The humanism of critical theory: The Frankfurt School’s ‘realer humanismus’

Abstract

Theodor Adorno has been quoted as responding to the Humanist Union stating ‘I might possibly be willing to join if your club had been called an inhuman union, but I could not join one that calls itself “humanist”’. Adorno’s opposition to forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity is reflected in readings of The Frankfurt Institute’s history such as that produced by Martin Jay. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly admired students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints. Rather, the Real Humanism of Adorno (as well as some of his fellow travellers) understands the human as the negative image of our currently existing society’s inhumanity, and urges us to take an ethical orientation towards the constitution of the human through the abolition of our inhumanity. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other.

Introduction

The work of the Frankfurt School can be viewed as hard to categorise when it comes to the question of ‘Marxist humanism’. It has been noted in readings such as Martin Jay’s that there was a crucial opposition towards forms of humanism (both liberal and Marxist) which posit the existence of our humanity within the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. While this is the case, one of Adorno’s highly admired students, Alfred Schmidt, commemorated his teacher by proclaiming him a ‘philosopher of Real Humanism’. In categorising Adorno’s work as embodying a ‘Real Humanism’, Schmidt points towards an understanding and orientation towards the human (and our understanding of it) which cannot be accurately characterised through the philosophies of Humanism and Anti-Humanism as oppositional viewpoints – as has been seen, for example, in E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Poverty of Theory’ and Althusser’s ‘Reply to John Lewis’.

A recent exchange between Asad Haider and Kyle Baasch in Radical Philosophy has highlighted the ever continuing influence and difference between the rediscoveries and re-readings of Marx’s Capital by Althusser and his students in France, and by the Frankfurt School in Germany at the end of the 1960s. ¹ If we were to say there was a ‘debate’ between these ‘French’ and ‘German’ Marxisms, the problem of humanism is one which holds key importance within said debate. While this article does not focus on the critique of Marxist Humanism put forward by Althusser and his followers, I would like to quickly note the understanding of humanism which Althusser critiques.

The critique of humanism Althusser presents is oriented towards a critique of transcendental subjectivity and, in turn, is opposed to understandings of the subject as sovereign, causa sui (self-caused) or as ‘Radical Origin’ of ‘all the determinations of the […] “Object”’. ² Charles Larmore has, in reference to Kant, put it that philosophies of the transcendental subject posit that

‘the a priori conditions of experience (be they necessary and universal or historically and psychologically variable) make possible the conceptualisation that underlies all contingent judgements of experience. The constitutive activity of the subject does not generate what the contingent features of experience are. But it does, according to the theory, lay down the conditions under which such features can be understood, under which they can come to be seen as part of experience’. ³

While philosophers who hold the transcendental subject to exist may differ as to whether the object exists actually outside of the subject or if it is the complete construction of the subject, the concept of transcendental subjectivity depends on an asymmetry wherein the ‘categories of the subject’ are constitutive of the object. ⁴ While the constitution of the object may not be constitution in a complete sense (full constitution of the object), this asymmetry on the side of the subject is important to note as it holds the subject over the object in terms of constitution of the world. Due to the fact of this asymmetry, the concept of transcendental subjectivity has been associated with Idealist philosophy – at least in its modern form. This definition (asymmetry concluding with the primacy of the subject) is wide enough to encompass the many views held under the term Idealism from at least the modern period onwards, while also highlighting the philosophical outcome of Idealism. This definition may, at first, seem to be reading Idealism, necessarily, as a form of subjectivism which has been opposed by scholars such as Beiser in regards the German Idealist tradition. Beiser argues that Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is both subjective and objective. For Beiser, Kant’s system is subjective because the ‘subject is ineliminable, that is, it is not only consistent with but necessary to the transcendental conditions of experience’. ⁵ The Kantian system is also objective, in Beiser’s reading, because the ‘intersubjective forms of experience [i.e. the grounding of appearances in space,] are not ideas but the necessary conditions of having ideas […] these forms are the necessary conditions of subjectivity and objectivity’. ⁶ Highlighting the primacy of the subject in the Idealist tradition since the modern period does not amount to an accusation of rejection of objectivity and lapsing into subjectivism. Adorno, like Beiser, opposes the reading of Kant as a subjectivist, but highlights the key role of the subject in objectivity somewhat differently. Categorising Kant as a subjectivist relegates Kant’s project simply to ‘a spirit of scepticism’ which Kant wished to escape. ⁷ While this is the case, Adorno states that ‘the Kantian project can actually be characterised not as one that adopts subjectivism in order to do away with the objectivity of cognition, but as one that grounds objectivity in the subject as an objective reality’. ⁸ In following Adorno’s reading of Kant’s project, it is possible to oppose a reading of Kant as being a subjectivist, while still highlighting that Kant’s project – as well as many who took influence from Kant – retains an asymmetry between subject and object which falls in line with the above categorisation of Idealism and transcendental subjectivity. ⁹ I would argue, that this understanding of Idealism as grounding objectivity in the subject is not only prevalent in Althusser’s critique of humanism as a form of transcendental subjectivity, but also informs the Frankfurt School’s critique of German Idealist philosophy and the humanism which permeates the Frankfurt School’s work.

