely ‘other’, acknowledging everything dominated and suppressed by the regimes
of identity thinking. [Lloyd Spencer, in The Icon Dictionary of Postmodern
Thought, edited by Stuart Sim, Icon, Cambridge, 1998]
1129 HORKHEIMER, Max, Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie.
Stuttgart, Kohlhammer 1930. 116 S. Ppbd.
1130 HORKHEIMER, Max, Aus der Pubertät. Novellen und
Tagebuchblätter. München, Kösel 1974. 374 S. OKart.
1131 HORKHEIMER, Max, (pseud.: Heinrich Regius). Dämmerung.
Notizen in Deutschland. Zürich, Oprecht u. Helbling
1934. 277 S. Kart.
Im Format verkleinerter Reprint des Originals aus den 70er Jahren.
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