Max Horkheimer Quotes on Mind
Max Horkheimer, the central organising figure of the Frankfurt School, made the fate of reason itself the subject of his philosophy, and the quotes assembled here concentrate on that theme. They contrast an older idea of reason, the mind's grasp of eternal ideas that could serve as goals for human life, with what Horkheimer called instrumental reason, a faculty reduced to calculating the most efficient means to any end whatever. In his bleak formulation, when modern dictators appeal to reason they mean only that they possess the most tanks. Horkheimer warns that as thought becomes automatic and industrialised, ideas lose their independent meaning and the mind loses even the freedom to think, a diagnosis at the heart of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason.
Quotes
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Attributed to Max Horkheimer:
“Reason for centuries has meant the activity of understanding and assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function as goals for men.”
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“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalised, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own.”
pp. 21-22. -
“The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.”
p. 133. -
“Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.”
p. 133. -
“Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.”
p. 149. -
“When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.”
"The End of Reason" (1941) | p. 28. -
“Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws—this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. … Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.”
"The End of Reason" (1941) | p. 29. -
“With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. … Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.”
"The End of Reason" (1941) | p. 39. -
“It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule—in short, made part and parcel of production.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21. -
“The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. … Subjective reason conforms to anything.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | pp. 24-25. -
“Pragmatism … reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of ‘being practical’ as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 52. -
“The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | pp. 21-22. -
“Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21. -
“Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | describing the pragmatist view, p. 51. -
“If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate—in short, emancipation of fear—then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947)