SOURCE: Schnädelbach, Herbert. “Max Horkheimer and the Moral Philosophy of German Idealism.” In On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonß, and John McCole, pp. 281-304. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Schnädelbach investigates Horkheimer's moral philosophy by contrasting his writings on the subject with the concept of German idealism.]

I

Horkheimer's work contains many passages concerning moral and morally relevant problems, but one searches in vain for a completely elaborated moral philosophy. The rudiments of one may be found primarily in “Materialism and Morality” (1933) and in various passages of the “Juliette” portion of Dialectic of Enlightenment. These could be quickly summarized but would not thereby be adequately elucidated. If the matter were to remain with the mere reproduction of these thoughts, one would have to reach the regrettable conclusion—given the paucity of texts—that early critical theory had an ethics deficit. Any attempt to read Horkheimer in such a way that the relevant passages open one's vision to an implicit moral philosophy—one amenable to reconstruction—must rely upon other approaches. For my own part, I choose the method of contrast: with the ethics of German idealism. In this connection, the concept of German idealism is construed broadly so as not to preclude from the very outset the possibility that it may also encompass contemporary communicative or discourse ethics, since, after all, the latter understands itself as a transformation at least of Kant's ethics. This need not be a bad thing, for idealism is by no means a dirty word. To be idealistic becomes an objection to an ethics only if a materialistic ethical scheme proves itself superior or more productive. This, however, is precisely Horkheimer's thesis, and if he is correct, this would have momentous significance for the current discussion of ethics. In this sense, the engagement with Horkheimer's thought is of more than mere antiquarian interest.

Already at this point, a crucial difference becomes visible between the great idealistic systems and critical theory. With Kant and Fichte, the philosophy of morality (Moral)—whether as a program of the critical grounding of norms or as a philosophy of virtue or ethics—is an important element of the system of philosophy as a whole, if not indeed the most important, given the primacy of practical reason. While Hegel deprecates morality in favor of the concrete ethical life, morality retains a system-constitutive position in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. In the older critical theory, at least, nothing plays a comparable role; ethics and morality were for it comparatively subordinate phenomena, which certainly deserved theoretical attention (it is well known that Adorno still wanted to compose an ethics) but which did not belong to the foundations of the theoretical self-understanding of critical theory. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is that materialism, the “content” of which Horkheimer had intended the critical theory of society to be¹, does not admit of a division into theoretical and practical philosophy. If “materialist theory [is] an aspect of the effort to improve human conditions,”² then practical philosophy has become total therein, for even the most sublime theory construction is undertaken with “practical intent.”³ The omnipresence of the practical intent in the theory leaves no room for a separate theory of praxis specializing in moral problems. The other reason for the relative irrelevance of ethics in critical theory is that it sought to counter academic neo-Kantianism's tendency to reduce the whole of practical philosophy to a normative ethics and to leave the themes of “society” and “state” to the social sciences. By contrast, critical theory transfers the traditional objects of practical philosophy to a comprehensive, interdisciplinarily conceived theory of society, whose philosophical character still has to be respected. In this materialistic “unification of philosophy and science,”⁴ ethics and morality themselves become objects of social theory, although it becomes difficult to specify what is still supposed to be philosophical about them aside from the fact that traditionally they always have been investigated by philosophers.

Much of what Horkheimer has to say about the issue of “morality” belongs loosely to the sociology of morality. In this respect, the paramount social-historical thesis is that morality, as an independent regulator of action effective within individuals, first emerges in the course of the development of bourgeois society and will decline together with that society.⁵ Moreover, Horkheimer makes a plausible case that the moral problem, as it has been formulated and discussed in bourgeois philosophy, is decipherable as a social problem: as that of the mediation between the general and the particular at the site of individual action, which remains inscrutable in the context of the bourgeois order and therefore produces in the individual's consciousness an “endless reflection and continuous upset”⁶ that fundamentally cannot be overcome. Morality—understood as the stamp of bourgeois consciousness—therefore has an aporetic structure. From this perspective it becomes clear why Horkheimer's critical theory laid so little value upon being considered as applied moral philosophy. To accord a constitutive significance to morality would amount to making the problem that one wishes to solve itself into the basis for the solution to that problem. If one thematizes morality and its problems from the standpoint of its historical contingency, indeed of its practical surmountability in a future human society that no longer requires morality,⁷ one would not wish to base the theory that understands itself as an element of precisely this project of transcendence on that which is to be transcended. Of course, Horkheimer here follows the motif of sublation (Auf hebung) via realization, which the young Marx applied to the whole of philosophy. In this respect, Horkheimer's theory of morality necessarily remains circumscribed within the still existing; he would not have considered the observation that his theory itself obviously contained characteristics of bourgeois morality to be a valid objection. Nonetheless, as a critical theory of morality, which pending such realization via sublation must, against its will, remain moral philosophy, this theory cannot develop such an affirmative relationship to morality that it could make the latter into its own foundation and then—as occurred in neo-Kantian ethical socialism—into the foundation of social criticism in general.

Is Horkheimer simply a moral philosopher malgré lui? “Morality is by no means dismissed by materialism as mere ideology in the sense of false consciousness. It is, rather, a human phenomenon which is hardly to be overcome for the duration of the bourgeois period.”⁸ From that perspective one could conclude that moral philosophy persists only “because the moment of its realization was missed,”⁹ but even this would reveal nothing of the truth content of its object. Even if it were possible to conceive of a society that no longer needed morality—and Kant, according to Horkheimer, had anticipated precisely this¹⁰—it in no way follows that one could prove from this utopian standpoint that morality had been mere ideology. That aspect of morality that is to be retained in the sublation via realization cannot be untrue. Horkheimer always vigorously rejected ideological reductionism. That which Horkheimer had to say beyond social history and the critique of ideology about the truth-content or the validity of morality is the content of his moral philosophy.

It remains moral philosophy because he persistently refused to go the way of many Marxists from ethics to the metaphysics of history. The young Marx had understood communism not as a mere “ideal” but rather as “a real movement, which transcends [auf hebt] the current condition.”¹¹ Lenin, Kautsky, and others developed this notion into an objectivistic teleology of history that made normative questions appear not just superfluous but indeed as signs of subjectivistic backsliding. Horkheimer knew that social theory and the philosophy of history alone were incapable of answering the Kantian question regarding what we ought to do. Furthermore, such theories themselves are never normatively presuppositionless,¹² and this means that even critical theory, which according to Horkheimer was best capable of orienting rational action, was determined by an interest that it itself cannot ground completely: an “interest in the elimination [Auf hebung] of social injustice.”¹³ Even if Horkheimer would undoubtedly have resisted characterizing this interest as merely moral—he always understood the term morality to refer primarily to individual or private morality—the impulses that constitute and stimulate the program of a critical theory must be examined more closely in the reconstruction of his moral philosophy.

