ON MAX HORKHEIMER'S "SCHOPENHAUER AND SOCIETY" (1955)

Author(s): Todd Cronan

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 15, No. 1 (FALL / WINTER 2004), pp. 81-83
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686191
Accessed: 20-08-2019 19:18 UTC

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Qui Parle

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ON MAX HORKHEIMER'S "SCHOPENHAUER
AND SOCIETY" (1955)1

Todd Cronan

"Humanism," says Julien Benda in La Trahison des Clercs,

"has nothing to do with globalism." "It is the impulse," he goes on
to say, "of a certain category of men - laborers, bankers, industri
alists - who unite across frontiers in the name of private and prac
tical interests, and who only oppose the national spirit because it
thwarts them in satisfying those interests."2 Benda's distinction is
worth preserving. That a truly humanist philosophy might stand in
opposition to globalism and internationalism may seem an unpop
ular notion, but stands as a powerful antidote to a too easy assim
iliation of politics and philosophy. In the following essay, "Scho
penhauer and Society," Max Horkheimer raises the distinction
between nominalism and humanism into a philosophical antinomy.
It is important to note the particular use and history behind
the word "society" in his title. For lack of a better fit, in this trans
lation I use the word "society" for the German word Gesellschaft.
Most famously, and the clear point of reference for Horkheimer, is
the connotation of the word as it appears in the title of Ferdinand
Tonnies's groundbreaking book Community and Society published
in 1887. Within the title Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft lies a
sweeping distinction between two forms of social existence.
Gemeinschaft points to an ideal state of social interaction, a com
munistic being-together free of coercion and innocent of the urban
disease of alienation. According to Tonnies, it is a form of living
Qui Parle, vol. 15, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2004

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82 TODD CRONAN

with deep roots in a self-subsistent, agricultural, way of life and one

that is thought to be rapidly disappearing; it is what we call a myth
ic concept. Gesellschaft, on the other hand, connotes a way of liv
ing that is based on a strictly coded division of labor; hierarchical
distinctions of the past are removed and replaced with a new set of
artificial and contingent categories of class difference based on
anonymous forms of cash exchange.
Tonnies's book impacted, and in many ways helped to define,
the parameters of modern German sociology. His distinction
between community and society found its way into the analyses of
the leading German sociologists of the first half of the twentieth
century including: Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money, Max
Weber's Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Georg
Lukacs in his distinction between epic and novel forms in the
Theory of the Novel, and Walter Benjamin in his distinction
between symbolic and allegorical forms of artistic practice and
interpretation in The Origin of German Tragic-Drama. If we follow
this trajectory we will arrive, in one of its later revisions, at Hork
heimer's Marxist sociology of the 1950s.
What Horkheimer helps us to see about Schopenhauer is his
straddling of two worlds. If Schopenhauer did indeed put an end to
the guiding sentiments of the nineteenth century - the Will in its
social development, the heroic figure of the world-historical man
unconsciously pressing onward toward the epiphany of Geist - he
was the better able to do so because the sentiments he destroyed
made up such a large part of his being. Schopenhauer's grand
denial of the Will and all that it connotes of worldliness, success
and social meaning, is also to see that what is denied was once
aspired to with real intensity. Horkheimer shows that Schopenhauer
was a man of a century in which he disdained, that he was deeply
rooted in its ethos and its mythos - both its fantasies and its beliefs
- as well as its dream of social and political perfectionism.
"Schopenhauer and Gesellscha ft" stresses Schopenhauer's
connection to his historical moment - the birth of the modern
urban consciousness. Schopenhauer's philosophy, far from
embodying an atemporal, Platonic philosophy of "pure percep

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 ON MAX HORKHEIMER'S "SCHOPENHAUER AND SOCIETY" (1955) 83

tion" and "pure will-less knowing," as some commentators have

argued, is in fact riven through by his historical and social moment.
This makes his philosophy at once suspect and privileged. Hork
heimer discerns the abiding relevance of Schopenhauer's philoso
phy in his uncompromising intransigence to all forms of rational
ization: "His work makes no promises."3 Schopenhauer refusal to
"clothe the negative in a semblance of meaning" - there is no leap
of faith, no cherishing of benign difference, no underlying 6Ian -
holds out against any form of false compensation. "Resistance,"
says Horkheimer near the end of this essay, "is the soul of
Schopenhauerian philosophy."

1 This translation was read in manuscript by Bibiana Obier and Raul Fleming, both of
whom made suggestions ? not limited to phrasing and continuity ? for which I
am deeply grateful.
2 The Betrayal of the Intellectuals [1927], tr. Richard Aldington (Boston: The Beacon
Press, 1955), 63.
3 Max Horkheimer, "Schopenhauer Today" [1961], in Critique of Instrumental
Reason, tr. Matthew J. O'Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 1974), 65.

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