Subject and Object

Ruth Groff

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623566418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

Subject & Object is a thematic collection of classic works by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, designed to foreground the authors' philosophical concerns, especially in the areas of epistemology, ontology, and method. The volume, which includes lucid introductions to all of the selections, illustrates Frankfurt School approaches to questions such as the nature of reason; the limits of empiricism, pragmatism and Kantian transcendental idealism; the case for materialism; the difficulty of thinking counterfactually; and the ideological character of mainstream social science. Many of the pieces in the volume are otherwise out of print. Subject & Object will be a resource for social, political, and cultural theorists who may be less familiar with the philosophical aspects of the Frankfurt School, for analytic philosophers who may not have had previous exposure to their work at all, and for anyone wanting access to these seminal texts.

PART ONE

Epistemology

CHAPTER ONE

“Means and Ends”
Max Horkheimer

“Means and Ends” is the first chapter of Eclipse of Reason, published in 1947, in English. The governing device of the book is a dichotomy between what Horkheimer calls “objective reason” and “subjective reason.” In this first chapter Horkheimer tracks the devolution of the former into the latter—which, expressed as pragmatism, he then criticizes. While he does not call for a return to the past, he does make plain the ways in which he believes the concept objective reason to be superior to that of subjective reason, and what the philosophical and political consequences have been of its eclipse.

The concept of objective reason is first and foremost an epistemological term: it refers to a posited intellectual capacity. However, insofar as the capacity is precisely that of being able to discern an external, metaphysically-given order, the concept brings realist ontological commitments along with it. Locke, for instance (to use Horkheimer’s example) took reason to be the ability to discern God’s will, as expressed in the Laws of Nature. Moreover, the order to be grasped is not just external, vis-à-vis the subject. It is also normative. While it is the order itself that compels action of one type or another, (rather than the faculty by which it is known), objective reason is therefore an organ of moral perception. As such, it yields knowledge of ends. Subjective reason, by contrast, does not. Subjective reason is purely instrumental.

Horkheimer sketches a trajectory in which objective reason first supplanted religious belief, allowing for a “softer,” more tolerant form of moral knowledge, but then itself gave way to subjective reason. The problem with the outcome is that subjective reason cannot help us to assess ends. It is simply the ability to calculate means. As Horkheimer observes, it is a kind of reason that cannot tell us if fascism is wrong. Nor, can it underwrite a defense of democracy. Classical arguments on behalf of consent, he reminds us, presupposed that we are bearers of objective reason. Authority is derived from the ruled not because the majority are fans of democracy, but because—as Locke would have it—everyone has the ability to discern God’s will (or at least adult Englishmen do). If reason is mere cleverness, then the normative situation is just as Hobbes said: “tyranny” can mean only “not to my liking.” Objective reason having “liquidated itself,” as Horkheimer puts it, we are left with self-interest as “the core of the official ideology of liberalism.”

The version of the ideology that Horkheimer criticizes here is pragmatism. At the level of practice, the issue is the direct equation of reason with efficiency—which is to say, efficiency in the service of the status quo. In the present case, reason-as-means comes to be identified with whatever is functional for “the reifying mechanisms of the anonymous economic apparatus.” (There is an irony in Horkheimer’s appeal to Locke, of course, in that Locke insisted that what objective reason reveals is an inviolable right to private property. But at least in the case of objective reason, such commitments are explicit.) At the level of philosophy, meanwhile, Horkheimer objects to a set of claims associated with James and Dewey, ranging from the “the opinion that an idea, a concept, or a theory is nothing but a scheme or plan of action, and therefore truth is nothing but the successfulness of the idea” to the thesis that the existential relevance of objects is exhausted by their effects upon us. At both levels, the concern is that reason as defined by pragmatists is no longer critical.

Horkheimer first considers the moral implications of the pragmatist conception, then goes on to ask if the approach is otherwise sound. With respect to the former, he writes: “If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about […] metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas’ or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody.’” But it is not just that pragmatism is in principle morally mute, and therefore morally deficient. In further interrogating the thesis that “each thought must have an alibi, must present a record of its expediency,” Horkheimer raises the following objections. First, the very experimental situations to which classical pragmatists appeal (likening all thought to the activity of determining “what works,” in the laboratory) – those situations are themselves shaped by social forces. This is so in a general sense, insofar as the goal of controlling nature is built into the project of modern science, but also more narrowly, in terms of the selection, design and funding of research programs. Thus, even at the philosophical level, identifying reason itself with the “utility” of science (science already conceived in Baconian terms) will have the effect of aligning a potentially critical faculty with prevailing interests, not just contingently but in principle. Second, the pragmatist has a regress problem when it comes to the idea that meaningful concepts are akin to successful experiments. For the very concepts that would figure in an effort to test the cognitive mettle of a given term via the experimental method will themselves be meaningful only qua results of other experiments. Finally, and perhaps most important, reason defined in instrumental terms has already lost much of its vaunted utility for moral beings such as ourselves.

“Means and Ends” can be usefully read along-side “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics” and/or “On the Problem of Truth,” both also by Horkheimer, and/or “The Concept of Essence,” by Herbert Marcuse. The first is an analysis of positivism that is similar to the critique of pragmatism; the second is another go at pragmatism; the third is Marcuse doing for the concept of essence what Horkheimer does for that of objective reason: namely, showing it to be a necessary aspect of genuinely radical thought, not merely a relic of a reactionary past.

“Means and Ends”

When the ordinary man is asked to explain what is meant by the term reason, his reaction is almost always one of hesitation and embarrassment. It would be a mistake to interpret this as indicating wisdom too deep or thought too abstruse to be put into words. What it actually betrays is the feeling that there is nothing to inquire into, that the concept of reason is self-explanatory, that the question itself is superfluous. When pressed for an answer, the average man will say that reasonable things are things that are obviously useful, and that every reasonable man is supposed to be able to decide what is useful to him. Naturally the circumstances of each situation, as well as laws, customs, and traditions, should be taken into account. But the force that ultimately makes reasonable actions possible is the faculty of classification, inference, and deduction, no matter what the specific content—the abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism. This type of reason may be called subjective reason. It is essentially concerned with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory. It attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable. If it concerns itself at all with ends, it takes for granted that they too are reasonable in the subjective sense, i.e. that they serve the subject’s interest in relation to self-preservation—be it that of the single individual, or of the community on whose maintenance that of the individual depends. The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake—on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself—without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflections about the social order as a whole.

However naive or superficial this definition of reason may seem, it is an important symptom of a profound change of outlook that has taken place in Western thinking in the course of the last centuries. For a long time, a diametrically opposite view of reason was prevalent. This view asserted the existence of reason as a force not only in the individual mind but also in the objective world—in relations among human beings and between social classes, in social institutions, and in nature and its manifestations. Great philosophical systems, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism, and German idealism were founded on an objective theory of reason. It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man’s life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were derived. The emphasis was on ends rather than on means. The supreme endeavor of this kind of thinking was to reconcile the objective order of the ‘reasonable,’ as philosophy conceived it, with human existence, including self-interest and self-preservation. Plato, for instance, undertakes in his Republic to prove that he who lives in the light of objective reason also lives a successful and happy life. The theory of objective reason did not focus on the co-ordination of behavior and aim, but on concepts—however mythological they sound to us today—on the idea of the greatest good, on the problem of human destiny, and on the way of realization of ultimate goals.

There is a fundamental difference between this theory, according to which reason is a principle inherent in reality, and the doctrine that reason is a subjective faculty of the mind. According to the latter, the subject alone can genuinely have reason: if we say that an institution or any other reality is reasonable, we usually mean that men have organized it reasonably, that they have applied to it, in a more or less technical way, their logical, calculative capacity. Ultimately subjective reason proves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end. This definition seems to be in harmony with the ideas of many outstanding philosophers, particularly of English thinkers since the days of John Locke. Of course, Locke did not overlook other mental functions that might fall into the same category, for example discernment and reflection. But these functions certainly contribute to the co-ordination of means and ends, which is, after all, the social concern of science and, in a way, the raison d’être of theory in the social process of production.