The critique of forms of transcendental subjectivity permeates the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Schmidt – as a student of Adorno and Horkheimer – even when it is not the forefront of analysis. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno states ‘he felt it to be his task to break through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity by means of the power of the subject’. ¹⁰ We also find, earlier in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer felt the need to highlight that ‘the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and natural’. ¹¹ These writers, in grappling with the German philosophical tradition which preceded them, felt the need to undertake a critique – and in Schmidt’s case, adopt and advance the critique of his predecessors – of this form of subjectivity which had amounted in the horrors of industrial society. The concept of the human, and of ‘real humanism’ which arises from the Frankfurt School is oriented in opposition to the inhumanity of capitalist society, and points towards a world without this inhumanity. Through an examination of the Frankfurt School’s critique of Kantian transcendental subjectivity and Adorno’s understanding of subject-object mediation, I seek to show how the humanism which arises from the work of the Frankfurt School circumvents being characterised as a form of transcendental subjectivity or as the subject as sovereign author. Rather, the ‘Real Humanism’ which arises out of the Frankfurt School is one which understands the human as the negative image of past, present and future inhumanity – not as a metaphysical essence which must be freed. Further, real humanism takes its goal as the universal abolition of the inhumanity of dominant structures. This Marxist humanism which affirms that the individual is not causa sui – self-caused – or ‘a Radical Origin’ – in the Idealist sense – is what this article seeks to outline.

The Frankfurt School and transcendental subjectivity

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer forward a critique of transcendental subjectivity by highlighting that the process of rationalisation and instrumental reason which they find inherent in Enlightenment results in the domination of nature. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this arises out of the concept of the transcendental subject found in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy wherein transcendental subject believes it stands outside of nature and works upon it. It is contended that in the transcendental subjects ‘mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence’. ¹² In splitting itself from the rest of nature, the transcendental subject operates as a myth of the Enlightenment which in its ‘hope of salvation’ from its dependence on necessity. ¹³ This is not to say that ‘society’ is the transcendental subject – this is a view which Adorno explicitly opposes in his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – but rather to highlight both the truth and untruth of the transcendental subject, albeit in a different – social – form.

This ‘society’ view of the transcendental subject allows for the possession of the ‘character of universality, of all-encompassing totality, that Kant ascribes to his transcendental subject’. ¹⁴ This universality is something which the individual subject can never attain given its particularity, and which the Kantian ‘I think’ similarly cannot attain as it is necessarily an abstract postulate. Society is able to construct itself as a totality – as a form of universality as it is the ‘summation of all the concrete factors’ of a given historically contingent social form. ¹⁵ For Adorno, universality in all forms, necessarily ‘points beyond the merely contingent nature of individual existence’. ¹⁶ The universal is a form which moves us beyond the self as an isolated, atomised being. While it is the case that society is a universality, it is a form of universality which dominates particulars (such as subjects).

The reason why Adorno says that ‘it would be misguided […] to say the transcendental subject actually is society’ is due to the gap between the self-understanding of Kant, and the process immanent to both Enlightenment and the transcendental subject. ¹⁷ For Adorno, in the transcendental subject there is an implication of the existence of a ‘rationally organized society’ – the Kantian kingdom of ends. Historically, on the other hand, there has been a process of domination of nature, and in turn, of subjects rather than the existence of ‘free rational actors’ – as was noted above. This gap between the self-concept of Kant and the trajectory of the concept of the transcendental subject is due an internal contradiction between the positing of the free subject and the repression of the subject by reason – which in Kant, subconsciously means the historically contingent reason of capitalist society. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer state that

Kant’s concepts are ambiguous. As the transcendental, supraindividual self, reason comprises the idea of a free, human social life in which men organize themselves as the 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, 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. The true nature of schematism, of the general and the particular, of concept and individual case reconciled from without, is ultimately revealed in contemporary society as the interest of industrial society. ¹⁸

‘Progressive’ or ‘instrumental rationality’ – which arises out of the transcendental subject for Adorno and Horkheimer – culminates in the domination of nature – and man’s nature – 'through the elimination of qualities’ of both subjects and objects by reducing these qualities into ‘quantitative forms’ which can necessarily be measured aligns itself with capitalism’s universalisation of the exchange-principle. ¹⁹ The principle of exchange which grounds capitalist society, functions in the same way as the domination of reason which emanates from the transcendental subject by ‘limiting’ and ‘leveling’ the qualities of individuals by transforming – or rather equalising – them into a universal form which can adequately be exchanged for one another. ²⁰ This process of abstraction through exchange in effect ‘virtually remov[es]’ the particularity of the qualities of the subject – thingifying the individual in the process – in order to allow for the exchange of the subjects labour and its produced objects to occur. This gap between the self-concept of Kant and the ‘true nature of the schematism’ means that in a sense the transcendental subject is both not society, and society at the same time. It is not society in that Kant’s self-concept has not been realised in the form of a rationally ordered society, but is society as well as society expresses the ‘true nature’ which arises out of the concept.

