Horkheimer's Criticism of Husserl

The criticism of science and Husserl’s logic

Horkheimer’s criticism of phenomenology can be seen partially as related to his criticism of vitalism, Cartesianism and positivism. He sometimes assesses phenomenology together with vitalism and finds some crucial common points between them. He even cites Max Scheler, the disciple of Husserl, together with Bergson in many places. According to John Abromeit, “The general outlines of Horkheimer’s reception of vitalism and phenomenology emerge clearly from lectures he gave in the late 1920s.” ² We can describe Horkheimer’s studies as a project aiming at re-establishing and modifying materialism by purifying it of positivism, naturalism, even idealism and metaphysics. In this process he made use in particular of the criticism of phenomenology and vitalism leveled at scientific rationalism held by positivism and naturalism. Horkheimer is much more critical of philosophy of life than of phenomenology. For example, Bergson is denounced for his overall rejection of conceptual knowledge and scientific truth. Horkheimer believes that refuting conceptual knowledge takes us to denying reason. Indeed, he shares the critiques of Dilthey and Bergson in many respects, but he takes a critical position against what they offer as the resolution of the problems evoked by positivism and rationalism.

Horkheimer appreciates Husserl as the last genuine epistemologist. ³ However, he considers Husserl as a typical bourgeois philosopher. He finds Husserl’s criticism of scientific rationalism the most important step for the legitimacy of philosophy. According to Horkheimer, there are three steps to re-establish or rescue the legitimacy of philosophy. According to Abromeit, “The first tentative step” was that of neo-Kantians ‘in a positivist epoch’. The ‘second, but the first truly substantial attempt to break the monopoly of positivism and to re-establish philosophy as an autonomous discipline’, came with the publication of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. The vitalist critique is the ‘next historical step in the emancipation of philosophy from science’. ⁴

Husserl’s main objection to science was that all forms of positivism both in natural and social sciences are inadequate in explaining phenomena; additionally, they are relativistic because of being grounded only on empirical data. Thus we need a more adequate and rigorous science that could explain phenomena originally. While philosophy was subordinated to science with the domination of positivism, Husserl attempted to reverse the process and to show in his different works that philosophy can be established as a rigorous science and mathesis universalis. According to Husserl, to be based on only empirical data and to reduce ideality to natural processes in a mechanistic way are crucial mistakes of positivism. Therefore, the arbitration of science in every matter is unacceptable.

Horkheimer gives a detailed account of Husserl’s logic in the Gesammelte Schriften 10 where he seems to be well aware of what Husserl intended to do. He says that according to Husserl everything that we determine factually has just relative validity. All regularities we found on the basis of our observing the facts have no unconditioned laws [Gesetze]; and we can never know that these facts in future too would happen in accordance with these regularities. Horkheimer goes on to say that it is Husserl’s strong belief that in psychological and physiological nature alike, both the fact of consciousness and things in space can give us only the principles that are revisable through the facts. ⁵ Thus, logical laws cannot be gained from the facts. If it were so, the unconditioned validity of these laws could not be saved. All positivism (psychologism and empiricism) is relativism, and relativizes the validity of logical laws, whether it admits this or not. It is capable of bestowing only probabilities [Wahrscheinlichkeit], but this is contrary to the sense of these laws. They admit of no exception and no changeability; and they are immediately transparent [einsichtig] as in the case of the principle of contradiction (two contrary principles cannot be true at the same time). ⁶ In Husserl logical laws are the presuppositions and the principles of science and all kinds of theory. However, they do not presuppose any (factual) thing for their validity. ⁷ Consequently, Husserl defends the absolute independence of logical laws from the facts. ⁸

Horkheimer describes this conception of logic or apriority as deficient because it is undialectical and very radical in its division of philosophy and science. He associates this sharp division with Husserl’s conception of science. He says that both Husserl’s and Cohen’s conceptions of science are problematic. Neo-Kantians regarded natural science as the legitimate master builder of the system; and philosophy was just the comprehension of their method. Husserl considered natural science in its empirical structure to be vague and unphilosophical. But neither Husserl nor Cohen knew practically what natural science is because their conception of science stems basically from the philosophical tradition. Cohen understood science in the sense of Cartesian rationalism as a mathematical system; and Husserl interpreted it in the sense of English sensualism as a factual research that accepted the mathematical form of deductive system as the unique rigorous scientific form. ⁹ Thus he appropriates neither Husserl’s sharp division of philosophy and science nor relativism and absolutism. As we will see below, Horkheimer holds that to be based on empirical data does not necessarily mean relativism. He suggests a position that rejects both relativism and absolutism.