Ethics as a philosophical discipline is distinguished from the sociology of morality not by its object but by its questions, which traditionally concern its conceptual and normative foundations. But today one can more competently investigate the conceptual structure and grounds of factual validity of a given moral teaching as a social scientist than in the role of a philosopher, for a great deal of empirical knowledge is necessary for the task. The matter is different if we switch from the perspective of the third person to that of the first person and inquire into the meaning and grounds of validity of our own action orientations not as observers but as participants. It is impossible to separate the two perspectives in Horkheimer's thought, for when he speaks of bourgeois morality, he hardly does so as if he were a traveling ethnologist discussing the Hopis; with mere critique, even critical theory cannot transcend the bounds of the bourgeois world to which it belongs.¹⁴ The social history and critique of the ideology of morality therefore always refers to the fundamental normative conceptions to which critical theory is committed despite its genetic and diagnostic findings. The perspectives of the first and third persons can be analytically distinguished, however, and such a move commends itself methodologically if one wishes to discuss Horkheimer as a philosopher of morality.

II

The moral philosophy of German idealism is the contrasting background against which the outlines of Horkheimer's moral philosophy emerge particularly clearly; he considered it the paradigm of all idealistic moral philosophy.¹⁵ A complete study would be necessary to elucidate in detail the way in which Horkheimer draws on Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Kant is ubiquitous in his thought, but the presence of Hegel in his ethical reflections cannot be underestimated; above all, the viewing of morality as a phenomenon from the perspective of the philosophy of history and of social theory, and the mistrust toward the pure ought, are Hegelian legacies. In the following, I discuss the moral philosophy of German idealism by employing certain formulaic simplifications; this leaves open the possibility of taking into consideration newer approaches to ethics as well.

At least according to Kant and Fichte, morality is the very essence of generally valid and rationally justifiable precepts of action of a categorical “ought” character; their ethics are deontological, universalistic, and rationalistic.¹⁶ It is taken as absolute that “the moral” is the “ought” (das Gesollte) in the sense of that to which not just anyone, but indeed the philosopher himself, is obligated.¹⁷ The ethics of German idealism is also deontological in the more specific sense that it is prepared to understand “the moral” only as the unconditionally obligating; everything else is mere pragmatic rules. The universalistic element of this ethics consists in the fact that it considers a categorical ought possible only in commandments that appeal to all human beings, indeed to all rational beings as such; in this regard, unconditional imperatives with individual persons as addressees would be perfectly conceivable, as, for instance, if pronounced by an omnipotent God in whom the person believes. The rationalistic motif in the ethics of Kant and Fichte is inseparable from the universalistic because of their conviction that categorically compelling moral principles can only be justified as rational insofar as they are also universal, and the structure of the categorical imperative in the relationship of maxims and general law explicitly expresses this. Yet the universal and the rational are not the same; feelings and motives that are not further justifiable may also be universal, and at the latest since Schopenhauer, it is precisely the rational that stands under suspicion of being the merely particular. Furthermore, one must make distinctions within the concept of the rational itself. The ethics of German idealism is rationalistic because it holds that the moral is that which is rationally justifiable and, simultaneously, because it understands the moral itself as rational. The two are supposed to relate to each other in such a way that the rationally justifiable immediately attains the attribute of being rational itself by virtue of its mode of justification. This leap from adverb to adjective underlies all procedural justifications of ethics, including discourse ethics, but it is not plausible in the least: there may be quite rational grounds for being irrational on occasion and, alternatively, the arguments for heeding reason and not “instincts” (or at least that which we take them to be) may run out in certain cases. In general the notion that we can only rationally perceive that which we can perceive as rational is a rationalistic myth that culminated in Hegel's philosophy; as a late descendant of the principle that like can be known only by like and thus as its equal, this notion expands here into a philosophy of absolute reason that teaches (above all for the sake of its own possibility) that reason rules the world and that world history will look rationally upon anyone who looks rationally upon the world.¹⁸ The post-Hegelian defeatism in regard to matters of reason stands completely under the spell of this principle; in Adorno, it still leads to the suspicion that philosophy as a whole, because it relies on reason, is a “gigantic tautology” that can discover nothing but itself in its object.¹⁹ Only if one is prepared to distinguish between metaphysical and methodical rationalism will the experience of irrationality in the world alone no longer cause one to doubt the possibility of rational philosophy.²⁰ In ethics, boundless rationalism leads to the conception that rational moral demands are demands of reason itself, just as if commandments, which we can rationally perceive as moral, were rational in the sense that they had had their origin in reason, that in them reason gained its voice, that indeed in them reason itself became practical.²¹

Schopenhauer rebelled against this rationalism in ethics, and Horkheimer followed his lead without thereby becoming an irrationalist. As far as the deontological character of ethics is concerned, Schopenhauer is not prepared to recognize any “other origin for the introduction of the concepts of law, precept, and Ought into ethics … but one alien to philosophy, the Mosaic Decalogue.” The concept of duty itself, “together with its relations—that is, those of law, commandment, Ought and the like—has its origin, when taken in this unconditional sense, in theological morality, and remains an outsider in philosophical morality until it adduces a definitive attestation from the essence of human nature or from that of the natural world.”²² Horkheimer adapts this thought in a materialistic fashion. His counterargument is not that an unconditional ought must always have theological roots but rather that the justification of such an ought requires recourse to an absolute (divine or human) consciousness,²³ and this course is closed off to Horkheimer the materialist per definitionem. For him as social theorist, “obligations … point back toward commandments and contracts,”²⁴ and he adds to this the remark, derived from Nietzsche and Freud, that the consciousness of duty, moral constraint, and unconditional ought has a quite profane origin in the internalization of social compulsion²⁵ and for this reason alone cannot be viewed as a divine voice or the voice of reason. For Horkheimer, categorical imperatives belong to the arsenal of idealistic moral theories every bit as much as eternal values. Hypothetical imperatives, by contrast, are not capable of making ethics into something deontic, for pragmatic rules have nothing specifically moral about them for either Schopenhauer or for Horkheimer. Schopenhauer sees in pragmatic ethics only a “clever, methodical, far-sighted egoism” at work,²⁶ while Horkheimer traces them back to “harmonistic illusions,” for morality and prudence necessarily diverge in the world as it is.²⁷