In contrast to the domination arising out of transcendental subjectivity, Adorno formulates his own understanding of the relation between subject and object. For Adorno, we cannot removal the equivocal nature of ‘subject’ – and object as well – though philosophical or terminological clarification. The two main understandings of ‘subject’ – subject as individual and subject as a collective or ‘universal’ ‘consciousness in general’ – are constitutive of each other. The relation of the universal to the particular and the particular to the universal is already presupposed in the act of thinking through the concepts we deploy. We see this through the term ‘particular person’, it is thinking through the particularity of subjectivity – it is attempting to understand something about the subject as individual – but in its use the universal is always already deployed through the use of ‘person’ – without the universal concept of species (or people) this phrase becomes meaningless. It designates ‘“someone” [who] who stands elliptically for “a person”’. ²¹ The desire to overcome the equivocal nature of subject and object is the aporia which defines the existence of modern philosophy – but one in which many answers fall into misrecognition and one-sidedness.

This understanding of the subject-object relation depends on the mediation of subject by object and of object by subject. The Hegelian concept of mediation has from Kierkegaard onwards been understood as a form of moderation. Adorno’s reading of Hegel contends that Hegel’s philosophy cannot be one of moderation as mediation occurs precisely due to and through ‘the extremes themselves’. ²² Hegel’s philosophy is one wherein ‘the fundamental ontological contents that traditional philosophy hoped to distill are not ideas discretely set off from one another; rather, each of them requires its opposite, and the relationship of all of them to one another is one of process’. ²³ Mediation means, for Adorno, that the identity – as well as non-identity – of both subject and object depend on one another’s polarities.

Because of this, there is both truth and falsity in the separation of subject and object in philosophy. This separation expresses a real existing condition of our human condition, but it has also been historically hypostatised into an invariant epistemological (and also ontological) principle. This hypostatisation of the subject-object split is highlighted in the reduction of the object to subject – and vice versa. This reduction of the object to subject is the removal of mediation as key to understanding subject and object – the mediation of subject by object, and of object by subject. This separation of the subject from object has culminated in the philosophical domination of the object by subject – the positing of the existence of the transcendental subject. Adorno notes that in Kant this is presented by the ‘construct[ion of] the objective world out of an undifferentiated material’ and, in Fichte, that the subject is the cause of the objective world itself. ²⁴ Philosophical idealism, in hypostatising the concept of subject qua transcendental subject, attempts to think through the implications and outcomes of mediation but ultimately does so in a one-sided manner. The hypostatisation of the subject to object or object to subject is a form of misrecognition, but still shows a truth of the world in a one-sided manner.

The rejection of the hypostatisation of the philosophical subject does not mean falling into a naïve realism wherein the external world is taken as existing as it appears before us in the form of immediacy. To take up this naïve realism is again to take the object’s historical form of appearance as law. Both forms of hypostatisation which arise from the subject-object split lack the self-reflection available through an understanding of mediation in thought. When one understands subject and object as always already mediated – as mediation is the constituting factor of all knowledge – we are able to understand ‘that subject for its part is object in a qualitatively different, more radical sense than object, because object cannot be known except through consciousness, hence is also subject’. ²⁵ The correct response to the hypostatisation of one concept is not the hypostatisation of its conceptual opposite – subject/object, structure/agency, etc. – but rather, the acknowledgement of subject already always being object, and object already being subject through the requirement of mediation means that our cognitions cannot be understood as ‘only subjective’ as subjectivists would propose as it does away with this sharp epistemological distinction wherein objectivity is banished from cognition.

The identification that mediation is the constituting factor in all knowledge doesn’t mean that all talk of the ‘primacy of the object’ is relegated to the hypostatisation of the object. For Adorno, we can speak of the primacy of the object over subject in cases where this primacy is determinable. This means when we speak of the primacy of the object it cannot be in the abstract metaphysical sense, but we can speak of this primacy in cases where we can see such causality. Adorno notes that ‘[s]ubject is the agent, not the constituent, of object’. ²⁶ Since (human) subjects are constituted by the society (object) they find themselves situated in, subjects themselves cannot be constitutive of the object.

There cannot be a transcendental subject if we posit the primacy of object either as the subject depends on the object for its constitution – even in the form of the subject always already being object. Still, this does not mean that we hypostatise the object in a way that we can think of the object without thinking of subjectivity, the object can only exist as object in relation to, and thus with the presupposition of the existence of subject. Adorno, in Negative Dialectics puts it as follows,

‘[d]ue to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject. An object can be conceived only by a subject but always remains something other than the subject, whereas a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object as well. Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject’. ²⁷

While this is the case, at the same time Adorno ‘does not wish to place the object on the orphaned royal throne of the subject’, but instead ‘to remove the [hypostatised] hierarchy’. ²⁸ Both subject and object depend upon each other; the subject is necessarily an object, and without the ‘subject as a moment’ the objectivity of the object ‘would become nonsense’ – '[b]oth [subject and object] are and are not’. ²⁹

It is in this understanding of subject and object as mediated by each other that Adorno is able to highlight that there is a reality in both the idealist understanding of ‘the subject as productive imagination’ which self-posits itself, as well as the subject as an object constituted by the world. ³⁰ This understanding of subject holds for us the kernel of agency which allows us to conceive of the possibility for us to overcome domination and enact a society free from the domination of the transcendental subject while not reducing subjectivity to the will of a sovereign author. The idealist position only becomes illusory when it takes the subject as the primary constituent of the object rather than the agent of the object in knowledge.

