Critical Theory and Frankfurt Theorists

Lectures-Correspondence-Conversations

Leo Lowenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351524889
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The core of this volume is its presentation of Lowenthal's sixty-year-long intellectual career as a critical theorist and sociologist. The book includes some of his speeches on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin and presents excerpts from conversations on his life as a scholar and teacher, as managing editor of the Institute for Social Research's famous journal, as government servant during and immediately after the war, and as observer and critic of contemporary culture and politics. Together these selections present an intriguing biographical panorama of a major intellectual figure.

Part I

German Jewish Intellectual Culture: Essays from the 1920s

Introduction

The following essays introduce a number of Jewish figures of the last 150 years who have been chosen because their respective contributions correspond decisively with the main events of German intellectual history. Such an undertaking might at first seem questionable. It could arouse the suspicion that it is meant to assert, as apologia, that the Jews “have always been there too.” It is easy to see that an apology is not out of the question. But the point of view from which this contribution to the history of Jewish biography is to be pursued is a social scientific one: the rise of bourgeois society, and the appearance of the contradictions for which bourgeois society is responsible, are reflected in the biographies of the leading Jewish personalities of our epoch. It is precisely there, where life circumstances are altogether and repeatedly stripped of illusion, where conditions are unsatisfying and subject to sudden transformation, that the bourgeois revolution, the class struggle of the proletariat, and the disillusioning force of modern scientific secularization find receptive carriers in exceptional degree.

Such a treatment of Jewish figures, as both creators and creatures of bourgeois society, necessarily proceeds somewhat generally. It is of no fundamental significance whether or not these persons were members of their religious communities or congregations. Nor is it decisive whether or not the topics to which these Jews devoted themselves were substantively Jewish. The great Jewish names of our epoch—Maimon and Heine, Börne and Moses Hess, Marx and Lassalle, Einstein and Freud, Landauer and Trotsky—are essentially not associated with specifically Jewish topics. It is for this reason that questions of biography take over the place of the evolution of questions within Judaism, so that this very substitution becomes one of the important problems of Jewish history.

In the first half of the period selected for treatment here, the problem of emancipation—that is, of integration into a bourgeois society itself in the process of early consolidation—stands in the forefront. For the trajectory of personal emancipation, whether a specific figure is of eastern or western Jewish heritage is, in every case, an essential distinguishing characteristic. The Jew who immigrated to Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century moved suddenly from one historical period into another; such was the experience of Maimon and, in a certain sense, Lassalle. The Rheinlanders Heine and Marx, on the other hand, were born into the new world. In terms of character, the eastern Jew faced an endlessly more difficult task than the western Jew. The story of his personal life is, therefore, of far greater import than that of the westerner, in regard to whom the evolution of intellectual concerns becomes more interesting. Thus, it might be said that the lives of Heine and Marx can be elucidated through their work, and the work of Maimon and Lassalle through their lives.

1

Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn has yet to receive an exhaustive treatment, a fate he shares with the entire epoch to which he belongs. That the scholarly treatment of the modern bourgeoisie still has not made use of the most important sources of its social constitution is a special problem and one, to be sure, which explains why Mendelssohn above all has not yet found his biographer. In and of itself, the Enlightenment is neither geographically nor temporally accessible as a unified movement. Its single universal characteristic is that it is everywhere the reflection of the rise of the bourgeois class. It is a rise which already bears mature fruit in England as it is being achieved in bloody turmoil in France and is transforming itself in Germany into an almost century-long defeat.

Far beyond any specifically Jewish interest, Moses Mendelssohn deserves intellectual historical attention because all of the specifically German tendencies of the Enlightenment can be found in his work. But it is precisely for this reason that it is so difficult to treat him. The complex of concerns reflected in his work yields no unified, uncontradictory picture. To the polarities between which Mendelssohn moved in his life as a Jew (son of a Torah scribe, father of baptized children) correspond intellectual historical oppositions. In one significant philosophical point he falls back behind Immanuel Kant (who wished to have him as a disciple); he encourages Gottfried Ephraim Lessing in his aesthetic theories, while simultaneously misunderstanding their ultimate philosophical consequences; and with F. G. Jacobi, he carries on a polemic, presumably in defense of his friend, Lessing, that draws him once again nearer to Kant, from whom he has just expressly distanced himself.

