Max Horkheimer > Quotes

“Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honored and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and meditate.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.”
― Max Horkheimer

“Now that science has helped us to overcome the awe of the unknown in nature, we are the slaves of social pressures of our own making. When called upon to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities. 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, the emancipation from fear--then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism.”
― Max Horkheimer

“Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow.”
― Max Horkheimer

“Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“The real individuals of our time are the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression, not the inflated personalities of popular culture, the conventional dignitaries. These unsung heroes consciously exposed their existence as individuals to the terroristic annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through the social process. The anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born. The task of philosophy is to translate what they have done into language that will be heard, even though their finite voices have been silenced by tyranny.”
― Max Horkheimer

“The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever.”
― Max Horkheimer

“An intelligent man is not one who can merely reason correctly, but one whose mind is open to perceiving objective contents, who is able to receive the impact of their essential structures and to render it in human language; this holds also for the nature of thinking as such, and for its truth content. The neutralization of reason that deprives it of any relation to objective content and of its power of judging the latter, and that degrades it to an executive agency concerned with the how rather than with the what, transforms it to an ever-increasing extent into a mere dull apparatus for registering facts.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life goes unheard”
― Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno

“The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”
― Max Horkheimer

“There is only one expression for truth: the thought which repudiates injustice. If insistence on the good sides of life is not sublated in the negative whole, it transfigures its own opposite: violence.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“The more these artificial renaissances strive to keep intact the letter of the original doctrines, the more they distort the original meaning, for truth is forged in an evolution of changing and conflicting ideas. Thought is faithful to itself largely through being ready to contradict itself, while preserving, as inherent elements of truth, the memory of the processes by which it was reached. The task of critical reflection is not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore in its relativity.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“The task of critical reflection is not merely to understand the various facts in their historical development (...) but also to see through the notion of fact itself, in its development and therefore in its relativity.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“Nuestra misión actual es, antes bien, asegurar que en el futuro no vuelva a perderse la capacidad para la teoría y para la acción que nace de esta [...] Debemos luchar para que la humanidad no quede desmoralizada para siempre por los terribles acontecimientos del presente, para que la fe en un futuro feliz de la sociedad, en un futuro de paz y digno del hombre, no desaparezca de la tierra.”
― Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays

“Freedom is not the freedom to accumulate, but the fact that I have no need to accumulate.”
― Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto

“La Ilustración se relaciona con las cosas como el dictador con los hombres. Éste los concede en la medida en en que puede manipularlos.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“Es justamente el espíritu dominador de la naturaleza el que continuamente reivindica la superioridad de la naturaleza en la competencia”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“Eine Assoziation über alle Länder gründen, besonders in Deutschland, die dem Entsetzen Ausdruck verleiht, die keinen affirmativen Glauben haben, weder die Metaphysik noch die Politik. Diese erscheint ihnen im wahnsinnigen Nachkriegseuropa als humane Praxis unmöglich, jene als Galimathias. Die das Grauen des Wirtschaftswunders erfassen, die verlogene Demokratie, die Bestechungsprozesse mit Hitlerrichtern, den Luxus und das Elend, die rancune und Absage an jede Anständigkeit, die Bewunderung der östlichen und westlichen Magnaten, die Auflösung des Geistes, die Verprovinzialisierung der alten Zivilisation, für die wäre die Assoziation eine Art Heimat. Keine Revolution im Schilde führend, weil sie in nacktem Terror endigt, wären sie doch freilich ohnmächtige Erben der Revolution, die sich nicht ereignet hat, die armen Hellsichtigen, die in die Katakomben gehen.”
― Max Horkheimer, Notizen 1950 bis 1969 und Dämmerung: Notizen in Deutschland

“El concepto total de ideología arrastra a la conversión de la dependencia de todo lo espiritual en experiencia teórica decisiva.
Sin duda, al «intelectual libre», como dice la expresión, se le concede gran independencia; pero, en último término, ésta no estriba en otra cosa sino en anunciar y aceptar la dependencia.”
― Max Horkheimer

“Paradoxically, a society that, in the face of starvation in great areas of
the world, allows a large part of its machinery to stand idle, that shelves
many important inventions, and that devotes innumerable working
hours to moronic advertising and to the production of instruments of
destruction—a society in which these luxuries are inherent has made
usefulness its gospel.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“Die Aufklärung aber erkannte im platonischen und aristotelischen Erbteil der Metaphysik die alten Mächte wieder und verfolgte den Wahrheitsanspruch der Universalien als Superstition. In der Autorität der allgemeinen Begriffe meint sie noch die Furcht vor den Dämonen zu erblicken, durch deren Abbilder die Menschen im magischen Ritual die Natur zu beeinflussen suchten. Von nun an soll die Materie endlich ohne Illusion waltender oder innewohnender Kräfte, verborgeneer Eigenschaften beherrscht werden. Was dem Maß von Berechenbarkeit und Nützlichkeit sich nicht fügen will, gilt der Aufklärung für verdächtig. Darf sie sich einmal ungestört von auswendiger Unterdrückung entfalten, so ist kein Halten mehr. Ihren eigenen Ideen von Menschenrecht ergeht es dabei nicht anders als den älteren Universalien. An jedem geistigen Widerstand, den sie findet, vermehrt sich bloß ihre Stärke. Das rührt daher, daß Aufklärung auch in den Mythen noch sich selbst wiedererkennt. Auf welche Mythen der Widerstand sich immer berufen mag, schon dadurch, dass sie in solchem Gegensatz zu Argumenten werden, bekennen sie sich zum Prinzip der zersetzenden Rationalität, das sie der Aufklärung vorwerfen. Aufklärung ist totalitär.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects. but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them. Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“Enthusiasm is bad. Calm and resolution constitute the strength of virtue. “That is the state of health in moral life, whereas the affect, even when it is excited by the idea of the good, is a momentarily lustrous phenomenon which leaves behind lassitude.”25 Juliette’s friend Clairwil makes exactly the same observation with regard to vice.26 “My soul is hardened, and I am far from preferring sensibility to the happy indifference I now enjoy. Oh Juliette . . . perhaps you are deceiving yourself about the dangerous sensibility prized by so many fools.” Apathy arises at the turning points in bourgeois history, as in the history of antiquity, when the pauci beati become aware of their powerlessness in face of the overwhelming historical tendency. It marks the retreat of the individual’s spontaneity into the private sphere, which is thus established as the truly bourgeois form of existence. Stoicism—which is the bourgeois philosophy—makes it easier for the privileged to look what threatens them in the eye by dwelling on the suffering of others. It affirms the general by elevating private existence, as protection from it, to the status of a principle. The private sphere of the bourgeois* is an upper-class cultural asset which has come down in the world.”
― Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

“The very idea of truth has been reduced to the purpose of a useful tool in the control of nature, and the realization of the infinite potentialities inherent in man has been relegated to the status of a luxury. Thought that does not serve the interests of any established group or is not pertinent to the business of any industry has no place, is considered vain or superfluous.”
― Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

“A technological rationale is the rationale of the domination itself.”
― Max Horkheimer

“To ridicule American consumerism is disgraceful unless the reader can somehow pick up how such matters should be regarded. Otherwise, it is merely abuse.”
― Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto