Max Horkheimer Quotes on Nature
Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (1947) and the co-authored Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, with Adorno) gave the early Frankfurt School its most influential analysis of the historical fate of the modern conception of nature. The central thesis is that the instrumental rationality through which Enlightenment thought reduced nature to a domain of calculable resources for human technical mastery has, in its mature form, turned back against human beings themselves — the same logic that disenchanted external nature also disenchants the inner nature of human capacities, leaving the modern subject confronting a thoroughly administered world in which substantive reason has been displaced by mere subjective preference. The framework, integrating Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Freud through the Frankfurt synthesis, shaped subsequent Critical Theory through Habermas’s reconstructive turn and the contemporary engagement with the philosophical conditions of ecological crisis.
Quotes
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“The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.”
Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129. -
“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. -
“The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflict between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.”
p. 138. -
“The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.”
p. 148. -
“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism .”
p. 148. -
“Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete.”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 18. -
“In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?”
Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 21.