In the customary historical treatments, Mendelssohn is depicted as a member of the Leibniz–Wolff school. Karl Lamprecht alone has drawn attention to Mendelssohn’s significance in having achieved a new and particular stage in the philosophy of the German Enlightenment. He points correctly to a statement in which Mendelssohn attacks the thoughtlessness with which, “in all polite society,” the “most profound truths” of Wolff’s philosophy become “vogue expressions.” “The truth itself became prejudice, through the fashion in which it was accepted.” In fact, Mendelssohn was very much an adherent of Wolffian scholasticism. But if it supplied the music for the political and scientific institutions of the tone-setting court, newly ennobled and early hautebourgeois circles in the epoch of absolutism, then Mendelssohn and others appropriate its central themes for the broader bourgeois strata of the eighteenth century. Mendelssohn took over those tendencies in the philosophical movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that revolutionized science, to fashion, in the phrase he himself contributed to the literature, a philosophy of “healthy human understanding.” It now has no more explicit task to perform than to satisfy the people’s need for happiness. Here the character of the German Enlightenment, in contrast to the French, becomes clear to us for the first time. The goal of western philosophy was to dethrone all ruling powers, both theoretical and practical, that could be dethroned through the instruments of reason and experience. The agreeable mood in Mendelssohn’s thought is merely a sign of the disagreeable narrowness of the German bourgeoisie, which was not in a position to accomplish any world-historical tasks.

Schopenhauer called Mendelssohn one of the “last sleepers” in philosophy before Kant. It seems necessary to interpret this statement from two sides to establish Mendelssohn’s position in the intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. First of all, we ask what the expression means in the context in which it appears. For Schopenhauer the phenomenal world, that is, the world perceptible to our senses, is merely appearance, a dream, a product of the imagination; nor are concepts which seek to comprehend this world of phenomena anything more than empty vapors, “phantasmagorias.” True being is not to be comprehended by way of the understanding and its tools. Comprehension necessitates a special method of introspection. Here arises the opposition to Wolff’s philosophy, and particularly to Mendelssohn’s. Both are “rational metaphysicians” in that (a cardinal sin for Schopenhauer!) they teach not only that the highest truths are recognizable to the tools of understanding, but also that rational cognition takes no note of whether understanding’s tools thereby apprehend the objects of our perceptions or whether they are at work in the realm to which such ideas as God and immortality belong. In opposition to Schopenhauer and, incidentally, in opposition to very influential currents in the most modern philosophy, there exists for Mendelssohn no boundary between the highest world of being and the simplest objects in our surroundings. According to his conception of immortality, for example, the soul simply continues to exist as it did before, beyond the decay of the body. The span of earthly life is merely a bounded piece of eternity for Mendelssohn, while for Kant this life and eternity stand utterly opposed. Kant, contrary to the speculations of Mendelssohn and others like him, seeks to apply all concepts of the understanding only to the world of mere appearance; in so doing, he destroys the possibility of a rational metaphysics which would be mediated through the understanding.

Schopenhauer’s view of the relation of Mendelssohn to Kant tellingly locates Mendelssohn within an irrational philosophy, but it is one-sided and must be supplemented. It never even occurred to Kant to regard the rational methods for knowing the absolute as inaccessible in principle. On the contrary, he believed in the possibility of a rational metaphysics and, in a letter of January 1763 to Mendelssohn himself, urgently drew attention to its importance for the “true and lasting good of the human race.” What in reality differentiates him from Wolff, and thereby from Mendelssohn, is the radical distinction between perception and understanding. For Mendelssohn this distinction does not exist in principle. Whatever sensuous perception, sentiment, or memory determines is proved for him once again by the understanding in its own specific way; the propositions found in experience become definitively correct only once the understanding has proven them to be logically necessary. Thus Mendelssohn lowers experience to the level of a source of knowledge, while he expands the competency of simple understanding to such an extent that the logically necessary also becomes the truly existing. Mendelssohn’s concept of God emerges in this context: because it is possible to think the most complete being, it must also exist. It is significant of Mendelssohn’s transitional position in intellectual history that, for the proof of the existence of God, he admits this old scholastic method of arguing from mere concepts to the existence of facts, while he maintains explicitly that such proof in the exact sciences, for example in mathematics, is completely impossible.