The humanism of critical theory

Throughout the work of Adorno and Horkheimer, there is a persistent opposition to positions that are associated with Marxist Humanism (as well as humanism more generally) such as the positing of a human essence as some have read into Marx’s Early Work, or a voluntarist understanding of the human subject wherein the subject ultimately stands outside of social relations, but there is a fidelity to Enlightenment values which could be taken to be humanist. Due to this, the way the Frankfurt School has been read and position in relation to humanism varies.

For example, Martin Jay reads the work of Adorno and Horkheimer as unable to be categorised under the label ‘Marxist Humanism’ as has been by Daniel Bell and George Lichtenheim, but also cannot be categorised as a form of Marxist anti-humanism associated with Althusser. Jay notes that the differences between the readings of Freud taken up by Adorno and Horkheimer in contradistinction to Erich Fromm means a distancing of Adorno and Horkheimer from the humanism associated with Fromm’s work. This difference appears with the reception of Freud’s libido theory. Fromm took the libido theory to be incompatible with the reading of Marx he sought to undertake, whereas Adorno and Horkheimer it pointed towards an understanding of the non-identity of the subject – albeit in a one-sided way as it hypostatised ‘human nature’. ³¹ The fragmented impulses of desire which pushed against the reality principle – which actively maimed the subject and their desire – meant, for Adorno and Horkheimer, that the myth of a ‘harmonistic’, ‘unity of the personality’ had been debunked. ³² This reading of Freud, meant that psychology could not account for the human in general terms, and rather all psychology is the psychology of the individual. ³³

Building upon this, Adorno opposes revisionist psychoanalysis (particularly that of Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) because in attempting to incorporate social factors it operates as the opposite to Freudian biologism – ‘it allies itself with social conformism’ and in rejecting the libido theory ‘softens the central concept of the unconscious’. ³⁴ In this move to oppose the biologism of Freud, revisionist psychoanalysis – which amounts to Adorno as a ‘sociologised psychology’ – not only rejects a key psychoanalytic insight that ‘[t]he unconscious constantly reveals the “failure” of identity’ due to its opposition to the norms imposed by the reality principle, but reads the alignment with the reality principle not as a violence which inflicts suffering upon the subject, but accepts alignment with historically contingent societal norms as inherently good for the subject. ³⁵ Psychoanalysis – if understood in this way – becomes ‘a type of higher social welfare’ – a therapy which adjusts the subject to align with ‘industrialised mass culture’. ³⁶ The affirmation of the well-adjusted personality – particularly in Horney’s work – is only possible with an understanding of the unconscious which is neutered, let alone morally absurd in the eyes of Adorno. ³⁷ If one is to adhere to the notion of the unconscious present in Freud’s work – as Adorno and Horkheimer do – the belief in the unity of an individual’s psychic life – and of a psychic unity of the human – whether conditioned by society or not, is undermined as the unconscious continually surfaces in opposition to the subject’s conscious desire and the reality principle.

Even though the Freudian unconscious is key for Adorno and Horkheimer as is highlights the possibility for the psychic to undermine social relations, it is not an object which is cordoned off from influence and change. Just like Adorno’s understanding of the subject-object relation, Sherrat notes that the subject’s psyche is both determined by history and holds a role in historical change as well. ³⁸ Given that historical conditions play a role in determining the psyche, when historical change occurs – which is in part determined by the psyche – a change in the psyche occurs as well. ³⁹ In this sense, Adorno and Horkheimer cannot be understood as just adherents of the Freudian libido theory, but rather produce a corrective to the theory through introducing historicisation into psychoanalysis.

While Jay makes a strong case in regards to Adorno and Horkheimer’s opposition to humanisms based in a human nature or essence – as found in Marx’s Early Works – through their opposition to revisionist psychoanalysis, there is not much engagement with Schmidt’s work on the Frankfurt School and humanism. Jay does makes note of Schmidt’s paper on Adorno’s ‘real humanism’ – which will be discussed further below – there is no real accounting of the implications this holds for our understanding of the Frankfurt School’s relation to humanism other than pointing out this aligns with the general opposition to talking about a shared human nature or of the subject as a sovereign will. Throughout the article, the way humanism is used points specifically to the positing of a human essence, or a voluntarism of the subject. Although Jay’s reading is correct that Adorno and Horkheimer should not be understood as holding these positions, it rejects ‘real humanism’ in name – ultimately treating it as an aside – while accepting its positions as for Jay, Adorno and Horkheimer ‘preserved the hope of a more truly humane society inhabited by concrete men rather than by the abstract subjects of the humanists, with whom they have so often been confused’. ⁴⁰

In the work of both Max Horkheimer and Alfred Schmidt, we find similar understandings of Humanism, albeit under different names. Horkheimer presents to us a formulation of what he terms ‘critical humanism’. Critical humanism is an underlying feature of Horkheimer’s understanding of Critical Theory, stating that is ‘unfolds the critique of the forms of life under which humanity is now perishing’. ⁴¹ Kozlarek has recently characterised the critical humanism of Horkheimer as ‘an activity devoted to detecting and denouncing tendencies of inhumanity, wherever they may occur’, rather than the divining through the bourgeois image of the present to reveal an ‘essential’ (hypostatised), and eternal image of man. ⁴² This ‘critical humanism’, then, is not based in constructing, in thought, a positive image of man. Rather, it seeks to critique our current society for the dehumanisation it inflicts upon subjects, which renders these subjects inhuman. ⁴³ This form of critique can be understood in relation to Adorno’s fidelity to negative critique due to the failure of positive visions to fully grasp the object they attempt to analyse. ⁴⁴ For Adorno, ‘[t]he materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. [Marx’s materialism, for Adorno,] brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity’. ⁴⁵ ‘Critical humanism’ must negatively grasp what the human is – ironic as this question is in the given context – in order to bring about social relations which allow for its constitution. To do so, one must follow the path of negative critique through the revealing of the dehumanisation and inhumanity of our current form of life. In this sense, the figuration of the human that the humanism of the Frankfurt School presents is not arrived at through a positive description of man, but is articulated as the negation of the inhuman conditions of the present.

Alfred Schmidt reads in Adorno’s work the presence of a ‘real humanism’. The term ‘real humanism’ is borrowed from the preface to Marx and Engel’s text The Holy Family. Real humanism is positioned against the philosophy of Bruno Bauer and his circle in this text. This form of humanism is originally formulated in a Feuerbachian fashion wherein ‘sensual-concrete existence of man’ is opposed to its substitution by the Hegelian concepts of ‘spirit’ and ‘self-consciousness’ which Bauer employs. This Feuerbachian position is later abandoned in The German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach wherein they arrive at the position that ‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’. ⁴⁶ For Schmidt, this means the abandonment of the concept of humanism as it is usually defined, but ultimately in Marx’s later work there is the presence of a form of humanism which does not adhere to the metaphysical humanism so often associated by scholars with the Young Marx’s Feuerbachian work. ⁴⁷ While there is the opposition to the static image of man that is developed on Marx’s work, Schmidt notes that in Marx’s mature work there is still a humanism present. Reading Marx, it is noted by Schmidt that the ‘cult of abstract man’ necessarily goes hand in hand with bourgeois society. The machinations of bourgeois society appear – in ideology – in the form of the abstracted man which trades private labour on the market which is presented – by all producers – as uniform, equal human labour. While this image of abstract man is a form of misrecognition, it highlights – in part – man’s role in the constitution of bourgeois society through human practice. ⁴⁸

In Marx, what is found by Schmidt is an understanding of the world which does not succumb to the ‘fin de siècle sociological problematic that pits structure against agency’ that rearose in the French opposition between Existentialism and Structuralism. ⁴⁹ The arrival at this position from the Hegel-inflected reading of Marx adopted by some of those around the Frankfurt School is of no surprise, and has been reinforced by Hegelian readers of Marx and the Frankfurt School such as Gillian Rose who notes that

‘[t]he sociological antinomy of action and structure reproduces the Fichtean antinomy of the positing ego and the posited non-ego. The non-ego is the deed or the structure, […] which is initially there and considered to be independent of consciousness. The ego is the action, […] which has insight into its own agency as the highest ‘fact of consciousness’, and thus comes to know the non-ego as its own positing. […] The opposition between structure and agency, or between not-posited and positing is abstract. It is a dichotomy the poles of which collapse into each other: the not-posited becomes indistinguishable from the positing, But the dichotomy is perpetually reconstructed, for an abstract opposition is a bad infinite which is therefore repeated but never sublated or transcended’. ⁵⁰

The voluntarism generally associated with some forms of Existentialism and sociological action theory, as well as the reification of necessity in Structuralism both end up engaging in an absolutisation of their chosen abstract postulates which sacrifices the ability to think the actual. ⁵¹ Instead, one of the particulars of actuality – whether it be the domination by structure, or the remainder that exists of agency alongside the existence of domination – is exalted into a position wherein either the subject will be able to never release itself from its domination, or the subject is understood as not determined in any sense by social reality – rather it is impeded on by certain social relations – and thus has the ability to engage in ‘free, unconstrained action’. ⁵²

Schmidt seeks to overcome this Fichtean antinomy through a reading of Marx’s concept of nature. Schmidt reads Marx as holding the position that ‘[n]ature cannot be separated from man; man and his accomplishments of his spirit cannot be separated from nature’. ⁵³ Marx’s thought, in Schmidt’s view, is necessarily ‘against any devaluation of man and nature’ (emphasis mine). ⁵⁴ The refusal to split Man from nature forms not only Schmidt’s political opposition to capitalism, but his philosophical critique of certain concepts of nature as well. Schmidt’s critique of capitalism arises from the Marxist understanding of the distinction between first nature and second nature. Hegel understood these terms as distinguishing between ‘a world of things existing outside men, as a blind conceptless occurrence’, and the manifestation of reason, or objective Spirit in institutions such as the economy, law, society and the state. ⁵⁵ The Marxist criticism opposes Hegel’s view, insisting that the realm of second nature has historically operated in the same fashion as first nature. Schmidt writes ‘Hegel’s “second nature” should rather be described in the terms he applied to the first: namely, as the area of conceptlessness, where blind necessity and blind chance coincide. The “second nature” is still the “first”. Mankind has still not stepped beyond natural history’. ⁵⁶ Natural history, for Schmidt, is what Marx termed the realm of necessity; the state wherein man has not moved beyond its historical domination by necessity. Following Marx, Schmidt’s humanist reading of Marx and Adorno relies on the belief that mankind can move beyond the realm of necessity – through the abolition of second nature – due to subjectivity’s possibility for historical change.

The entering of man into the equation means that nature becomes something socially mediated, not only through labour but through knowledge as well. Schmidt quotes Marx stating the distinction between pre-social and socially mediated nature ‘has meaning only in so far as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere […] and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach’. ⁵⁷ The historical fact of the social mediation of nature by man means that Subject and Object cannot be split apart into homogenous, self-identical objects. In understanding nature as a ‘homogenous substratum’ one returns to a pre-Marxist materialism ‘fails to realize [that in … i]t is not possible to distinguish what originates from mere nature and what originates from human intervention in the content of our perceptions’. ⁵⁸ Because of this, Schmidt’s reading of Marx understands nature not as an ontological category like Substance, but rather the totality of the world and is thus historically determinate. As nature is refused in the form of a homogenous ontological category, and posited as one which mediates and is mediated by the subject, Schmidt cannot be understood as advocating a freeing of a currently alienated human essence through his call for the abolition of second nature’s blind necessity or as a form of transcendental subjectivity as understood by Althusser. For Schmidt, ‘[r]eal humanism is not concerned with ultimate metaphysical concepts whether idealist of materialist. The social emancipation it strives for serves the interests of real, individual men’ – it is opposed to all forms of ‘dehumanisation’ which have existed historically. ⁵⁹

The ‘real humanism’ that Schmidt reads in Adorno’s – and by extension, Marx’s – work does not end with the highlighting of the constitutive role of human practice in bourgeois society. It moves further highlighting that there is a political need to instatiate the human through the constitution of social relations which will allow its existence. Above I have used the term human, for the most part, as specifying the human species for simplicity, but in Schmidt’s reading of Adorno, the position that the human has not yet existed is taken up. Rather, our current (and also previous) existence is the existence of the ‘inhuman’. In opposition to the naïve understanding of humanism present in The Holy Family, for Adorno, ‘[m]an, reduced in totalitarian regimes to his bare materiality, ceases to be man’. ⁶⁰ In this sense, Marx’s statement that ‘[t]he prehistory of human society therefore closes with [the closure of the capitalist] social formation’ is taken as the heart of ‘real humanism’ on Schmidt’s reading. ⁶¹

The human that is invoked by Adorno, Horkheimer and Schmidt holds fast to its opposition to the commonly held position that communism is the freeing of the human’s trans-historical essence – rather, the human is utilised in their texts as a self-reflexive – or more aptly, a negative dialectical or non-identical – concept which signifies future forms of subjectivity which could arise in a society wherein the ‘realm of freedom’ – the ‘free development of each’ – exists. In this there is the integration of the ‘double meaning of the word “humanity”’ wherein not only is our self-concept, but the entirety of ways of being as well. ⁶² Humanity, as a concept, then is not static but includes an everchanging totality of being and understanding; ‘the concept itself mediates between individual living subjects and the species, in other words it encompasses the accommodation of each to the other’. ⁶³ The human – the political goal of ‘real humanism’ – in this sense, operates as the negative image of that which we see as unjust and oppressive treatment of subjects – and in turn of ourselves.

Butler reads Adorno in a similar fashion, highlighting the aporetic situation Adorno finds in the attempt to define the human. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler states that for Adorno ‘[i]f the human is anything, it seems to be a double movement, one in which we assert moral norms at the same time as we question the authority by which we make that assertion’. ⁶⁴ This double movement is not simply one restricted to argument as well, but highlights the refusal of ‘identity-thinking’ which is embodied throughout Adorno’s work. The refusal of hypostatisation is not restricted to thought, but has to be embodied in the political practices of subjects. This is why Butler states that for Adorno the ‘I’ cannot be understood as will (sovereign or transcendental subject) or devoid of will. If the human is understood as sovereign, understood in terms of the will, the reality of our vulnerability is removed from the equation in terms not only of our self-understanding, but our political actions as well (which is highlighted in Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the transcendental subject). In understanding the human as devoid of will, the present is made into an ontological principle – a better world is ontologically declined. ⁶⁵ When Butler states that for Adorno ‘[t]he “I” emerges as a deliberating subject only once the world has appeared as a countervailing picture, an externality to be known and negotiated’, it is not simply in relation to the negation of the inhuman, but the refusal of the violence of the hypostatisation of the subject as well. ⁶⁶ This concept of the human ultimately ‘embodies itself in [the] tenacious historical work’ required for the human to come into existence. ⁶⁷