Horkheimer states tersely: “Binding moral commandments do not exist.”²⁸ But morality exists; morality is a historical and social phenomenon, and moral consciousness is a psychic phenomenon, which the materialist has first to describe and explain. Horkheimer also relies closely on Schopenhauer in the phenomenology of morality, and this reliance leads him to reject universalistic ethical claims. The moral is not the unconditional “ought” because such a thing does not exist, and the conditional “ought” is not specifically moral. Therewith falls away the logical or systematic compulsion to seek a justification of the moral ought in the theory of morality. After the end of theology, such a justification could only be found in an agency or authority that obligates every human being as such; that is, if ethics rids itself of deontology, it can simultaneously rid itself of universalism. Morality is not a general human phenomenon but a historical one; with this observation Horkheimer shifts even Schopenhauer's nondeontic ethics of the denial of the will to live out of the universalistic perspective and into a historical one. If the history of morality is vitally linked to the emergence of bourgeois individuality, its content is vitally linked to the individual; thus, the moral itself is something individual. Horkheimer cannot be intimidated with the objection of relativism, which rears its head almost automatically at this point; he insists that the specifically moral lies precisely in that which cannot be generally expected, demanded, or compelled, and conversely he points to the extramoral origin of that which is universalistic in bourgeois morality. For him, morality is neither deontic nor ontic in general, because metaphysics—according to which the universal is also the good—ended with Schopenhauer.²⁹ One could almost identify critical theory as a whole with the conviction that the universal and powerful cannot be good precisely because it is universal and powerful; thus, the good in this world is to be sought in the ephemeral, the weak, the individual impulse, the exception, indeed in the improbable—in the unexpected and actually unwise goodness of individual motives and actions. The traditional theory of morality is itself traditional and not critical theory.³⁰ Horkheimer does not thereby deny that bourgeois morality contains the principles of freedom, equality, and justice essentially as general principles, but he recognizes at the same time that they are not primarily moral but political principles. That is, these principles could only appear as specifically moral principles, and then as the foundation of politics as well, after their transposition into a bourgeois-moral context.³¹ Despite his rejection of a deontic-universalist ethics, with this argument Horkheimer can continue to subscribe to the universalistic import of the demands for freedom, equality, and justice, which admittedly he can no longer justify in terms immanent to moral philosophy. But the motives for raising these demands as general and universal today are themselves ethical, according to Horkheimer, in the sense of the not-generally-to-be-expected and enforced good;³² they do not follow “logically” from their universalistic import alone.

With this expulsion of the universalistic aspect of bourgeois morality to the political sphere and of the ethical aspect to the individual, the Kantian linkage of morality to rationality is broken. For Horkheimer, too, reason is the universal, but the moral is not; therefore, morality can be neither grounded in reason alone nor can it be rationally justifiable in the sense of a generally valid justification. The very limits of justifiability itself result for Horkheimer the materialist from the insight that final, absolute justifications are an “idealistic delusion.”³³ Not just the notion of absolute demands is incompatible with materialist thought but also the assumption of any kind of facticity from which they could derive and to which they would ultimately have to trace their justification,³⁴ be it God, Being, an absolute consciousness, matter, or “history.” Accordingly, Horkheimer says of morality: “It does not admit of justification—neither by intuition nor by way of argument.”³⁵ According to Horkheimer, morality cannot “be proven,” and “not a single value admits of a purely theoretical justification.”³⁶ He adds an ethical mistrust to his metaphysical mistrust toward theoretical ethical justifications; the suspicion or the fear that the moral could lose its ethical character precisely through its rationalization via rational justification. Schopenhauer had already wanted to unmask the Kantian calculus of transforming individual maxims into universal laws to see whether one then still wants them as sublime pragmatic calculation and thus as a pseudo-ethical facade on an egoistic background. Horkheimer sharpens this argument by detecting in the rationalization of the moral the workings of the rationality of mere self-preservation. For Horkheimer, pure reason in morality is instrumental reason in unadulterated form; this is detailed in the “Juliette” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. “Self-preservation is the constitutive principle of science, the soul of the table of categories, even if it has been idealistically deduced, as in Kant. Even the ego, the synthetic unity of apperception, the agency that Kant calls the point upon which the whole of logic depends, is in truth the product as well as the condition of material existence.”³⁷ If one attempts to justify ethics solely in this medium or upon this agency, according to Horkheimer, a formalism remains—“a flawless and vacuous procedure”³⁸—which is not just an indication of the transformation of “pure” reason into unreason but also raises the question of what all this still has to do with morality. The pure ethics of reason thus appears as a late product of the dialectic of enlightenment—that is, of the triumph of a nature-dominating rationality at the price of its formalization. While Kant wanted to avoid the consequences of this process by limiting his “enlightening critique,” the Marquis de Sade expressed them bluntly:³⁹ “Unlike its apologists, the dark writers of the bourgeoisie⁴⁰ did not attempt to deflect the consequences of the Enlightenment with harmonistic doctrines. They refused to pretend that formalistic reason stood in a closer connection to morality than to immorality.”⁴¹

Thus, in Horkheimer's thought, the pure ethics of reason is both accomplice and victim of the domination of nature; the move from Kant to Schopenhauer is for him an advance in the self-enlightenment of reason, not a relapse into irrationality. After Schopenhauer, a materialistic moral philosophy can no longer be rationalistic in any substantive sense. It will, of course, offer justifications when it is able to do so; it will not arbitrarily shirk demands for justification, and thereby it remains rationalistic in a methodical sense. It will, however, give grounds why one cannot justify everything, and then with reasons will reject certain demands for justification. Here we are concerned with what is now referred to as an “ultimate justification” (Letztbegründung). Horkheimer considers this specifically idealistic: “While idealism occupies itself with ‘constantly calling into question its own presuppositions anew’ due to the independent significance that the spiritual (Geistige) holds for it, scrutiny of materialism's own presuppositions is motivated by the real difficulties into which the theory that depends upon them falls. Materialism is in these questions much less ‘radical’ than idealistic philosophy.”⁴² Plainly, Horkheimer does not reckon with the possibility that it could be inherent “real difficulties” of ethics that might compel us to attempt ultimate justifications. This becomes comprehensible against the background of his thesis that the moral element in morality is precisely the unjustifiable; an “ultimately justified” ethics would then be a contradiction in terms. Thus, paths out of those internal difficulties of ethics must be sought in another direction.

