Abstract
Alfred Schmidt, Berlin, 19 May 1931 – Frankfurt/Main, 28 August 2012
Alfred Schmidt, son of a mechanic, first studied classical and English philology and literature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. Schmidt also attended Max Horkheimer’s philosophy courses, which had a big impact on him, and provided the impulse for his dedication to philosophy for the rest of his life. He continued his studies in philosophy, with a focus on Schopenhauer, Marx, Western Marxism, Goethe and the Critical Theory of Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno were his teachers and he later became their assistant. Schmidt would soon establish himself as the leading authority – at least in the German academy – on the history of philosophical materialism, and as one of the most respected teachers of the history of philosophy in general.
His doctoral thesis The Concept of Nature in Marx was first published in German in 1962. The first English translation was published in London by New Left Books in 1971. It was one of the first extensive studies of Marx in the postwar period that was written from a non-partisan perspective. The book has subsequently been translated into 18 languages and is still one of the most important works of critical Marxism.
Schmidt was the co-editor (with Gunzelin Schmid Noerr) of the Gesammelte Schriften (complete works) of Max Horkheimer, which were published by Fischer Verlag between 1985 and 1996. In 1972 Schmidt was awarded Horkheimer’s professorship in social philosophy at the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt, which he occupied until his retirement in 1999. He continued to teach courses in Frankfurt as an Emeritus Professor in Philosophy until his death. At the end of his last class on July 12th 2012, Schmidt stated, before saying farewell to the students for the holidays: ‘Until death occurs, it is not an issue of concern; once death happens, it is again no longer of any concern. This was, in any case, Epicurus’s view of a very serious issue.’ 1
Schmidt’s History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981) was also published in English. He also translated several of Herbert Marcuse’s principal works from English into German, including Reason and Revolution in 1962 and Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis in 1964. Schmidt’s translations helped make Marcuse’s writing available to German New Left and protest movements of the 1960s.
Although he dedicated himself to a number of other themes and authors, such as Schopenhauer, Goethe, Feuerbach, Critical Theory and the philosophy of religion, Schmidt never renounced the radical critique of the dominant socio-economic system. He initiated several new editions of his first book on Marx. When a French translation of his book was published by the prestigious Presses Universitaires de France in 1994, he wrote an extensive new prologue, with the title ‘For an ecological materialism’.
His death has left the world poorer in thinkers who do not let comfortable political taboos and intellectual fashions stifle their critique of capitalism – the destructive socio-economic form that remains today the main barrier to an emancipated humanity.