Over the course of the twentieth century, the notions of humanism and anthropology became increasingly problematic. From Walter Benjamin to Ulrich Sonnemann, the writers and philosophers associated with the Institute for Social Research accompanied this process in a distinctly critical fashion, yet with significantly different emphases. Between the mid 1910s and the late 1960s, they formulated a critical theory of society and culture that rejected the idea of an invariant human nature. At the same time, they studied the restrictions and limitations that repressive and antagonistic societies impose on the human being. Engaging with various philosophical currents from transcendental philosophy to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, the first generation of the Frankfurt School criticized assumptions about ‘human essence’ that justified a world based on identity thinking and the principle of exchange. To counter such assumptions, they proposed interventions in anthropological discourses that work toward a less coercive and dehumanized social order.
The following reconstruction begins with a genealogy and outline of the anthropological problematic as encountered by the Institute’s founding members. The second section presents Benjamin’s linguistic destabilizations of traditional humanist and anthropological discourses. Section three turns to Max Horkheimer’s critique of philosophical anthropology and bourgeois humanism, which provides, together with Benjamin’s efforts, the basis for the School’s subsequent engagements. Tracing the afterlife of Benjamin’s and Horkheimer’s responses, the fourth section portrays the anthropological implications of Erich Fromm’s and Herbert Marcuse’s works, while section five discusses the notion of ‘negative anthropology’ in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno and Ulrich Sonnemann.
Most forms of humanism rely on a specific understanding of the human being and its essence or nature. Jürgen Habermas (1973: 89–90; also Marquard, 1971, 1992) distinguishes three ways of studying the human being. Anthropology, in the broadest sense, is concerned with the practices, condition, and development of the human species, often in close conversation with ethnology and human biology. Philosophical anthropology, in the narrower sense, designates the various ways of posing, responding to, and reflecting on the question ‘What is the human being?’ The early members of the Frankfurt School employed the term anthropology primarily in this understanding. Thirdly, Philosophical Anthropology refers to a German school of thought associated with, among others, Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen (Fischer, 2008).
Before Plato’s ironic definition of the human being as the ‘two-legged animal without feathers’ and Aristotle’s more serious determinations as zōon politikon and zōon logon echon, translated into Latin as animal rationale, Homer’s epithets for the human being were, as Jacob Grimm (1984: 7, 25n6) points out, ‘ο μέροπς [hoi méropes], μέροπς νθρωποι [méropes ánthrōpoi] or βροτοί [brotoí] from μίρομαι [meíromai] or μρίζω [merízō], who divide, articulate their voices. Essentially however,’ Grimm continues, ‘this sound articulation depends upon the upright gait and stance of men,’ since, ‘νθρωπος [ánthrōpos], having man’s face or aspect, points to this upright position of the countenance’. Historically, philosophical anthropology is either considered to be as old as thinking itself, because humans have always asked themselves what they are, or seen as a response to modern philosophy’s more recent crisis after having lost many of its central themes to disciplines such as psychology and sociology (Blumenberg, 2006: 484–5; also Schnädelbach, 1984: 220). Odo Marquard (1971: 362) argues that both of these extremes conceal anthropology’s actual genesis in the late eighteenth century.
Kant formulated the specifically modern anthropological question. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1998: 415 [A347/B405–6]), he excluded empirical psychology ‘as a species of physiology’ from transcendental philosophy, because it ‘would perhaps explain the appearances of inner sense, but could never serve to reveal such properties as do not belong to possible experience at all’. Although he subsumed empirical psychology under ‘applied philosophy’, Kant argues that ‘one must still concede it a little place (although only as an episode) in metaphysics. It is thus merely a temporarily accepted foreigner [Fremdling], to whom one grants refuge for a while until it can establish its own domicile in a complete anthropology’ (1998: 700 [A848–9/B876–77]; trans. changed). In this transitional state, empirical psychology transformed into Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Although this anthropology claimed to be merely pragmatic, it holds an important place in Kant’s system. In the introduction to his lectures on ethics, Kant states that ‘practical philosophy’ and ‘anthropology […] are closely connected, and morality cannot exist without anthropology, for one must first know of the agent whether he is also in a position to accomplish what it is required from him that he should do’ (Kant, 1997: 42).
In his lectures on logic, Kant (1998: 677 [A805/B833]; 1992: 538) adds a fourth question to the three he listed in the first Critique: ‘What can I know?’ (metaphysics), ‘What should I do?’ (morals), ‘What may I hope?’ (religion), and: ‘What is man [der Mensch]?’ (anthropology). ‘Fundamentally, however,’ Kant adds, ‘we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one’. Blumenberg (2006: 501) notes that this addendum is ‘problematic and much more difficult than it seems’. It indicates that, for Kant, empirical psychology became more than an ‘episode’ in metaphysics. His pragmatic anthropology, asking not ‘what nature makes of the human being’, but ‘what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (Kant, 2007: 231; also Brandt, 1999; Stark, 2003), puzzled and inspired many philosophers, including various members of the Frankfurt School.