In the subjectivist view, when ‘reason’ is used to connote a thing or an idea rather than an act, it refers exclusively to the relation of such an object or concept to a purpose, not to the object or concept itself. It means that the thing or the idea is good for something else. There is no reasonable aim as such, and to discuss the superiority of one aim over another in terms of reason becomes meaningless. From the subjective approach, such a discussion is possible only if both aims serve a third and higher one, that is, if they are means, not ends.¹

The relation between these two concepts of reason is not merely one of opposition. Historically, both the subjective and the objective aspect of reason have been present from the outset, and the predominance of the former over the latter was achieved in the course of a long process. Reason in its proper sense of logos, or ratio, has always been essentially related to the subject, his faculty of thinking. All the terms denoting it were once subjective expressions; thus the Greek term stems from legein, ‘to say,’ denoting the subjective faculty of speech. The subjective faculty of thinking was the critical agent that dissolved superstition. But in denouncing mythology as false objectivity, i.e. as a creation of the subject, it had to use concepts that it recognized as adequate. Thus it always developed an objectivity of its own. In Platonism, the Pythagorean theory of numbers, which originated in astral mythology, was transformed into the theory of ideas that attempts to define the supreme content of thinking as an absolute objectivity ultimately beyond, though related to, the faculty of thinking. The present crisis of reason consists fundamentally in the fact that at a certain point thinking either became incapable of conceiving such objectivity at all or began to negate it as a delusion. This process was gradually extended to include the objective content of every rational concept. In the end, no particular reality can seem reasonable per se; all the basic concepts, emptied of their content, have come to be only formal shells. As reason is subjectivized, it also becomes formalized.²

The formalization of reason has far-reaching theoretical and practical implications. If the subjectivist view holds true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral, or esthetic decisions. ‘A judgment of fact,’ says Russell,³ one of the most objectivist thinkers among subjectivists, ‘is capable of a property called “truth,” which it has or does not have quite independently of what any one may think about it. . . . But . . . I see no property, analogous to “truth,” that belongs or does not belong to an ethical judgment. This, it must be admitted, puts ethics in a different category from science.’ However, Russell, more than others, is aware of the difficulties in which such a theory necessarily becomes involved. ‘An inconsistent system may well contain less falsehood than a consistent one.’⁴ Despite his philosophy, which holds ‘ultimate ethical values to be subjective,’⁵ he seems to differentiate between the objective moral qualities of human actions and our perception of them: ‘What is horrible I will see as horrible.’ He has the courage of inconsistency and thus, by disavowing certain aspects of his anti-dialectical logic, remains indeed a philosopher and a humanist at the same time. If he were to cling to his scientistic theory consistently, he would have to admit that there are no horrible actions or inhuman conditions, and that the evil he sees is just an illusion.

According to such theories, thought serves any particular endeavor, good or bad. It is a tool of all actions of society, but it must not try to set the patterns of social and individual life, which are assumed to be set by other forces. In lay discussion as well as in scientific, reason has come to be commonly regarded as an intellectual faculty of co-ordination, the efficiency of which can be increased by methodical use and by the removal of any non-intellectual factors, such as conscious or unconscious emotions. Reason has never really directed social reality, but now reason has been so thoroughly purged of any specific trend or preference that it has finally renounced even the task of passing judgment on man’s actions and way of life. Reason has turned them over for ultimate sanction to the conflicting interests to which our world actually seems abandoned.

This relegation of reason to a subordinate position is in sharp contrast to the ideas of the pioneers of bourgeois civilization, the spiritual and political representatives of the rising middle class, who were unanimous in declaring that reason plays a leading role in human behavior, perhaps even the predominant role. They defined a wise legislature as one whose laws conform to reason; national and international policies were judged according to whether they followed the lines of reason. Reason was supposed to regulate our preferences and our relations with other human beings and with nature. It was thought of as an entity, a spiritual power living in each man. This power was held to be the supreme arbiter—nay, more, the creative force behind the ideas and things to which we should devote our lives.

Today, when you are summoned into a traffic court, and the judg...