III

With the rejection of the deontological, universalistic, and rationalistic conceptions of ethics, the fundaments of Horkheimer's materialistic moral philosophy have emerged. “We have tried to show that, according to materialism, actions do not proceed with necessity from an ultimate, absolute thesis. … This materialistic perspective does not have the solely negative meaning of dismissing an ethics that is to be grounded metaphysically, but rather has always been understood by materialists in the sense of recognizing the human striving toward happiness as a natural fact that needs no justification.”⁴³ Here, according to Horkheimer, the idealistic need for justification with reasons finds a materialistic limit. This fundamental eudaemonism of materialist moral philosophy is no mere counterthesis to Kant's ethics, since Kant's privileging of the worthiness of happiness above happiness itself for its part requires recourse to the “fact of pure practical reason” in order to be plausible—a fact that, in contrast to the human striving for happiness, has the disadvantage for the materialist of not existing.⁴⁴ Materialist moral philosophy thus rests not on an absolute demand but only on a much-contested fact, from which, however, as from facts in general, nothing further follows normatively. Thus

materialism attempts to replace the justification of action with explanation via the historical understanding of the acting individual. It always sees in such justifications an illusion. If most people until now harbor a very strong need for this illusion, if they do not wish to rely merely on feelings of indignation, compassion, love, or solidarity, but rather connect their instinctual drives to an absolute world order by characterizing them as “ethical,” this still in no way proves the possibility of the rational fulfillment of this need.⁴⁵

The retreat of materialist ethics from the justification of action to interpretive explanation is no simple error, no uncontrolled discursive switch.

The lives of most people are so miserable, the privations and humiliations so numerous, efforts and rewards stand for the most part in such crass disproportion, that the hope that this earthly order may not be the only one is only too understandable. To the extent that idealism tries to rationalize this hope instead of explaining it for what it is, idealism becomes a vehicle for mystifying the instinctual renunciation compelled by nature and social relations.⁴⁶

Ultimate justifications of action are not just illusionary but ideological; they amount to “mystification” because they seek to postpone recognition of the validity of urges toward protest and hopes for improvement until such time as their rationalization has been successfully completed—and that is never the case. For Horkheimer, morality occurs only when men profess their commitment to feelings of “indignation, compassion, love, and solidarity,” and indeed precisely when there are no adequate rational grounds to feel this way.

Materialist moral philosophy is not deontological but eudaemonistic; not universalistic but individualistic and context bound; not rationalistic—thus irrationalistic? If one reduces the significance of reason for the interpretation of responsible action, the weight of emotions grows; if one limits justifications, unjustifiable decisions gain ground. Horkheimer thus falls not accidentally into the vicinity of the two most important and influential normative positions of his age: emotivism in metaethics and decisionism. Horkheimer rehabilitates the emotions; does he therefore defend a mere emotivism? In many passages, the incriminated word decision appears; what distinguishes him from Carl Schmitt?

Horkheimer's conception distinguishes itself from pure emotivism, first, in that it is not intended as a contrasting project to rationalism but rather is indebted to the latter for insight into its limits. Thus, materialism is not for him a straightforward counterposition to that of idealism but essentially a critique of idealism; only in this sense is the amalgamation of materialism and critical theory at all comprehensible. The materialist knows that one cannot justify everything and that reason alone—“pure” reason—is incapable of motivating real action. A “pure” ought, behind which no empirical impulses and forces stand, is for him a myth; Kant's “respect for the law” (Achtung vor dem Gesetz) thus appears a mere makeshift solution that nevertheless fails to appreciate the sublime figure of internalized social compulsion to which that formulation points. For Horkheimer, the fiction of purely rational motives of action, which results from idealistic system constraints, and the isolation of reason-free emotions, upon which emotivism is based, are two sides of the same coin. In the “Juliette” chapter, he describes enlightenment as a progressive process of unmingling reason and the affects, which leaves behind reason as a pure “organ of calculation” and the affects as mere natural facts: “Because reason posits no substantive goals, all affects are equally distant from its governance, and are purely natural.”⁴⁷ Pure calculating reason is thus no longer capable of motivating action morally; from it flows, at worst, the coy enticement of the pure ability to command—the perverse eros of power for the sake of power. Rationality, which has been reduced to the naked logic of self-preservation, has, for Horkheimer, itself “reverted to nature,”⁴⁸ because it perpetuates natural constraints instead of sundering them. The dialectic of enlightenment consists in the fact that reason, which seeks through its formalization constantly to expand its dominion, thereby regresses into the natural depravity that it hoped to avoid. Horkheimer is no pure emotivist because he knows that, before the tribunal of enlightenment passing judgment on enlightenment, neither rationalism nor emotivism has the upper hand; he therefore privileges neither pure reason nor pure feeling.

Morality cannot survive where reason and emotion are completely separated from each other. This conclusion leads Horkheimer to engage Kant's concept of “moral feeling” and reinterpret it materialistically. When Horkheimer employs the misleading formulation that ethics is a “psychic state,” he means that morality is a psychic disposition that rests upon a particular, morally relevant sensibility: “Characteristic for the moral feeling is an interest that diverges from ‘natural law’ and that has nothing to do with private appropriation and possession.”⁴⁹ The difference between proclivities toward “natural law” and moral feeling is thus also the rational kernel of Kant's distinction between actions performed out of mere inclination and those performed out of duty, but Horkheimer refuses to trace the ethical quality of the moral feeling to a psychologically inexplicable emotional effect of pure rationality, as Kant does. What makes the moral feeling ethical is something that points beyond the inclinations toward the “natural law” of the prevailing order:

The moral feeling has something to do with love … but this love concerns the person not as economic subject, nor as an asset belonging to the lover's property, but rather as the potential member of a happy society. This love is directed not toward the function and repute of a particular individual in bourgeois life, but toward his neediness and powers, which point to the future. Unless the aim of a future happy life for all persons, which results, of course, not from revelation but from the privations of the present, is taken up into the description of this love, it does not admit of a determination. To all, insofar as they are human beings, it wishes the free development of their creative powers. It appears to this love that living creatures have a claim to happiness, and it does not in the least request a justification or substantiation for this. … Not the corporal's baton but the climax of the Ninth Symphony is an expression of the moral feeling.⁵⁰

It is important that Horkheimer does not simply link the ethical quality of the moral feeling to a utopian perspective, which increasingly slipped away from him in his later work; anyone who believes that it suffices to anticipate utopia in order to be moral reduces ethics to the philosophy of history. According to Horkheimer, it is the universalistic perspective of a claim of all to happiness—itself neither further justifiable nor in need of justification—that first makes love morally relevant as inclination, emotion, or passion.