In Hegel’s (2007: 29–141) systematic philosophy, the ‘Anthropology’ chapter occupies an odd, but important position, namely, the transition from the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of mind. Hegel seeks to demonstrate ‘the emergence of spirit from nature’, which he describes as the victorious ‘struggle of spirit against its corporeity’ (Lucas, 1992: 132, 135). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 42) criticize this ‘victory’ as the ‘denial of nature in human beings’. Although Alexandre Kojève (1969: 48) proposed an anthropologically informed interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel himself seems to have struggled with integrating the anthropological question in accordance with his dialectical method (Fetscher, 1970: 25).
Marx’s writings are one of the Frankfurt School’s preeminent sources regarding the anthropological problematic. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, first released in the Soviet Union in 1927, Marx (1988: 75–7) describes labor as the activity that produces human consciousness. This description gave rise to the interpretation that, while different forms of labor result in different stages of human self-realization, or ‘anthropogenesis’ (Avineri, 1968: 85), the constitutive function of labor itself remains unaltered by history. Leo Kofler (1967: 28; my trans.) characterized this formal anthropology as the ‘science of the unchangeable preconditions of human changeability’. Taking Marx’s later works into account, Alfred Schmidt (1971: 68) presents labor as the ‘living interaction’ between nature and humanity, which commodity form turns into the abstract relations of a ‘dead and thing-like reality’. Marx (1978: 145, 144), however, had already criticized the understanding of the human being as mere ‘genus’ [Gattung] in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, instead proposing to understand labor as ‘practical, human-sensuous activity’. Louis Althusser (2005: 227) maintained that Marx’s early anthropological work, embodied in the 1844 Manuscripts, is opposed to the more mature, sociological view of Capital, which focuses on the social and political transformation of the labor process. Yet Marx adhered to his early conviction that the human being does not yet exist because restrictive forms of society hinder the unfolding of its ‘species-character’ (Bien, 1984: 67–8, 210–11), an idea that permeates the works of the Frankfurt School’s first generation.
Martin Jay (1972: 289, 292, 295) argues that the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno differs in two pivotal respects from ‘humanist’ as well as from Althusser’s ‘scientific’ Marxism. Because of their skepticism toward identity theory, Adorno and Horkheimer never ‘read society as a manifestation of the creator-subject’. Unlike Marcuse and Fromm, however, they also ‘never de-historicized labor into man’s “ontological” activity’. These divergences are the ‘primary reasons’, Jay (1972: 296) suggests, for why Critical Theory ‘cannot be included among the variants of Marxist Humanism’. Inquiries into the relationship between Critical Theory and Philosophical Anthropology (Ebke et al., 2016) indicate that the anthropological problematic exceeds the debates about Western Marxism. Perceived as a ‘blind spot of Critical Theory’ (Weiland, 1995) from the perspective of Philosophical Anthropology, (Weiland, 1995), the anthropological question has co-shaped the outlook of the Frankfurt School from the beginning.
It was of particular importance for the early Frankfurt School that, in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy, anthropology and philosophy of history were perceived as being mutually exclusive (Marquard, 1992: 125, 128–34; Blumenberg, 2006: 485–8). The moment one turns to the human being’s invariant nature, one turns away from the realization of freedom in history, and vice versa. Marx’s (1988: 102) sentence that ‘communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism’ seeks to reconcile this tension. Rather than reconciling nature and history by conflating them, Wilhelm Dilthey (1977: 116) suggested that every historical epoch is the distinct ‘expression’ of the ‘relative uniformity of human nature’. This view gave rise to the distinction between ‘formal’ (or ‘weak’) and ‘substantial’ (or ‘strong’) anthropology, which became important, in varying degrees, for Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács excluded anthropological assumptions from dialectical materialism because they limit the human being’s historical changeability, agreeing, in this respect, with Horkheimer and Adorno. Allowing the human being to ‘become frozen in a fixed objectivity’, Lukács (1971: 186–7) warned, ‘is the great danger in every “humanism” or anthropological point of view’.