While it is the case that humanity is deployed in the work of the Frankfurt School, there is also grappling with the philosophical deployment of the ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ which forces Horkheimer to state ‘[i]f only I knew a better term than humanity, that poor, provincial slogan of a half-educated European. But I don’t’. ⁶⁸ The term ‘global subject’ which appears in Adorno’s work operates similar to the way ‘humanity’ is deployed by Horkheimer and Schmidt. In a note titled ‘The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom’, Horkheimer states ‘the error is not that people do not recognise the subject but that the subject does not exist. Everything therefore depends on creating the free subject that consciously shapes social life’. ⁶⁹ Adorno makes a similar statement in a lecture: ‘Humanity’s survival is threatened by the forms of its own global constitution, unless humanity’s own global subject becomes sufficiently self-aware to come to its rescue after all. The possibility of progress, of averting the most extreme total calamity, has migrated to this global social subject alone’. ⁷⁰ While taking from Kant’s idea that man is something that is developed – as highlighted in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ – it necessarily rejects the ‘basic anthropological Given’ that is present in Kant’ work. ⁷¹ Kanally notes that Adorno moves from the ‘ideas of Kant, to the Hegelian-Marxist idea of humanity’, which while correct, needs more nuance. For example, we find in the work of Lukacs – one of the foremost Hegelian-Marxists – a clinging to the anthropological given through the freeing of human’s nature – through the freeing of labour – under communism. Adorno’s Hegelian-Marxist conception of man must necessarily be differentiated from Lukacs as he (Lukacs) succumbs to a metaphysics of essence when he speaks of the human. The understanding of the human which is present in the work of the Frankfurt School is not one wherein the instantiation of humanity is the realisation of man’s ‘true’ nature – whether it be through the faculties of reason as in Kant or free labour in Lukacs – but, rather, is a conception wherein man’s ‘disposition is such that what he really is, is something that he has first to become’. ⁷²

Although it is the case that Adorno’s conception of the human and the global social subject go against Lukacs’ humanism in that there is an opposition to an essence of man which is metaphysically prior to sociality – and which will be freed with the dissolution of class society – Kanally notes that Adorno’s statement that ‘[s]ociety is objective because, on account of its underlying structure, it cannot perceive its own subjectivity because it does not possess a total subject and through its organization it thwarts the installation of such a subject’ is necessarily a Marxist one – but also, one which agrees with Lukacs as well. ⁷³ This reading of Adorno can be easily translated into Lukacs’ language as it highlights the necessity of the movement of the social subject from the in-itself of the non-class conscious proletariat to for-itself of the global social subject (or humanity) in a communist society. In this sense, Adorno’s conception of man is one which is not destined to be or become, or arrive from revealing the given, but rather must be constituted through the development not only of the self-conception of the self qua self, but of the relation of the self to the other as a (human) community – of the unified relation of the differentiated. This conception is a necessarily ethical one which must be ‘energetically worked out’ in a form which will properly fit with the rearrangement of our ‘thinking and conduct, so that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’. ⁷⁴ Our conception of the human – as well as our orientation towards its constitution – must be one which adheres to this new categorical imperative which arrived in the wake of Auschwitz.

This global social subject functions as the interrelation of humanity qua particular (individual) and humanity qua universal (human community). For Adorno, the understanding of humanity ‘may well be meant as a[n ethical] regulative ideal’ wherein ‘every individual should be respected as a representative of the socialised human species, that he is not a mere function of the exchange process’. ⁷⁵ Kanally further notes that Adorno’s referencing of Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ in the paper ‘Progess’ highlights that for Adorno a society wherein humanity is actual rather than possible ‘would have both the greatest freedom, and the precise specification of the limits to this freedom’. ⁷⁶ As of this, a truly human society is not one which operates through forced unity wherein the social process occurs behind the backs of individuals, but rather is one wherein the unity of particulars arises ‘from the bottom up, through the internal development of its contradictions and therefore the actions and freedom of actual living human beings who will rationally establish humanity’. ⁷⁷ This process wherein humanity and the realm of freedom arises in particular through its reflective interaction of the particular and universal. A form of interaction wherein non-identity is not subsumed by identity, but rather they both depend on and complement each other. A society wherein humanity exists for Adorno is one which is fundamentally opposed to the promulgation of inhumanity, and in this situates the realm of freedom as something which arises immanently from society rather than something imposed upon subjects from above whether it be by an ‘alien social power’ or by ‘an all-embracing terrestrial organization’. ⁷⁸

The ethical orientation of ‘real humanism’ towards the instantiation of a global social subject, and the social relations which enable it – whether presented under the term ‘human’ or otherwise – links with Bloch’s invocation of Heimat [Home] and the not-yet. Cat Moir notes that ‘Adorno and Bloch both agreed that utopia’s essential function is “as a critique of what is present”’ in opposition to the orthodoxy of both East and West wherein ‘nothing utopian should be allowed to exist’. ⁷⁹ Heimat in the context of German thought tends to invoke ‘a romanticised past of childlike innocence and lost unity with nature’. For Hölderlin, the modern world has been characterised by a loss of ‘spiritual unity’, for Novalis, it is the loss of a ‘Europe [that] was a culturally and spiritually unified entity bound by “childlike faith”’. ⁸⁰ The Romantic Heimat longs for the return to a pastoralist originary nature – ‘as German spirit, as Romantic counter-revolution’ against the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. ⁸¹ Bloch’s invocation of Heimat links with the concept of the human which is highlighted in the work of the Frankfurt School through the same concept which distinguishes the Heimat of Bloch from that of German Romanticism – through the ‘not-yet’. While influenced by Hölderlin and Novalis the ‘double meaning of the [German] word scheinen’ – to seem or to appear – accentuates Bloch’s point that all ‘nostalgic vision[s]’ of a past Heimat are little more than something which only seems to be. ⁸² Similarly, Moir notes that for Adorno as well, the search into the past for an origin which could be freed will only result for the seeker in chimeras. ⁸³ In this sense, the Frankfurt School, in identifying the human as something which does not exist and is to be constituted, is linked with the Blochian not-yet in a conception of the human as not arising from an alienated origin, but as a form of existence which we have an ethical duty to fight for.