Love in this sense is that aspect of moral feeling that makes the Other—as Kant formulated it—not a mere means but recognizes her or him as an end; she or he is an end in light of the anticipation of a liberated and happy humanity.⁵¹ The psychic reality of this anticipation, however, is compassion, which recognizes itself in the suffering Other; therefore, the active form of such anticipation is solidarity. Like Schopenhauer, Horkheimer understands compassion not as mere emotion but as an emotional impulse mediated by insight; he is thus no pure emotivist. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he delineates compassion more precisely as “the sensuous awareness of the identity of general and particular, as naturalized mediation.” The time has come for an ethics of compassion because this form of mediation is the only one “that was left after the formalization of reason.”⁵² Precisely because compassion unites in itself the perspectives of the universal and the individual, the general and the particular, it alone—and not “pure” reason—is capable of providing the grounding for the moral. Horkheimer agrees with those critics of compassion who note that it may be used as a cover for becoming overweening or sentimental; its contrary is “bourgeois coldness,”⁵³ not rationality per se. Reason itself is immoral insofar as it is nothing but the organon of bourgeois coldness.

If compassion and reason are not simply contraries, then the materialist need not reject justifications to the extent that he or she is forced to become a decisionist; at the same time, he or she will not believe that no decisions are necessary because everything admits of justification. Horkheimer understood the connection between absolute truth claims, relativism, and the anxiety of subjective decisions.⁵⁴ To recognize that one cannot justify everything, and that we must simply decide in those cases we cannot justify, is not to become a decisionist. Horkheimer opposes only excessive—that is, idealistic—claims to justification which necessarily lead to relativism and paralyze praxis. Moreover, he insists upon the indispensability of empirical, historical, and predictive knowledge for those decisions that can be justified to the extent that such knowledge is indeed indispensable.⁵⁵

Just as Horkheimer's critical theory as a whole operates on the razor's edge between metaphysics and positivism,⁵⁶ his moral philosophy remains equidistant from pure rationalism, flat emotivism, and abstract decisionism. It is just as incompatible with the metaphysics of values in themselves, “pure” reason, or heroic decisions ex nihilo as it is with the positivism of mere feelings. Moreover, Horkheimer describes decisionism as the result of a purist disaggregation of rationally motivated decisions that divides them into their basic elements of abstract calculation, emotional motive, and purely spontaneous decision.⁵⁷ The difference between a materialistic and an emotivistic or decisionistic moral philosophy consists in the fact that the latter isolate and dramatize the emotive and voluntaristic aspects of real actions out of an idealist despondency over the insufficiency of pure reason, while the materialist reacts to this rather more calmly. This may be documented by way of the concept of interest, which Horkheimer uses in the quoted description of the moral feeling and again in crucial programmatic passages in the characterization of critical theory. The “interest in the elimination of social injustice” is for him “the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason.”⁵⁸ This interest is neither a purely Kantian interest of reason (Vernunftinteresse), nor a quasi-transcendental cognitive interest, nor a mere natural fact that justifies linking critical theory with naturalism.⁵⁹ Feelings and emotions such as love or compassion are as little independent of culture as are the interests of human beings. The concept of “interest” is a systematic lacuna in critical theory, and unfortunately it remains so today despite a number of studies of the concept's history.⁶⁰ The problem of the normative foundations of critical theory would look quite different today if critical theory had not for so long assumed that the concept is intuitively clear. Horkheimer, correctly, situated the concept strategically in the theory without really explicating it. Interests are not mere feelings or emotional predispositions; they are not reducible to discrete impulses of instinct or will; they must probably be conceived as rationally and cognitively elaborated dispositions of motivation and will. In such “elaboration,” empirical knowledge, self-knowledge, interpretations of situations, and means-ends calculations would play a role; it is only for this reason that interests are susceptible of being changed by argument, which is not the case with instinctual impulses, for example. At the same time, the recourse to interests precludes abstract decisionism; because of the cognitive and rational aspect of interests, interest-governed decisions are never pure acts of will, which occur where the force of argument cannot reach.

In materialist moral philosophy, “interest” is a mediating concept that should integrate extremes, not the name of a principle. “Interest” is not fit to be a principle because it is itself a historically, socially, and psychically mediated phenomenon. Insofar as the materialist bases ethics on an interest, he or she is on shaky ground; but at the same time, he or she contests the notion that the ground of other conceptions of ethics is any less shaky—indeed, the materialist suspects that they are groundless. The theoretical insecurity of materialist moral principles is the price that must be paid for the insight that all moral principles have their place in concrete historical and social contexts that originate in human praxis and are therefore malleable. Horkheimer's materialist ethics is thus primarily a political ethics, which could be reduced to the formula: instead of rationalistic private morality, solidarity and politics.⁶¹ He believes that he can look to the tradition of the moral philosophy of German idealism because Kant's ethics, at least, sets bourgeois morality in a utopian perspective that can only be redeemed by political means. According to Horkheimer, the consistency of Kant's own thinking led him beyond the limits of bourgeois morality; his thesis is that the universalistic principles implicit therein indeed turned out to be political and social principles. In this sense, Horkheimer understood critical theory not just as the critic of idealist moral philosophy but also as its heir.

IV

My sympathetic reconstruction of Max Horkheimer's implicit moral philosophy would be incomplete were it not to mention the systematic difficulties into which that philosophy brings the sympathizer. From the standpoint of Hegel, this moral philosophy appears as a critical theory of bourgeois ethical life (Sittlichkeit), in the context of which morality becomes a historical phenomenon in need of explanation without thereby losing its significance for the orientation of contemporary action; the deontological, universalistic, and rationalistic self-understanding of this morality is put fundamentally in question. Horkheimer distinguishes himself from Hegel's philosophy of morality by subsuming morality under the Marxist dialectic of sublation and realization. If morality and bourgeois society belong together and if that society can no longer be understood as a moment of an overarching, concrete ethical life that is the embodiment of objective reason, then the Good cannot be exhausted by that which morally “ought to be” in the here and now but must instead point beyond it.⁶² That Horkheimer not only demonstrates this utopian surplus of bourgeois morality but that he identifies with it and would like to make it into the standard of political praxis is not merely the moral or political decision of a sociologist of morality. Horkheimer gives reasons for it, and this is what makes him a moral philosopher. But Hegel's “reason in history” is no longer available to Horkheimer the materialist; the historical power of bourgeois morality tells us nothing about its reasonableness or binding force. The pure reason to which the Kantian withdraws is sufficiently suspect of formalism and thus of amorality. Whence, then, can we draw the grounds for the rescue of morality, if they are to be rational grounds?