Another key aspect of the anthropological problematic that shaped the Frankfurt School’s responses unfolded between logic and psychology. In a review from 1894, Frege (1972: 336) pointed out that Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic is vulnerable to the charge of psychologism, the view that the laws of thinking are reducible to empirical psychology. This charge motivated Husserl to provide a basis for ‘pure logic’ by analyzing the structures not merely of human consciousness, but of consciousness as such. In 1931, Husserl feared that the recent advances of psychology and anthropology could undermine his transcendental project, which led him to dismiss Scheler, and implicitly also Heidegger, in his lecture ‘Phenomenology and Anthropology’. Inquiring about the origins of Husserl’s concern, Blumenberg (2006: 22; my trans.) traces the immediate beginnings of Philosophical Anthropology back to Scheler’s essay on sympathy from 1913, in which, as Blumenberg claims, ‘for the first time the relationship between ontology and anthropology was established as a “realism” that does not begin with epistemology anymore’.
In 1927, Heidegger (1996: 46) introduced the formulation ‘anthropological problematic’ [anthropologische Problematik] to indicate that the human being became a problem, not only as the object of science and philosophy, but also as a term and question; as the being that asks for and tries to understand and describe itself. Heidegger (1996: 45) rejects philosophical anthropology for conceiving of the human being only through the lens of Aristotle’s metaphysics, or, theologically, as the being ‘that goes beyond itself’. He emphasizes that his ‘existential analytic of Dasein comes before any psychology or anthropology, and certainly before any biology’ (Heidegger, 1962: 71), suggesting that fundamental ontology can provide the basis for ‘working out fully the existential a priori of philosophical anthropology’ (1962: 170). These remarks not only caused Plessner (1985: 328) and Husserl (Breeur, 1994: 13; also Husserl, 1981) to charge Being and Time with practicing philosophical anthropology in an unacknowledged manner, they also increased the Frankfurt School’s skepticism toward ontology’s renewed efforts to provide absolute principles.
Heidegger insisted that the anthropological reading of Being and Time is a misunderstanding. Between 1936 and 1938, he demanded to release the human being ‘from the fetters of “anthropology”’ (Heidegger, 2012: 67), and, in the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (1946), he declared that the word ‘Dasein’ meant from the beginning that ‘the human being occurs essentially in such a way that it is […] the clearing of being’ (Heidegger, 1998: trans. changed, 248), rather than a privileged way of understanding its meaning. The tensions between Being and Time and Heidegger’s later writings encouraged poststructuralism’s subversions of anthropology and humanism, especially a series of works by Michel Foucault (1989, 2008) and Jacques Derrida (1978, 1982), which complement and challenge the interventions of the Frankfurt School.
While Scheler and Heidegger negatively delimited the Frankfurt School’s relation to philosophical anthropology, the other positive reference besides Marx is psychoanalysis. The members of the first generation were confronted with the choice of integrating Freud’s ‘heavy’ theory of the drives, which relies on assumptions about the human being’s biological constitution and animalistic past. Emphasizing Eros’s ultimate superiority over the ‘death drive’ offered strong support for the belief in humanity’s intrinsic striving for emancipation, an idea that Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse embraced to different degrees. Adorno and Sonnemann, by contrast, refused such assumptions because they preclude the radical openness of society’s future development. Instead, Adorno incorporated ‘lighter’ anthropological elements such as Freud’s belief in the fragmentary and antagonistic constitution of the individual, which expresses, as Jay (1972: 302) notes, ‘one aspect of the non-identity of man in an unreconciled totality’.
Between Freud and Marx on the one hand, and Scheler and Heidegger on the other, Blumenberg (2006: 32–3, 30) describes two conflicts that reappear throughout the following sections. The first arises between critics who fear too much essence from philosophical anthropology, so that the human being cannot change radically enough in history, and others who worry about too little essence, so that what is truly human can be treated arbitrarily and with disrespect. The second conflict unfolds between interpreters who accuse Western philosophy of never having seriously inquired about the concrete ‘bearer’ of science and theory, and those who insist that philosophy must provide an understanding not only of the human being’s contingent self-understanding, but of any form of consciousness, world, or language. These conflicts shape the discourses of philosophical anthropology to the present day, including the Frankfurt School’s various interpretations and interventions.
Benjamin was one of the first to register the renewal of anthropological thinking during the mid 1910s. He rarely engaged directly with the terminology of philosophical anthropology, but his interpretations contain unexpected and still unexplored perspectives on the relationship between Critical Theory and anthropology.
In ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916), Benjamin criticizes ‘the bourgeois conception of language’ according to which ‘the means of communication is the word, its object factual, and its addressee a human being’ (Benjamin, 1996a: 65). Challenging this conception, he proposes a broader understanding of language as a ‘medium’ in – not through – which the spiritual essence of a thing communicates itself (1996a: 63). In human language, an elevated sub-category of language ‘as such’, things are named through cognition [Erkenntnis], which led to the hubristic ‘chatter’ of judgment and assertion. The ‘judging word expels the first humans from Paradise’ (1996a: 71), ensnaring them in a perpetual history of guilt. Benjamin’s gesture can be seen as anthropomorphizing nature, a danger that did not escape Adorno’s critical attention. At the same time, it destabilizes humanity’s place in the order of things, resembling Heidegger’s later understanding of language (Arendt, 1968: 204–205; Seel, 2002).