Horkheimer also differs from Husserl radically in the resolution of the problems produced by science. For Husserl, the deficiency in the explanation of the phenomena is in science itself. It cannot be reconciled with some modifications because there is a variety of phenomena about which science has nothing to say. What science does is an illegitimate reduction of every phenomenon to mere empirical facts. Hence, Husserl suggests a science based on ideality. Horkheimer does not share Husserl’s views on the nature of science itself; he says that the deficiency is not in science itself or because of the science, but because of the ongoing changing of social reality. ¹⁰ He apparently believes that science can be recovered if one considers social reality’s continuous changing.

It follows that he does reject Husserl’s idea of rigorous science or a mathesis universalis to be developed separately from science. For, to take such a position would be repugnant to the character of social phenomena. However, Horkheimer participates in Husserl’s denunciations of current scientific method as being superficial or naïve and of its mechanistic method in understanding profound problems. He says that science, in spite of its industrial achievements, became unsuccessful in explaining social problems. ¹¹ It cannot approach ongoing changing social phenomena as it does nature. Thus its mechanistic approach to social phenomena does not yield a correct explanation. ‘In order to grasp the structure of social reality’ or ‘the development of men acting in history’ we need a ‘theoretical delineation of profoundly transformative processes which revolutionize all cultural relationships. The structure is not to be mastered by simply recording events as they occur, which was the method practiced in the old-style natural science.’ ¹²

Horkheimer points out that we are indebted to phenomenological achievements in exposing the shortcomings of current scientific method. The criticism of phenomenologists and other philosophers led science to experience an inner crisis. For example, there is the metaphysics of Max Scheler, who, Horkheimer writes, “once again turned the attention of science as a whole to numerous neglected areas and prepared the way at many points for a method less hindered by conventional narrowness of outlook. Above all, the description of important psychic phenomena, the delineation of the social types, and the founding of a sociology of knowledge have had fruitful results.” ¹³ Yet Horkheimer says that in spite of some fruitfulness, metaphysics, both phenomenologically oriented and vitalist, has some crucial deficiencies. First, these philosophies interpreted reality “as a mythical essence, not a real living society in its historical development”. ¹⁴ Their conception of life is essentialist and lacks history. ¹⁵ Horkheimer criticizes here especially the metaphysics of Max Scheler who, unlike Husserl, regarded essential insight [Wesensschau], as a key to open the metaphysical essences of objects. Scheler even “believed, at this time, that Wesensschau might even help liberate Europe from the iron cage of rationalization into which it had haplessly maneuvered itself”. ¹⁶ Additionally, Horkheimer accuses phenomenology and vitalism of an anti-scientific character. “Such essays in the last analysis did not stimulate science but were simply negative towards it.” ¹⁷ He says that according to Husserl we cannot trust science in fundamental questions and we cannot incorporate scientific elements into philosophy. ¹⁸ Horkheimer opposes such a stance and definitely does not approve of the view that phenomenological method is completely detached from science. ¹⁹ Although Husserl is right in his criticism of science, his suggestion in the overcoming of the problems with science is untenable. “The problems with science cannot be overcome by purely theoretical insight. Only a change in the real conditions for science within the historical process can win such a victory.” ²⁰ Yet, Husserl takes historicism as an epistemological mistake, evaluates it in the same category as psychologism, and dismisses it from phenomenological method. Indeed, Husserl recognizes “the extraordinary value of history in the broadest sense for the philosopher”; since “a deeper penetration into general life of the spirit offers the philosopher a more original and hence more fundamental research than material does penetration into nature”. ²¹ However, Husserl sees historicism as something related to the problem of truth; his sharp division of relativism and absolutism leads him to have a negative position to historicism. He says that

… it is easy to see that historicism, if consistently carried through, carries over into extreme skeptical subjectivism. The ideas of truth, theory, and science would then, like all ideas, lose their absolute validity. That an idea has validity would mean that it is a factual construction of spirit which is held as valid and which in its contingent validity determines thought. There would be no unqualified validity or validity in-itself. ²²

Husserl’s aversion to history is methodical; he sees history not as a method of science but of Geisteswissenschaften. Worldview philosophy [Weltanschauungsphilosophie] is evaluated in this context; the task of philosophy is to be science, not to be worldview for an age. Husserl thinks that history is not a proper way in achieving purely scientific philosophy. So he sustains basically the Cartesian idea of science and foundationalist epistemology in his early period. However, scientific philosophy is not a philosophy that follows what natural sciences do; philosophy must be science in its proper way. Thus Husserl’s attitude towards science cannot be interpreted as an anti-scienticism; Husserl never rejected science, but simply suspended it; namely, he did not incorporate scientific views into phenomenological method, since phenomenology, unlike science, uses the first-person perspective and deals with different kinds of phenomena.