In an interview with Adorno, Bloch remarks,

‘[t]his [utopian] island does not even exist. But it is not something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if only we could do something for it. Not only if we travel there, but in that we travel there the island utopia arises out of the sea of the possible’. ⁸⁴

This identification of utopia with the future and with existent possibility means that, for Bloch, temporal utopianism is a form of Marxist Historical Materialism. ⁸⁵ Marx’s position presented in the 10th of the Theses on Feuerbach that ‘the new materialism [operates from the standpoint of] human society or socialised humanity’ means Bloch arrives at the position that man cannot be rid from Marxism’s centre even in its most ‘scientific’ forms as its goal is that of the constitution of the human. ⁸⁶ This point Bloch makes echoes Schmidt’s opposition to the Althusserian ‘scientific norm’ stressing that the decentering of Man upheld by anti-humanists is a historical fact which will ultimately be abolished with the instantiation of Man. The decentering of the human should be ultimately understood as a part of the social ontology of capital, not a trans-historical proposition of thought. Marxism, then, is to be an orientation towards these not-yets which we find in utopia – the orientation must be not one towards the past, but to the future.

The opposition to inhuman treatment and dedication to the possibility of a society wherein ‘real freedom’ exists – as opposed to the ‘formal freedom’ of capitalism – permeates the work of the Frankfurt School and their fellow travellers. This opposition leads them to speak of a collective social subject which is constituted by the free conscious action of subjects in the formation of their own social reality. But this social subject is not something which is purely given, but is rather a subject which must be created if the goal of a society rid of dehumanisation is to be achieved. If we, like Adorno, are to believe in the new categorical imperative that we must make sure ‘that Auschwitz never repeats itself, so that nothing similar ever happen[s] again’, then we must fundamentally orient ourselves towards the goal of ‘real humanism’ – a society free from the domination of ourselves and the other.

Conclusion

In his essay titled ‘Progress’, Adorno crystalises the humanism which I have sought to show is present in the work of the Frankfurt School – particularly Adorno, Horkheimer and Schmidt. Discussing Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Concept of History’, Adorno states

‘progress would be the very establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospect opens up in the face of its exctinction. […] If humanity remains entrapped by the totality it itself fashions, then, as Kafka said, no progress has taken place at all […] This can be elucidated most simply by the definition of humanity as that which excludes absolutely nothing. If humanity were a totality that no longer held within it any limiting principle, then it would also be free of the coercion that subjects all its members to such a principle and thereby would no longer be a totality: no forced unity’. ⁸⁷

The Frankfurt School does not fit into the categories of anti-humanism or humanism as they are usually characterised. Their work rather exemplifies ‘the possibility of a Marxist humanism that does not take any extant humanisms as its point of departure’, and also does not oppose anti-humanism tout court. ⁸⁸ In understanding the human as not something given, but rather a historical possibility, the Frankfurt School is able to orient itself towards the goal of bringing about the conditions which will allow for the human to be constituted. As the human is conceived in this way, the Frankfurt School cannot be charged with being ‘humanists’ in the way Althusser conceives of humanism – the positing of one (or more) of man’s characteristics as being the motor of history. The human, for the Frankfurt School, is not an ‘ultimate metaphysical concept’, but rather one of the ethical concepts which ‘real humanism’ orients itself around. It is precisely because of this ethical orientation, and repudiation of homogenous metaphysical concepts that allows us to understand the Frankfurt School’s work as embodying a ‘real humanism’.

Adorno is often quoted, stating that ‘[p]hilosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed’. ⁸⁹ Less often, is a fragment from Minima Moralia drawn into play wherein we find that ‘[t]he objective end of humanity is only another expression for that which is the same. It attests to the fact that individual persons have, as individuals – as these latter represent the species-being [Gattungswesen] of humanity – lost the autonomy through which they could have realized the species’. ⁹⁰ Not only does philosophy remain alive because the moment of realisation was missed, but the human stays alive in the speculative dimension of philosophy due to its missed realisation as well.

In the 1844 Manuscripts, we find these two positions together where Marx states that ‘[p]hilosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy’. ⁹¹ In this, we find that Benjamin was correct to state that catastrophe is ‘to have missed the opportunity’, and that progress is ‘the first revolutionary measure taken’. ⁹² The missed realisation of both philosophy and the human means we must take an orientation towards both. In striving for a society wherein the subject is not dominated by the structures of society we strive for the destruction of the ‘objective end of humanity’, and the realisation of philosophy simultaneously.

ORCID iD

Alice Nilsson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1021-2982