User:Chamberschris24/sandbox

Horkheimer's work is marked by a concern to show the relation between affect (especially suffering) and concepts (understood as action-guiding expressions of reason). In this, he responded critically to what he saw as the one-sidedness of both neo-Kantianism (with its focus on concepts) and Lebensphilosophie (with its focus on expression and world-disclosure). Horkheimer did not think either was wrong, but insisted that the insights of each school on their own could not adequately contribute to the repair of social problems. Horkheimer focused on the connections between social structures, networks/subcultures, and individual realities, concluding that we are affected and shaped by the proliferation of products on the market place. It is also important to note that Horkheimer collaborated with Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.

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Horkheimer's earlier work is also marked by his involvement in the positivism dispute, which pitted the Frankfurt school against the philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle. Of the Vienna Circle, Horkheimer engaged most consistently with Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, and A. J. Ayer. This involvement was in fact part of his response to neo-Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie. Horkheimer's early work is thus notable for its deep engagement with the dominant philosophical views of the time. Along with theories already mentioned, Horkheimer also responds to the pragmatism of William James and the sociological methods of Durkheim and Weber (anticipating Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action). Horkheimer saw these philosophical views as manifestations of 18th to 20th century thinkers. The logical positivists primarily inherited the views of August Comte and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, whereas the neo-Kantians, intuitionists (Bergson and Dilthey), and phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers) inherited Immanuel Kant.

Horkheimer criticizes these philosophical camps in part because of the politics which underlies them: what Horkheimer terms "bourgeois liberalism." Unlike critical theory, the bourgeois liberalism of the traditional theories seeks, in Horkheimer's words, an "unbroken harmony between reality and reason" -- a harmony that elides the potential contradictions within society. Horkheimer develops this point primarily in four of his early essays, "Materialism and Metaphysics" (1933), "On the Problem of Truth" (1935), "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), and "Traditional and Critical" (1937).

These early essays mark what Helmut Dubiel has termed Horkheimer's materialism phase. Importantly, Horkheimer's materialism is meant to depart from the standard conception of materialism as philosophically opposed to idealism. Horkheimer instead endorses the dialectical materialism introduced by Hegel and later elaborated by Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels. Horkheimer's turn to Marxian materialism, which was characteristic of early Frankfurt School thinking writ large, thus serves as the philosophical basis for his critical theory: as a philosophical Weltanschauung dialectical materialism prioritizes, as Horkheimer writes, "changing the concrete conditions under which men suffer and in which, of course, their souls must become stunted." Dialectical materialism sets the stage for the orientation toward futurity characteristic of (at least Horkheimer's) critical theory.

Horkheimer perceived himself to be uniting science and philosophy, setting the groundwork for the social science orientation of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer hoped to overcome the consequences of traditional theories of science (as expressed by neo-Kantianism and logical positivism); he writes that: "... science has to do with a knowledge of comprehensive relationships; yet, it has no realistic grasp of that comprehensive relationship upon which its own existence and the direction of its work depend, namely, society." As the title of his 1932 essay suggests -- "Notes on Science and the Crisis" -- Horkheimer perceived science, because of its in attentiveness to its concrete, historical situation, to have reached a point at which its value was limited to its instrumental use. "Rational, scientific thinking," as he terms it in "Notes on Science and the Crisis" was used solely for the sake of industrial production.

The critique of instrumental reason with which Horkheimer is normally associated was in this way present in his thought from the very beginning. As Habermas notes in his essay "Remarks on the Development of Horkheimer's Work," this critique is first elaborated in "The Authoritarian State" (1940) and "The End of Reason" (1941). This critique is later developed during his "third phase," to use Helmut Dubiel's terminology, in works such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Eclipse of Reason.