Horkheimer says that phenomenology is intended to be the autonomous science of logical objects that are independent from the facts so that evident principles do not tolerate [dulden] any exception. In such logic, dialectic is missing. ²³ He claims that it is impossible immediately to get any absolute knowledge and to transfer it mechanically; every knowledge, it does not matter how abstract it is, belongs to a concrete situation whose special traits might not be visible [sichtbar] because of its implicitness [Selbstverständlichkeit] for the members of a certain cultural circle or a historical epoch. New insights [Einsicht] do not annihilate the earlier knowledge, but relativize and restrict [Einschränkung] it; whereas in Husserl concrete situation is fundamentally unimportant. Horkheimer argues that Husserl’s view of immediate insight [unmittelbare Einsichtigkeit] that aims at the absolute validity, the apriority, is virtually a means to absolutize a certain historical condition of knowledge [Erkenntnislage]. ²⁴ The dialectic calls for expounding the conditions everywhere. Both subject and object belong to the peculiarity of a conditioning constellation [die Besonderheit der bedingenden Konstellation]. The sense and value of knowledge always can become problematic. Thus Horkheimer thinks that Husserl’s concept of apriority, in particular, is undialectical. ²⁵

Horkheimer goes on to say that Husserl’s concept of apriority is founded on evidence that excludes [ausschliesst] the confinement or alteration [Veränderung] of insight through knowledge of mediating conditions and announces immediate access to absolute truth through intuition. Indeed, the concept of apriority became one of reasons for the wide influence of Husserl's teaching. But it means in logic a regression [Rückschritt] compared with Cohen’s teaching of progressive relativizing of axioms and possible changing of knowledge methods; and in the further development of phenomenology this concept led to an untenable ontology. ²⁶ Horkheimer claims that Husserl with his undialectical philosophy agrees, like the neo-Kantians, with a mere mechanistic psychology and physics. This undialectical distinction of philosophy and real sciences made Husserl’s highest contemporary theories less fruitful in concrete areas. ²⁷ As Horkheimer sees, mechanism and ahistoricism are the common points between positivism and Husserl’s logic in this period. Therefore, it is not an unjustified criticism to say that Husserl’s early phenomenology is undialectic. In the beginning, he intended to posit, against naturalism, phenomenology as a science of ideality which is the precondition of the sciences of factuality. But in his criticism Horkheimer does not consider Husserl’s theory of constitution, intersubjectivity and his turning towards history in crisis.

Horkheimer’s criticism of both phenomenology and science rotates around dialectical materialism; he finds Husserl’s sharp distinction between science and philosophy untenable. Thus his criticism of science or positivism does not prevent him from committing to scientific results; unlike Husserl, Horkheimer believes in unification of philosophy and science. He says that he does not mean by this unification the absolutization of particular scientific doctrines. With respect to his conception of the unification of science and philosophy, ‘every piece of knowledge’ would be taken ‘as a representation by particular men in a particular society, context and moment of time’. ²⁸ So he should not be accused of being a positivist. He believes that this conception of science distinguishes materialism from the positivism and empirico-criticism of the 19th century. Horkheimer writes, “Despite all its its belief in the progress of science, positivism necessarily understood science itself in an unhistorical way.” ²⁹ But a genuine materialism considers scientific data with respect to the historical context and the process of ongoing change in society. I think, in any case, that Horkheimer’s demand for the unification of science and philosophy blurs his anti-positivistic stance because such a unification can subordinate philosophy to science, even though scientific doctrines are not absolutized. Additionally, the dogmatic character of scientific doctrines should be considered here, which is opposite to the non-dogmatic character of philosophy.

Concisely, Horkheimer like Husserl emphasizes the independence of philosophy from science. He interprets Husserl’s phenomenology as an ahistorical and undialectical method. Thus he appropriates neither Husserl’s conception of philosophy nor his conception of science, but his criticism of scientific rationalism.

Theory or mathesis universalis?

Husserl believes that his phenomenology is a method, not a theory or a philosophical system. Although he uses the term ‘theory’ or ‘theory of essence’ for phenomenology – for example, in Philosophy as Rigorous Science – he does not mean by it a theory that gives non-absolute or tentative explanations, but a theory that is strict. ³⁰ He posited phenomenology as a fundamental epistemology that aims at absolute knowledge and to found philosophy as a rigorous science. Husserl thought that he did not establish a philosophical system and bring any tentative theory to explain phenomena; but just a method to expound phenomena in their self-evidence. Horkheimer says that it is untenable to defend a ‘theory of all possible theories’ and a theory in the sense of mathesis universalis, ³¹ which aims at absolute knowledge. Husserl is, like Plato and Kant, an ahistorical thinker and is the chief representative of the idea that philosophy is an exact science. That is why Horkheimer calls Husserl both a Platonist and a Kantian. ³²