The fact that Horkheimer himself adduces grounds shows that he does not take his own suspicion that moral justifications merely follow idealist system constraints or academic rituals of self-affirmation as the occasion for remaining at the level of moral phenomenology. Under post-Hegelian conditions, anyone who attempts to offer justifications has problems of justification, and Horkheimer has them as well. That he divides the traditional problem of morality into the two elements of “moral feeling” and “politics under universalistic principles” amounts in truth only to a displacement of the problem; this does not resolve it. Rather, two questions now arise that need to be answered without recourse to a metaphysics of history: What precisely makes moral feeling moral? And, how can the universalistic perspective of emancipatory politics be defended against skeptical objections? I would like to demonstrate briefly that at this point Horkheimer connects hermeneutic perspectives with issues of principle without thus being able to resolve the associated difficulties. Nonetheless, he points in the direction in which a resolution of the entire problem complex might be sought.

To restrict oneself to feelings when attempting to evaluate moral feeling would amount to a positivism of emotion, against which Horkheimer always stood firm. The same is true for interests—including, indeed precisely, the “interest in the rational organization of human activities” that “critical theory consciously pursues in the formation of its categories and in all phases of its development”; critical theory, according to Horkheimer, sets itself the task of “illuminating and legitimating” this interest.⁶³ A positivism of interests, which ultimately would amount to the political hamstringing of critical theory by that power which understood how to define this interest successfully, is thus also precluded, for interest-guided theory returns to its guiding interest and makes this interest itself into its object. This feedback loop between interest and theory, which places both moments in a reciprocally constitutive relationship and thus hinders their one-sided absolutization, could be understood as dialectical if a structural dialectics were divisible from absolute idealism. Because this is not the case, I prefer to speak here of hermeneutics, although this word has long been listed on the index verborum prohibitorum in Frankfurt.⁶⁴ The connection between interest and theory in Horkheimer's work is hermeneutic because they form a hermeneutic circle: the interest in rational conditions of life has the function of a preunderstanding that is constitutive of theory but itself must be “illuminated and legitimated”—that is, made comprehensible in its empirical and normative senses—by the theory so constituted. The hermeneutic circle created by interest and theory could also be described as the product of the unification of the perspectives of the first and third persons: the interest that determines the critical theorist's theory construction appears simultaneously on the side of his or her objects, and vice versa. Such a hermeneutics is materialistic because, in contrast to Heidegger and Gadamer, it interprets its own preunderstanding not existentially but socially; critical theory understands itself not as existential destiny (Seinsgeschick) but rather as the intellectual dimension of real historical (or historically possible) changes that arise from the material life process. This is precisely the meaning of the thesis, which Horkheimer himself formulated, that social theory belongs a priori to its own object realm; it exemplifies a hermeneutic figure.⁶⁵

The limits of hermeneutics as practical philosophy are drawn where reference to an existentially or socially conditioned preunderstanding is no longer adequate to the task of “illuminating and legitimating” practical intentions in more than a historical sense. What makes those conditions of life in which critical theory is interested rational? What is unjust about “social injustice,” the elimination of which critical theory has made its aim? What is rational and just is not immediately obvious; nor do “moral feeling,” the “critical impulse,” and “practical interest” suffice as standards. The problem is that such singular and historically conditioned impulses and dispositions are not capable of constituting the universalistic dimension of the fundamental concepts of “reason” and “justice.” The same is true of hermeneutic self-reflection, for it only makes clear the historical standpoint of the theoretician, conditioned by the life-world, a standpoint from which reason and justice may appear as universal principles; to consider them to be so would constitute an objectivistic regression by the hermeneuticist, which is all the less excusable the more uncompromisingly he understands himself as critic of ideology.

Through the critique of ideology, Horkheimer destroys the universalism of bourgeois morality and moral philosophy with reasons but attempts at the same time to rescue politically that part of it which was universalistically intended: the ideas of freedom, equality, and justice. Precisely at this point, however, he once again runs into the problem of justification, which cannot be sidestepped hermeneutically. Horkheimer is no mere hermeneuticist because he still takes seriously the problem of justification as a problem of principle. He says of critical theory that “the perspectives which it takes from historical analysis to be the aims of human activity—especially the idea of a rational organization of society, which corresponds to universal needs—are immanent in human labor, though neither individuals nor the public consciousness are aware of them in their correct form. A certain interest is required to experience and perceive these tendencies.”⁶⁶ What is hermeneutic in this passage is the notion that one can extract practical aims from a properly developed historical analysis—in particular, through the feedback between the interest that is constitutive of theory and that which theory discovers; both interests ultimately refer to the same thing. No longer merely hermeneutic, on the other hand, is the thesis that the idea of a rational social organization is immanent in human labor itself; this thesis is a matter of principle, but it is nowhere rigorously justified by Horkheimer. Elsewhere he says that “the aim of a rational society, which today admittedly appears to be preserved only in the imagination, is really inherent in every human being,”⁶⁷ but here too one seeks in vain for more precise details. These and similar formulations reveal that Horkheimer at least sensed a justification deficit in critical theory; he recognized that referring to the reciprocal determination of practical-political interests and critical social theory does not suffice to protect the unredeemed bourgeois ideals of freedom, equality, and justice from the suspicion of simply being culturally specific curiosities or mere ideology. As long as they simply rotate within the hermeneutic circle, the relativistic and ideology-critical skeptic remains in the right, and critical theory is then not much more than a warring faction of powerless and quickly disillusioned intellectuals.

References to human labor, to “every human being,” or to a concept of humanity specific to critical theory⁶⁸ in the context of issues of justification, were mere episodes in the early Horkheimer; he later drew closer to Kantian positions once again to the extent that the political experiences of the 1930s extinguished even his weak Hegelian Marxist faith in historical “tendencies.” What is the universally rational that is supposed to be “really inherent” in “every human being” if not precisely instrumental reason? In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer points out the ambiguity of the Kantian concept of reason:

As the transcendental, supraindividual self, reason comprises the idea of a free, human social life in which human beings organize themselves as a universal subject and overcome the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. This represents the idea of true universality: utopia. At the same time, however, reason constitutes the court of judgment of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation.⁶⁹

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno located the rational in reason, that part of it which is not exhausted in being an organon for the domination of nature, in reason's self-reflection;⁷⁰ it should be clear that this falls far short of what Horkheimer says approvingly about Kant in the passage above. Once the critique of morality conducted by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche has come into the world, one can reconstruct the universalistic meaning of the main precepts of bourgeois ethics—which are also those of critical theory—only if one demonstrates, with Kant, that the ideas of a free and solidaristic human social life are inherent in reason itself as elements that cannot be thought out of existence. Merely recalling the mechanisms, consequences, and costs of nature-dominating rationalization is inadequate here. But if the rational concept of reason contains the idea of free and solidary association, then it remains to be seen what this idea represents in “every human being.” At this point, the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness at least make plausible the transition to a speech- or communications-theoretical grounding of critical theory; other alternatives are not yet in sight. If one does not close one's eyes to critical theory's internal problems of justification, especially in ethics, one will no longer decry the “communications-theoretical turn” as a kind of original sin and wish to reverse it.⁷¹