The correspondence of Kant and Mendelssohn is not without its tragic features. Again and again, with the warmest of words, Kant attempted to win Mendelssohn over to his philosophy. Indeed Kant saw in him a genius who could lead thinking out of the path of an obsolete metaphysics and into the light of critical science. But according to Mendelssohn’s own confession (which is to be found, in addition to his correspondence, in the Foreword to “Morgenstunden”) he not only had not read Kant’s main work, but felt himself to be wholly of the spirit of the middle of the century in opposition to its last quarter. And in reality, as metaphysician and epistemologist, Mendelssohn does remain a thorough-going member of the mercantilist, prerevolutionary epoch. The Berlin Academy of Sciences, in giving precedence to a prize essay by Mendelssohn over one by Kant, might have erred as a forum of systematic philosophy, but in historical terms its judgment was wholly legitimate. Mendelssohn’s essay affirms that one can enjoy the same confidence in matters of spiritual knowledge as in those of science based in experience. For one for whom such is the case, the world is completely in order just as it is in the moment. The world is excellent and just, and everything, including God and philosophy, have the single meaning of increasing human happiness. These views corresponded fully to the situation of the possessors of absolute power, even if Mendelssohn did not hold them for the sake of the powerful. In opposition to these views stands Kant’s philosophy: the world is in no way finished, in no way in order; it is an eternal problem to be solved by means of scientific experience.

But thus far only one side of Mendelssohn’s intellectual historical position has been treated. Insofar as Mendelssohn, a member of a class destined for emancipation, accepts a philosophy hostile to it, he is a reflex of the lack of independence of his social stratum. But he also represents its progressive tendencies. They are probably most apparent in his philosophical relation to Lessing; for the theory of art (and it is naturally no accident that it was precisely the theory of art) is the essential contribution by which the thought of the German Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century was further developed. To Mendelssohn is due the honor of a decisive share in the discovery that art is served by a particular type of human consciousness. Alongside the conventional division of consciousness into thinking and willing, there appears for Mendelssohn as a third capacity of mind the capacity of “approval” or of liking out of which, for him and his like-minded friends, develops “feeling.” One sees in Mendelssohn how closely aesthetics and psychology are connected—and with intellectual historical justice!—for in Germany, the bourgeoisie first expressed its newly liberated life of feeling almost exclusively in art. Eighteenth-century German art, together with the theory of art in Lessing, Mendelssohn and their spiritual kin, is the grande révolution of the German bourgeoisie. In this revolution, Mendelssohn participates decisively indeed. The feeling for “beauty” and the “sublime,” for the “pleasurable” and “unpleasurable” now receives altogether its due in general consciousness. It is no longer merely the prerogative of the ruling circles. Lessing continued to polemicize: “Art follows bread.” But, with a clear affinity to Schiller, Mendelssohn already demanded that art clothe the lessons of truth in the garments of beauty, in order to maximize their effectiveness. Kant was now able to draw the philosophical parallels and Mendelssohn’s initiatives found fertile soil in the progressive philosophy of art and feeling contained in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

Mendelssohn’s two-sidedness gained dramatic expression toward the end of his life in his famous conflict with Jacobi about whether Lessing had been a Spinozan. In answering the question affirmatively, Jacobi rejected Lessing; Mendelssohn vindicated him with his negative reply. The question belongs to that category of intellectual historical issues that must be interpreted according to their broader meanings and for which it is difficult to render a final, objective judgment. Jacobi saw in the philosophy of Spinoza an atheistic system in which knowledge is gained solely through rational means. In accepting this system Lessing, according to Jacobi, sacrificed completely the most valuable side of life— that side namely that derives without mediation from suprarational sources of belief. In attacking Lessing, Jacobi launched the first great attack on the part of romanticism, the intellectual counterrevolution, against the bourgeoisie’s attempt at political and social conquest. The bourgeoisie’s most important weapon is science, and that is precisely what Jacobi sought to discredit. Mendelssohn addressed his famous verdict on Jacobi to Kant:

For his part, he ultimately takes refuge behind the canon of belief and finds salvation and security in the bastion of the beatific Lavater, out of whose ‘angelically pure’ mouth he cites consoling words at the end of his text. But they afford me no consolation, because I do not understand them. This text by Mr. Jacobi is altogether a rare mixture: the head of Goethe, the body of Spinoza and the feet of Lavater.