According to Horkheimer, there are two main theories historically: traditional theory and critical theory. Traditional theory is generally logical and ‘depending on the logician’s own general philosophical outlook, the most universal propositions from which the deduction begins are themselves regarded as experiential judgments, inductions (as with John Stuart Mill), as evident insights (as in rationalist and phenomenological schools) or arbitrary postulates (as in modern axiomatic approach)’. ³³ He regards Husserl as one of the representatives of the traditional theory and tries to justify his claim with Husserl’s definition of theory and his phenomenological philosophy. He says that Husserl, who represented the most advanced logic of the present time, defined theory in Logical Investigations ‘as an enclosed system of proposition for a science as a whole’. ³⁴ Husserl sees theory entirely as ‘a systematically linked set of propositions, taking the form of a systematically unified deduction’. Then, science becomes ‘a certain totality of propositions … emerging in one or other manner from theoretical work, in the systematic order of which propositions a certain totality of objects acquires definition’. ³⁵ The fundamental precondition for the perspective of the traditional theory is that all the parts of the system ‘should intermesh thoroughly and without friction’. ³⁶

When we consider Horkheimer’s criticism of phenomenology, Husserl’s phenomenology, too, must be regarded as a traditional theory which is described by Horkheimer as a Cartesian mechanistic, undialectical and ahistorical method. According to Horkheimer, Husserl’s method shares this trait with positivism. Horkheimer’s criticism implies that Husserl is a Cartesian philosopher. Second, Horkheimer does not give a detailed critique of pure phenomenology. However, he certainly does not read Husserl’s pure phenomenology in the sense of classical idealism. From Horkheimer’s perspective, traditional theory has basically Cartesian implications. He says that the belief in the form of rational system became authoritative for the first step of phenomenology, where Husserl took mathematics as his model. ³⁷ He describes Husserl’s point essentially as a logical, mathematical point and undialectic, anti-historicism. This makes Husserl a bourgeois philosopher and closer to positivism.

The bourgeois subject is essentially a mathematical point. Such an individual cannot carry out critical thinking since it is not the function of the individual or the function of a sum total of individuals. ³⁸ Thomas McCarthy writes that for Horkheimer, “philosophy is critical enlightenment, an ongoing “attempt to bring reason into the world” … [and] radical, practically oriented reflection on reason and its realizations”. He believed that this kind of research “cannot be carried out in the manner of classical philosophy”. ³⁹

Horkheimer seems to believe that Husserlian phenomenology considers mind separable from the historical being and independent of it. He says that it is impossible to detach the individual from the world and the world from the individuals. The world with its objects is, in its present and ongoing form, a product of the activity of society as a whole. The objects we perceive around us bear the mark of human labor and activity. ⁴⁰

Horkheimer held a strongly historicist view by protesting against an essentialist perspective. He even regards the notion of a supernatural subject as madness and says that “[i]t is the human being who thinks, not the Ego or Reason … [and that] is not something abstract, such as the human essence, but always human beings living in a particular historical epoch”. ⁴¹

Husserl holds that consciousness exists independently from historical being. It has perfect freedom and autonomy. ⁴² Horkheimer sees this kind of idea as a Cartesian implication and delineates it as an ideology in the strict sense. Thus, the bourgeois ideology appears in the absolute and perfect freedom and autonomy of the individual. Accordingly, phenomenology can be called a bourgeois ideology. As we said above, this does not mean that Horkheimer claims that Husserl’s subject is a worldless subject. He obviously acknowledges the merit of Husserl’s pure phenomenology and does not identify it with traditional idealism. But Horkheimer believes that Husserl’s phenomenology cannot carry out the task of critical theory because of the above-mentioned Cartesian implications.

Horkheimer does not conceive of philosophy and its problems independently of its social-historical function. His conception of philosophy is basically an unclosed dialectical theory. Thus, it is not surprising that he describes all schools that are not dialectical as belonging to the traditional theory. Even though phenomenology distances itself from positivism or empiricism, Horkheimer finds something in common between phenomenology and other schools, which are anti-historicist, undialectic, and function mechanically. For example, phenomenologically oriented sociologies have an identical conception of theory with empirically oriented ones. From the empiricist perspective of sociology, the scientist, knowing the facts, applies his or her more or less general propositions, as hypotheses, to ever new facts. Accordingly, he or she is supposed to have reached the true knowledge of reality. On the other hand, the phenomenologically oriented sociologist will not bring a different conception of theory from an essentialist perspective. ⁴³ According to it, when we get an essential law, we have absolute knowledge because:

Every particular instance will exemplify the law. But the really hypothetical character of the essential law is manifested as soon as the question arises whether in a particular case we are dealing with an instance of the essence in question or of a related essence, whether we are faced with a poor example of one type or a good example of another type. There is always, on the one hand, the conceptually formulated knowledge and, on the other, the facts to be subsumed under it. Such a subsumption or establishing of a relation between the simple perception or verification of a fact and the conceptual structure of our knowing is called its theoretical explanation. ⁴⁴

By these words, Horkheimer means that the phenomenological method which suggests an essentialist perspective is not as different from empiricism as it is supposed. Although Husserl posited phenomenology not as a deductive science, but a descriptive one, Horkheimer does not distinguish phenomenological method from the empiricist one. The empiricist attempts to get truth through the guidance of her or his hypotheses and general propositions; the phenomenologist would use his or her so-called essential law as hypothesis and general proposition. Hence, their type of functioning becomes similar. Horkheimer goes on to say that both empirically and phenomenologically oriented sociology overlooks something of importance: that “the influence of the subject matter on the theory, so also the application of the theory to the subject matter is not only an intra-scientific process but a social one as well”. ⁴⁵ The stance of empiricist and phenomenologist typically reflects the stance of the individual of the bourgeois society. ⁴⁶

Horkheimer’s subject is society more than individual; his individual is passive and dependent. Thus he implies that the epistemic dualism, which emerges from the opposition of passivity and activity of the individual (the dualism of sense-perception and understanding), “does not hold for the society in the same measure as for the individual”. “Society, though made up of individuals, is an active subject”.⁴⁷ However, Horkheimer describes this subject, unlike the individual, as non-conscious and improper. He separates the mode of existence of humankind and society. Historical forms of social life have been always affected by this different mode of existence. ⁴⁷ “The existence of society has either been founded directly on oppression or been the blind outcome of conflicting forces, but in any event not the result of conscious spontaneity on the part of free individuals.” Consequently, it appears that Horkheimer’s individual is conscious, but passive; his or her society is active but non-conscious. For, she or he takes “the meaning of activity and passivity … according as these concepts are applied to society or to individual. In the bourgeois economic mode the activity of society is blind and concrete, that of individuals abstract and conscious.” ⁴⁸

One is tempted to ask how it becomes possible that passive and receptive individuals make up an active subject; since, he implies that the totality of passivities is an activity. Actually the background of this judgement is the dialectical logic that rejects the principle of contradiction. Horkheimer proposes a philosophy where the individual as an epistemological agent does not exist. Even though he protests against the bourgeois individual as an epistemological subject, he pays special attention to the suffering of the individual.

I would like to ask whether Horkheimer reduces philosophy to sociology with this conception of philosophy. His descriptions of basic philosophical problems such as method, knowledge, truth, logic sound as if he reduces philosophy to sociology. Shortly, Horkheimer evaluates all philosophical matters in terms of social reality. However, he needs to warn us that the social function of philosophy must be distinguished here from another view that identifies philosophy with “one general social function, namely ideology”. Horkheimer claims that he does not reduce philosophy to sociology. For, “the critical theory is the heir not only of German idealism but of philosophy as such”. He attempts to justify his claim by saying that modern sociology takes “philosophical thought or, more correctly, thought as such” as “merely the expression of a specific social situation”. ⁴⁹ It functions as ideology and lack comprehensive theory. Even many schools of modern sociology are based on the notion that there is no philosophical truth, no truth at all for humanity because they interpret all philosophical theories as accidental, as ideology in a stereotyped way and as something determined situationally. ⁵⁰

Horkheimer’s conception of philosophy is an interdisciplinary materialist research project so that he deconstructs philosophy ⁵¹ in favor of sociology. However, he urges that his project is not a sociology of knowledge in the manner of Karl Mannheim. ‘His critical theory shared with Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge a recognition of the socially conditioned character of human thought.’ But he criticizes Mannheim for the ‘relativistic implications’ of his approach. ⁵²

The problem of truth

Husserl takes both the givenness of subject and the givenness of object as the epistemological point of departure, but he rejects the traditional correspondence theory. Still, the subject is a place of epistemological correspondence. According to Dan Zahavi, for Husserl, “knowledge can be characterized as an identification or synthesis between that which is intended and that which is given”. ⁵³ Therefore, truth is not a correspondence between consciousness and mind-independent object, but an identity between meant and given. That is, it is a coincidence between two intentions. ⁵³

Horkheimer rejects any epistemological point of departure from the subject as an individual. He thinks that to take individual subject as an epistemological departure in order to get absolute knowledge leads us to idealism. He calls this kind of thinking an illusion of idealism ever since Descartes, an illusion that holds that the individual to be endowed with perfect freedom and autonomy. Hauke Brunkhorst writes, “Horkheimer's philosophical point of departure” is “the finitude and worldliness of human life, the brute fact of the privation and misery suffered by “far and away the greatest part of humanity”, of their hopes and longings and the claim to worldly happiness of “individuals”. ⁵⁴ Therefore, his epistemological subject is not individual, but society.