V

On the other hand, the communicative or discourse ethics that would like to inherit and continue critical theory must consider how it wants to respond to Horkheimer's objections to an idealistic ethics. Discourse ethics is deontological, universalistic, and rationalistic in the sense that it seeks to prove that the ought is the rationally justifiable and precludes questions of motivation.⁷² It must admit of being questioned by Horkheimer as to whether, if it has formulated the problem of ethics as a problem of universally binding norms, it has spoken at all of the ethical as the good. Horkheimer remains a eudaemonist because he considers a deontological ethics untenable in a postmetaphysical age; at the same time, the identification of the good with the rational must appear to him—as to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche before him—as a rationalistic prejudice. Universalistic validity claims can be raised in ethics only when one believes that the will must become purer—that is, more rational—in order to become a good will. But even if one no longer equates the good will with the pure, merely rational will, the question remains whether the rational is the good: is that which we can ground rationally therefore and exclusively for that reason good? Not only substantive but also procedural ethical rationalism leaves open the question concerning the good.

Thus, to the extent that it seeks to secure the claim to universality of binding norms in the medium of procedural rationality, discourse ethics runs the risk of losing sight of the morally good. Jürgen Habermas has taken this into account by conceding that a procedurally rational, and thus formalistic, ethics must restrict itself to normative problems of justice and must exclude evaluative questions regarding the good and proper life; at best, such an ethics can treat these questions as candidates for suggested norms with a claim to generally binding force.⁷³ Assuming for the moment that discourse ethics deals better with the problem of relativism than did Horkheimer's materialist moral philosophy, would it not be possible for Horkheimer to invite discourse ethicists to broaden the foundations of normative justification so that, when the rationally justified is spoken of, the good is discussed as well? In order to achieve that objective, it would be necessary to abandon pure cognitivism in the justification of norms and, without fear of falling into emotivism or decisionism, consider emotive and voluntaristic factors as well. The discourse ethicist will respond that this concerns mere motivational issues and not the validity dimension of what is at issue in the ethics debate. From Horkheimer one can learn that it is not possible simply to shunt motives into the realm of psychology if one seriously confronts the issue of interests—and not just the problematic interest of reason in itself, which Kant referred to as “moral feeling.” A materialist ethics that takes interests seriously must also provide a materialistic interpretation of the Kantian interest in the generalizability of interests, without once again ending up in a position of historical relativism. What kind of interest is an interest in the just? Is it merely an interest in knowledge of what is just—in knowing the just? Does it not also include recognizing it—that is, an affective attachment to the just and the will to pursue in one's own decisions that which one knows to be just?

Horkheimer's moral philosophy can help to stimulate a critique of pure communicative reason in the ethicists' discussion of foundations. If the discourse ethicist were to take into consideration not just the communicative but also the emotive and voluntaristic conditions of real morality, he or she might perhaps once again be able to perceive the good that has fallen from view in those methodically excluded motives for recognizing that which has been discursively grounded. In “Kant's Philosophy and the Enlightenment” (1962), Horkheimer speaks of the capacity for “devotion and happiness” as forming “the precondition for concern about the welfare of the whole, for self-abnegation, indeed for comprehension of the theoretical idea.”⁷⁴ Here it becomes clear that even the purely cognitive interest in the moral is no merely cognitive affair; even less so is its practically significant recognition, as ethical intellectualism would have it. Why do we even want to know what is moral? Why do we conduct discourses of justification? Horkheimer shows us that the good cannot coincide with the discursively justifiable because discursive justification itself—like critical theory as a whole, and theory in general—depends on factors that are not discursively justifiable: the capacity for “devotion and happiness” is always presupposed in the “concern for the welfare of the whole,” in “self-abnegation,” indeed in the “comprehension of the theoretical idea,” and all this together is what constitutes the interest that critical theory itself pursues in the first place.

Thus, even the merely cognitive interest in the ethical is itself no mere cognitive affair; this is especially true when we take the “moral point of view,” the perspective of universalization with “practical intent.” From Horkheimer one can learn that the cognitive interest in the ethical need not necessarily be ethical, even where it is not purely cognitive. What is ethical about the universalization of maxims and interests if it can be the expression of the wholly amoral instrumental rationality of calculated self-preservation? (In a thoroughly rationalized society it is prudent to live according to generalizable precepts.) Kant did not have to confront this problem because for him the morally good coincided with the rational. But if the rational is indeed a necessary but by no means sufficient condition of the good, then universalization alone no longer suffices to make the step from rationality to morality. Horkheimer sees that the interest in morality itself must be a moral interest in order to constitute morality; opportunists and cynics can also have a practical interest in the ethical but for other than ethical reasons. The above holds a fortiori for the practical recognition of that which is known as morally good. The problem of recognition has long been discussed in the form of the question, “Why be moral?”⁷⁵ Translated into the language of discourse ethics, it reads: “Why should I even participate in ethical disputes in which it can be demonstrated to me transcendentally that through my participation in them I have always already recognized ethically relevant norms?” To seek the answer in a decision that is not further justifiable, or in a calculus of shrewdly securing one's identity,⁷⁶ would surrender the practically significant recognition of the discursively justified to motives that can by no means be characterized as morally good. In short, one can recognize the morally good for other than ethical reasons, as Kant already knew.

Horkheimer's critical theory thus reckons with emotive and voluntaristic foundations of morality and of moral philosophy because it recognizes that morality cannot be reconstructed from rationality alone. It calls these foundations “moral feeling,” which it bases on the interest in the just, that is, on what discourse ethics believes it can justify in purely cognitive terms. The theory is materialistic because it claims that the good will can no longer be described as the pure will and because the ethical quality of its “moral feeling” is formed only under contingent conditions; there is no a priori guarantee for its existence. The capacity for “devotion and happiness,” as an ultimately contingent cultural fact, constitutes the interest that “deviates from the natural law”;⁷⁷ it is the source of motivation both for the question of the good and the just and for its recognition, but it is not only this. Because this capacity is what makes the will into the good will, it is a necessary condition of the good itself.

Notes

1. Cf. Max Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Alfred Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), I:45 (hereafter cited as KT).

2. Ibid., 46ff.

3. On the relationship between theory construction and practical interest, cf. ibid., II:112ff.

4. Ibid., I:55.

5. Ibid., I:71ff.; cf. also II:7ff., 62ff.

6. Ibid., I:75; cf. also 74ff.

7. Cf. ibid., I:82ff., II:76.

8. Ibid., I:79.

9. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1966) 13.