The intellectual historical irony here consists in the following: one’s literary sympathies belong to Mendelssohn, who fought more elegantly, while it cannot be denied that it was Jacobi who in fact hit upon Lessing’s intentions in accusing him of the rationalistic spirit (of science). Moreover Mendelssohn in his defense of Lessing, and Jacobi in his attack, aspired to something fundamentally similar. Both wanted to save the existence of the spiritual as something provable. Mendelssohn made his attempt as yet with the tools of rational scholasticism; Jacobi already enlisted the irrational emotional forces of romantic thought.

In conclusion, a turn to the personal. In studying Mendelssohn, I am occasionally inclined to think of Goethe’s remark on Hamlet: “A great deed laid upon a soul that was not equal to it.” Mendelssohn is one of the most charming figures in German intellectual history; elegant in polemics, suggestive in presentation, penetrating and yielding at once in oral and written exchanges of opinion, accessible to even alien suggestions and prepared to accept them. But only a genius of unheard of capacity would have been truly able to recognize, to unite and, in a technically satisfying presentation, to clarify the intersecting and contradictory tendencies which came together in Mendelssohn’s work. Thus does his philosophizing frequently fail to surpass evasion. He spoke excitedly, for example, of French philosophy, but meant only Rousseau, not exactly a sufficient representative. He commented wittily on the superiority of English thought over French, and meant at bottom merely the blissful emotionalism of a Shaftesbury. He seized upon the title of a Platonic text, whose spirit is that of the victorious consciousness of a gloriously dominant class, but conveyed with it, in essence, the mere appearance of immortality to a bourgeoisie eager to assume it that itself shares very insufficiently in the fruits of the good life. But perhaps we commit an historical injustice in calling to mind a genuis who could never have existed. Perhaps Mendelssohn was as he was because “Young Germany’s” phrase, “Germany is Hamlet,” applied already to his time.

2

Salomon Maimon

Maimon’s most relevant book today is his Autobiography (edited by Jakob Fromer, Georg Müller Press, Münich). It was originally edited by Karl Philipp Moritz, the well-known writer of the German Enlightenment, whose Bildungsroman, Anton Reiser, represents the rationalistic counterpart to Wilhelm Meister. And, in fact, the motive which led Moritz to edit Maimon’s autobiography is not in the slightest aesthetic, but bourgeois revolutionary in the true sense of the Enlightenment. Moritz believed Maimon’s life to be an example of the power of human knowledge and will—victorious even within oppressive social relations:

What gives this book particular worth in yet another respect is its nonpartisan and unprejudiced presentation of Judaism, of which one can justifiably maintain that it is the first of its type. It is, then, especially at present, when the formation and enlightenment of the Jewish nation has become an object of reflection in its own right, that it deserves attention of the first order.

In reality, Maimon’s autobiography is the documentary result of an eastern Jew’s attempt to penetrate the rational cultural world of the German bourgeoisie just before 1800. It is not, after the model of Augustine or Rousseau, a confession which strives to bring to light the hidden and secret, that which has till now been kept from the world and from the self. Much more, it manifests once again a life that is already manifest to all: the life of a person uprooted, cast to and fro and tragicomic, insecurely alternating between seriousness and ridicule of others and himself, the whole performed with the grimace of an astonished clown. Maimon’s life takes one of the forms characteristic of the attempt by eastern Jews to break through to Western Europe (a process, by the way, that in the 1920s has not yet reached its end). One path to the West was the more or less forceable demand for social equality, of which Lassalle was an example. Another drew on the powerful craving for conquest on the part of the cultural heritage of idolized Western Europe; so it was in the case of Salomon Maimon.

Maimon broke free to Europe, because he simply could no longer stand his life at home. His father was a Jewish barkeeper, forced into the misfortune of his calling by the miserable Polish legislation on Jews. Maimon’s childhood memories tremble with the derision of Jewish family life everywhere apparent in his Christian environment. In this hell of inferiority and rejection there arose in him, as a decisive formative experience, a Jewish spiritual pride, which gilded in a thousand ways the suffering of the present with the special position of the Jew in his world of the future. This messianism at first seemed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I German Jewish Intellectual Culture: Essays from the 1920s
• Part II Lectures (1978–1983)
• Part III Correspondence
• Part IV Conversations
• Afterword
• Name Index