Horkheimer asserts that Cartesian language overemphasizes the logical process, but overlooks the dialectical concrete historical process, whereas “critical thought explanation signifies not only logical process but a concrete historical one as well”. ⁵⁵ He enunciates that “knowledge is bound up not only with psychological and moral conditions, but also with social conditions”. ⁵⁶ No doubt, this is untenable for Husserl. The knowledge bound up with psychological, moral and social conditions is not the target at which his epistemology aims to get, because they are relative ones. He intended to establish a science based on ideality or a method available for having truth in itself, validity in itself. Husserl even defends a logical Platonism ⁵⁷ in Logical Investigations where he claims that “no truth is a fact, i.e. something determined as to time. A truth can indeed have as its meaning that some thing is, that a state exists, that a change is going on, etc. The truth itself is, however, raised above time.” ⁵⁸ Husserl speaks, here, on truth in the sense of ideality. Yet, this sharp distinction between ideality and factuality is what also Horkheimer refutes. It appears that for Husserl truth is substance more than subject. For Horkheimer, “truth is more subject, less substance”. ⁵⁹ He connects ‘truth with history and freedom”; “truth is both practical and theoretical”. ⁶⁰ Husserl does not connect truth with history, but he connects the comprehension of truth with the perfect freedom of the individual that is the bourgeois subject, not the human of the socio-historical world. Horkheimer says that “preference for static principles was the great delusion of Husserl’s original ‘Eidetics’” and he calls this kind of “sublime principles” “abstract-positivism”. ⁶¹

According to his point of view, the notion that regards philosophy as an exact science overlooks the relative truths in the favor of absolute truth, whereas ‘a dialectical philosophy, for example, in keeping with its principles, will tend to extract the relative truths of the individual points of view and introduce them in its own comprehensive theory’. ⁶²

Horkheimer says that the fundamental view of phenomenology is untenable, which is that the facts [Tatsachen] of our consciousness found [begründen] all knowledge. All knowledges must get their validity through immediately given objects of consciousness. ⁶³ He believes that with this notion, Husserl understands knowledge as being based on the individual subject, not in its social product, and overlooks its dialectical process. Our knowledge of ordinary life and scientific inquiries deserves to have the status of truth. To say that our knowledge is open to correction is not to hold relativism or skeptic indecision, but alertness to errors and “flexibility of thought”. ⁶⁴ Horkheimer claims, contrary to Husserl, that “they are no less objective than pure logic”. “Truth is also valid for whoever contradicts it, ignores it, or declares it unimportant.” ⁶⁵ He takes an exactly opposite stance to Husserl’s notion of truth and holds the impossibility of an extra-historical concept of truth. For Horkheimer it is possible that truth can be lost in the ongoing changing process of reality. But this cannot be regarded as relativism. According to McCarthy, Horkheimer holds a sharp separation “between false and true consciousness” in order to avoid relativism. Horkheimer rejects the traditional “dichotomy between the ideal and the real”, but this does not require a “retreat to a relativism of socially conditioned perspectives”. His point is neither relativism nor absolutism, but to retain “the dichotomy between the true and false, albeit in a more modest, suitably human form”. ⁶⁶ Horkheimer objects to identification between truth with historicity and the relativism. Lambert Zuidervaart writes, “The way to surpass the relativism/absolutism antithesis is to take seriously the historical mediation between sociohistorical reality and theoretical thought. Recognizing this mediation, a materialist dialectic neither denies its own relativity nor abandons the claim to comprehensive truth.” ⁶⁷

On the one hand, Horkheimer misinterprets Husserl’s view of ideality. To say that the fundamental view of phenomenology is untenable, which is that the facts [Tatsachen] of our consciousness found [begründen] all knowledge, is to overlook Husserl’s basic objection to naturalism. Husserl rightly claimed that ideal meanings cannot be reduced to natural processes. Acts are unique and unrepeatable; but ideal meanings are repeatable and shared by everyone. Husserl tried to show that science is impossible without ideality. Reducing ideality to empirical facts annihilates the possibility and the validity of sciences. According to Husserl, the naturalist denies what he or she accepts in principle. Thus ideal objects are logical preconditions of talking about something, and talking about the validity of our judgements.