10. Cf. KT, I:82ff.

11. Karl Marx, Deutsche Ideologie, in S. Landshut, ed., Die Frühschriften (Stuttgart, 1953), 361.

12. Cf. note 3.

13. KT, II:190. In the original version of “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” the passage reads: “interest in the overcoming of class domination.” Cf. Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 6 (1937): 292. On the relationship between theory and interest, cf. also ibid., II:162ff., and I:91.

14. Cf. T. W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Prismen (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), 7ff.

15. For Horkheimer's characterization of idealist moral philosophy, cf. KT, I:72ff.

16. These characteristics also accurately describe Hegel's conception of morality (Moralität), although he defines it only as an element of the concrete ethical life. On the application of these definitions to discourse ethics, see section V.

17. Once Fichte and Hegel interpreted this ought as a “mere” ought, that is, as an indicator of the finitude of the subject, an ambiguity was introduced into the matter that has tremendously burdened the ethics discussion until the present day, especially with Hegelians. Only from a teleological standpoint, which is not the Kantian, can the ought as that which obligates us be equated with the “mere” ought, that is, the still unreal, the not-yet-realized. On this, cf. Odo Marquard, “Hegel und das Sollen,” in his Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt, 1973), 37ff. Both Hegel's critique of the “mere” ought and Schopenhauer's rejection of deontological ethics as a whole play an important role in Horkheimer's ethical reflections.

18. See Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, 5th ed. (Hamburg, 1955), 31.

19. See Herbert Schnädelbach, “Dialektik als Vernunftkritik: Zur Rekonstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno,” in von Friedeburg and Habermas, eds., Adorno-Konferenz 1983 (Frankfurt, 1983), 66ff.

20. On this point, see Herbert Schnädelbach, “Über Irrationalitat und Irrationalismus,” in Hans Peter Duerr, ed., Der Wissenschaftler und das Irrational (Frankfurt, 1981), 2:155ff.

21. Cf. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Introduction, A, 29ff.

22. Schopenhauer, Über die Grundlage der Moral, sec. 4, in Werke in zehn Bänden, Zurich edition, 6:161ff.

23. Cf. KT, I:39, 42.

24. Ibid., 105.

25. Cf. ibid., 92.

26. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. 1, Appendix: “Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie,” in Werke, 2:639.

27. Cf. KT, I:93.

28. Ibid.; on the following, cf. 91ff.

29. Cf. Max Horkheimer, “Die Aktualität Schopenhauers,” in Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Frankfurt, 1967), 256ff. (hereafter cited as KiV).

30. Cf. Carl-Friedrich Geyer, Kritische Theorie: Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno (Freiburg and Munich, 1982), 131.

31. “The concept of justice … is older than morality.” KT, I:98. Cf. also Horkheimer's remarks on Kant, KT, I:88ff., 94ff.

32. Cf. KiV, 206; see also section V below.

33. KT, I:81. Horkheimer refers with this expression to the good will as the sole unconditional good.

34. Cf. ibid., I:42, 38ff.

35. Ibid., 93.

36. Ibid., 106.

37. Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972), 86-87.

38. Ibid., 90.

39. Cf. ibid., 93ff.

40. Horkheimer elsewhere names Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Mandeville. Cf. ibid., 90.

41. Ibid., 117-18.

42. KT, I:42.

43. Ibid., 64.

44. Thus, Kant's ethics belongs to the “mere coups de main by reason of the consciousness that morality itself is underivable.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, 85.

45. KT, I:44.

46. Ibid.

47. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88, 89.

48. Ibid., 87.

49. KT, I:93. On Kant's concept of the “moral feeling,” cf. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A, 133.

50. KT, I:94-95.

51. Cf. ibid. The later communicative ethics of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel could connect with this motif of the anticipation of the ideal and thus understand itself as the heir of critical theory.

52. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 101.

53. Ibid., 103.

54. Cf. KT, I:235-36; cf. also ibid., II:112ff.

55. Cf. ibid., I:64.

56. Cf. Alfred Schmidt, “Die Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung: Geschichte und gegenwärtige Bedeutung,” in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Munich, 1980), 1:25ff.

57. Cf. KT, II:128-29.

58. Cf. note 13.

59. It is my impression that the quasi-transcendental “cognitive interest” with which Jürgen Habermas argues in Knowledge and Human Interests and thereafter is more strongly inspired by Max Weber than by Max Horkheimer. On this, cf. Max Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis,” pt. II, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1973), 161ff.

60. Cf. KT, I:95ff.

61. Cf. ibid., 84-85.

62. At this point, Horkheimer implicitly offers an alternative to modern neo-Aristotelianism, which as the philosophical prop of our contemporary neoconservatism prefers to interpret and to ground every ethics from the standpoint of a given lived ethos; Horkheimer, too, pursues this approach, but he turns it in a critical direction. On neo-Aristotelianism, cf. Herbert Schnädelbach, “Was ist Neoaristotelismus?” in Wolfgang Kuhlmann, ed., Moralität und Sittlichkeit (Frankfurt, 1986).

63. KT, II:193.

64. In the “Positivist Dispute,” Jürgen Habermas defended as hermeneutic the dialectical position of the Frankfurt theorists.

65. Cf. KT, II:148ff.; in addition, see Jürgen Habermas, “Analytische Wissenschaftstheorie und Dialektik,” in T. W. Adorno et al., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie (Neuwied and Berlin, 1969), 156ff.

66. KT, II:162.

67. Ibid., II:199.

68. Cf. ibid., II:159.

69. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 83-84.

70. Cf. ibid., 38ff.

71. On this see, as interesting documentation, Lobig and Schweppenhäuser, eds., Hamburger Adorno-Symposion (Lüneburg, 1984).

72. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Diskursethik—Notizen zu einem Begründungsprogramm,” in Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 53ff.

73. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Über Moralität und Sittlichkeit: Was macht eine Lebensform ‘rational’?” in Herbert Schnädelbach, ed., Rationalität: Philosophische Beiträge (Frankfurt, 1984), 220ff.

74. KiV, 206; cf. also KT, I:247ff.

75. Cf. F. H. Bradley, “Why Be Moral?” Ethical Studies (1876); Gernot Reibenschuh, “Warum moralisch sein? Zur Kritik soziologischer Moralbegründung” in Manfred Riedel, ed., Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie (Freiburg, 1974), 2:85ff.; cf. also the citations in the Notes.

76. On this point, cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Diskursethik,” 108ff. While Karl-Otto Apel never disputes the existence of a “decisionistic residual,” Jürgen Habermas attempts at this point to refer the skeptic to real conditions of his survival as a person; he thus adopts a position that approaches that of Hobbes and Hobbesianism.

77. KT, I:93.