On the other hand, Husserl’s and Horkheimer’s understanding of relativism is dramatically different. For Husserl relativism is unabsoluteness, uncertainty. For Horkheimer, relativism is to claim that there is no false and no true. Husserl defends a more radical conception of truth. Horkheimer’s criticism on this issue rotates around Husserl’s distinction between essence and existence, ideality and reality, the immediately givenness of the object and his conception of subject. As we already said, the fundamental deficiency he finds in Husserl’s logic is a lack of historical-dialectical orientation, which is closely related to the matter of truth. Horkheimer’s empirically based research project cannot conform to Husserl’s non-empirically based method. Still, Horkheimer’s position from Husserl’s point of view seems to be relativistic because it is an empirically and practically oriented explanation. It is clear that Husserl’s and Horkheimer’s concerns are fundamentally different.

Metaphysics and phenomenology

Horkheimer prefers to interpret all history of philosophy as a conflict between two different ways of thinking: the opposition between materialism and idealism. ⁶⁸ He says that this opposition becomes more decisive in contemporary philosophy. As we said earlier, one of Horkheimer’s main concerns is to modify and purify materialism from metaphysics. He modifies materialism with the Kantian critique, giving a criticism of reason, human will and freedom. According to Horkheimer, it would be misleading to read the so-called historical conflict as one between two metaphysical tendencies. Horkheimer writes, “The primarily reason for this misunderstanding is that materialist theory and practice are not approached in the right way.” ⁶⁹ Horkheimer acknowledges that most of materialists in the history of philosophy started to philosophize with metaphysical questions and then tried to justify their thesis in opposition to idealist positions. Yet, they misunderstood what materialism really is; because materialism is neither an answer to metaphysical questions, nor can it be “reduced to the simple claim that only matter on its movement is real”. He says that as long as one sees materialism as an answer to metaphysical questions, one cannot grasp the characteristics of materialism. Thus criticism of vitalist and phenomenologist philosophers who interpreted materialism as a naïve metaphysics is misleading and far from understanding materialism. ⁷⁰ “Materialism is epistemic materialism in the philosophically restricted sense that is concerned with the de facto limits of reason and will, the empirical and historical preconditions of a rationally organized society. Materialism is the equation of the subject of knowledge with the finite human being.” ⁷¹

On the contrary, Horkheimer identifies metaphysics with idealism. He regards the historical fight between materialism and metaphysics as a struggle between materialism and idealism. Every metaphysics, both the phenomenological one and others, strives for insight into essential nature, with the idea that the nucleus of the future is already contained in it. What metaphysics discovers must underlie not only the past but the future as well. ⁷² He says that “metaphysics tends to regard the whole world as the product of reason, for reason knows only itself perfectly. … [I]t continues to regard absolute consciousness as the reflecting mirror of the innermost reality of being”. ⁷³

Horkheimer posits materialism as a method closed to metaphysical questions; for to make materialism open to metaphysical questions would make it an ideology. And any materialism that functions as a worldview is pseudo-materialism because it leads us away from historical practice. ⁷⁴ Whenever materialism contains metaphysical moments, it would becomes like idealism, or ideology. For him, positivism and metaphysics are not opposite philosophies as it is usually thought. “Positivism and metaphysics are simply two different phases of one philosophy which downgrades natural knowledge and hypostatizes abstract conceptual structures.” ⁷⁵ He says that “positivism is really much closer to metaphysics of intuition than to materialism, although it wrongly tries to couple the two”. ⁷⁶ Horkheimer criticizes here especially Bergson; however, Husserl is not supposed to be very far from this criticism. Horkheimer thinks that Husserl’s phenomenology is likewise unhistorical and downgrades natural knowledge. In this respect phenomenology, too, becomes closer to positivism than materialism does. Horkheimer adduces that his point is neither to accept scientific knowledge as the only possible form of the knowledge nor to embrace the view that true knowledge must emancipate itself from science in order to explain human existence. These are the positions of romantic spiritualism, philosophy of life and material and existential phenomenology “during and after the war”. ⁷⁷ Horkheimer denounces positivism because it eliminates radically the subject not only from physics but also from the process of cognition. Positivism has an unhistorical and uncritical conception of knowledge and hypostatizes a particular method of procedure employed by natural science. ⁷⁸ He criticizes phenomenology and phenomenological metaphysics because they suggest unhistorical knowledge and a knowledge purified from science. ⁷⁹ For him, materialism, unlike idealism, means always thinking of particular men within a particular period of time. It accepts neither “the autonomy of thought nor a meaning immanent in events”. ⁸⁰

Setting aside the phenomenological metaphysicians, what about Husserl as the initiator of modern phenomenology? Husserl’s position in Logical Investigations has been controversial since the early generation of phenomenologists. For example, Roman Ingarden claimed that Husserl is a realist philosopher in Logical Investigations, but he turned to idealism later on; and some (such as Van Breda) adduced that Husserl has been never a realist but always an idealist. ⁸¹ In my opinion, Husserl in Logical Investigations is not in a position where he could be called idealist or realist. It would be truer to take Husserl’s stance in Logical Investigations to be neutral to both realism and idealism because he does not speak of reality or the status of reality, but of idealities. Husserl defends the irreducibility of idealities to factualities. If this idea can be regarded as an idealism, then he can be called an idealist philosopher in Logical Investigations. Likewise, Dan Zahavi describes Husserl’s position in Logical Investigations to be neutral. He even says that Husserl’s turning to transcendental idealism is not in the sense of traditional idealism, but an attempt to overcome both metaphysical realism and metaphysical idealism. He interprets Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as an attempt to remove some shortcomings and obscurities in Logical Investigations. ⁸²

Interestingly enough, Horkheimer does not regard Husserl as a metaphysician either in descriptive phenomenology (Logical Investigations) or in pure phenomenology (Ideas). He says rightly that in Husserl the being of general objects, of ideal unities, is not still metaphysically meant, but his teaching allows the possibility of metaphysical hypostatization [Hypostasierung]. ⁸³ He even says that Husserl himself turned in his investigations towards a pure phenomenology of construction [Ausbildung] of eidetic science on the consciousness, in which he went about the problem of constitution unlike the usual transcendental philosophy that is in strong independence from factual research. ⁸⁴ Husserl meant by essence [Wesen] originally nothing else than the species, the identical [das Identische] of real or imaginary examples, not metaphysical essence of the real objects. The being of essence [Wesen] was the purely meant being by consciousness; the being as the subject of possible predication [Aussage], pure logical being. His teaching of ideas was not a metaphysical teaching, at least immediately. The domain of essences contains many factual impossibilities, which are mere logical possibilities. ⁸⁵ However, Horkheimer criticizes Husserl’s philosophy because it allows the possibility of metaphysical hypostatization. For example, in Husserl the view of the independence of acts of consciousness where essence is given belongs to the view of the independence of essence. Husserl put the old distinction between essence and existence in central place, even though it is not a metaphysical view. ⁸⁶

Horkheimer says that despite its non-metaphysical character, phenomenology in its fight against positivism evolved from pure logic into metaphysics and general world-view questions. Not Husserl himself, but his students especially Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad Martius and Alexander Pfaender developed a new view of reality. Accordingly, the world that is accessible in essential insight [Wesensschau] is not only a world of pure possibilities, but also the genuine reality itself or at least a model of genuine reality. ⁸⁷ Horkheimer levels much more criticism at Max Scheler, the most influential phenomenologist among the early generation of Husserl’s students, than other phenomenologists. Horkheimer says that Husserl’s conception of essence [Wesen] turned into an intuitive Platonism in the hands of Scheler. ⁸⁸

Horkheimer objects to Husserl in all basic points; his criticism focuses on Husserl’s conception of philosophy as a mathesis universalis, of science as a relativistic research. In Gesammelte Schriften 10, he characterises Husserl’s method as ahistorical and his understanding of apriority as radically abstract and undialectical. However, Horkheimer does not defend apparently the positivistic reducibility of ideality to factuality or the identification of acts and meanings. Still, he refutes the dichotomy between ideal and real. He thinks that Husserl’s conception of apriority is static and overlooks the dialectical relation. For Horkheimer, Husserl’s phenomenology is the philosophy of being rather than becoming because it neglects socio-historical reality. And the positivistic and Cartesian implications make Husserl’s philosophy less fruitful in concrete situations. Therefore, he calls Husserl’s phenomenology abstract positivism, traditional theory and a bourgeois ideology. Consequently, Horkheimer’s criticism can be summarized in four points. (1) He objects to the view that ideality founds all knowledge. (2) He holds that Husserl’s phenomenology is an undialectic and anti-historistic method. (3) It is a traditional theory because of the positivistic-Cartesian implications. (4) In conclusion, it is a bourgeois ideology.

Horkheimer appropriates neither Husserl’s conception of philosophy nor his conception of science, but his criticism of scientific rationalism. Alongside, he does not interpret Husserl’s idealism as a metaphysical idealism, although he identifies metaphysics with idealism. Essence is not interpreted in a metaphysical sense. It is his merit that while dealing with pure logic or referring to pure phenomenology he does not fall into the misinterpretation that takes Husserl to be a Platonic metaphysician and his pure phenomenology to be a philosophy of the wordless subject.

Husserl’s phenomenology evolved from the science of logical objects to a comprehensive method that gives us a very original and fruitful perspective in the interpretation of all phenomena. We must stress that Horkheimer’s criticism refers mostly to Husserl’s early phenomenology. As far as I know, he does not give any detailed criticism of the problem of constitution, intersubjectivity, life-world and historicity which are developed by Husserl later on, although he acknowledges the merit of Husserl’s late philosophy in a footnote. ⁸⁹ Therefore his criticism must be considered in the context of Husserl’s early phenomenology.