Around 1918, Benjamin discerned in Kant’s epistemology ‘unreflected relics of an unfruitful metaphysics’ (Steiner, 2010: 229; my trans.), endorsing Husserl’s attempt to undercut ‘the relation of knowledge and experience to human empirical consciousness’ that Kant overcame ‘only very tentatively’ (Benjamin, 1996b: 103). These comments pertain to Benjamin’s search for a ‘sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object’ (1996b: 104), a sphere that he finds in a radically transcendental and non-pragmatic understanding of language. In a diagram titled ‘Anthropology’ (c. 1918), Benjamin explores this sphere by distinguishing ‘elementary concepts of a metaphysical, historico-philosophical theory of the human being’ (Benjamin, 1991b: 64; Benjamin, 1991c: 672; my trans.). These concepts rest on the principal distinction between body [Leib] and language, while the ‘individual’, located in the center of the diagram, is the result of their relation, rather than a primary category (Duttlinger et al., 2012: 22). In the related ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’ (c. 1922), Benjamin seeks to further dissolve the mind-body dualism by distinguishing a third element: ‘mind’, ‘body’, and ‘corporeal substance’ [Körper]. In this elusive fragment, he proposes a positive, yet self-destabilizing anthropological definition: ‘The system of […] possible competences [Zuständigkeiten]’ for assigning meaning to perceptions, he writes, ‘is human nature’ (Benjamin, 1996c: 399). Based on this system of competencies, Benjamin’s ‘Outline’ blurs the border between language and perception, unsettling categories such as ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, ‘nearness’ and ‘distance’, and ‘dream’ and ‘waking consciousness’.
Beginning to integrate an unorthodox materialist vocabulary, Benjamin (1999d: 217) argues that ‘the metaphysical materialism, of the brand of [Carl] Vogt and Bukharin’ cannot be transferred without rupture into the ‘anthropological materialism’ evinced by ‘the experience of the Surrealists’, adding that materialism should not be founded on ‘abstract matter or the cosmos’, but on the ‘bodily collective’ (Benjamin, 1991a: 1041; my trans.). Continuing this thought in the notes to the Arcades Project, he outlines a conflicted ‘history of anthropological materialism’ (Benjamin, 1999e: 633) in Germany and France. ‘Anthropological materialism’, he writes, ‘is comprised within dialectical materialism’, while its Surrealist version is ‘refractory to Marxism’ (1999e: 591, 698; trans. changed). Rather than relapsing into pre-critical materialism, Benjamin seeks to reintroduce the sensual registers of the human collective neglected by overly positivistic forms of Marxism (Kittsteiner, 1998; Wohlfarth, 2011; Khatib, 2012). This mobilization of anthropological categories is reflected in his remarks about the ‘poverty of experience’, which he describes as a poverty of ‘human experience [Menschheitserfahrung] in general’ and ‘a new kind of barbarism’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 732). This ‘positive concept of barbarism’ has strong anti-humanist overtones; the destruction of ‘classical humanism’ creates space for another, ‘real humanism’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 454; trans. changed). Neither Horkheimer nor Adorno failed to hear these overtones, which echo key moments of Marx’s critique of bourgeois humanism.
After beginning to work more closely with Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin (1994: 372) tried to construct a ‘strained and problematic […] bridge’ between ‘the way dialectical materialism looks at things’ and his ‘particular stance on the philosophy of language’, a bridge he admittedly never completed (Scholem, 1981: 209). This bridge was supposed to relate the metaphysical elements of his early understanding of language to the revolutionary materialism that he discerned in the writings of the Surrealists, but precisely how he intended to relate them remained unanswered. Extensive reviews of ethnological and sociological literature on language (Benjamin, 2002b) eventually led Benjamin to propose a renewed mimetic understanding of human language as a historically sublimated ‘canon […] of nonsensuous similarity’ (Benjamin, 1999c: 721; also Menninghaus, 1995: 60–77). His essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), which links the emergence of human languages to the earliest forms of animal mimicry, begins with one of Benjamin’s strongest ontological and anthropological assumptions: ‘Nature produces similarities’, he writes, and ‘the highest capacity for producing similarities […] is man’s’ (1999c: 720).
In the following years, Adorno repeatedly criticized Benjamin’s ‘anthropological materialism’. In Adorno’s eyes, this materialism’s ‘undialectical ontology of the body’ renders it ‘profoundly romantic’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 1999: 146–7, 283; Reijen, 2006). Adorno’s complaint that Benjamin gives ‘conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a “materialist” turn by relating them immediately, perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of the substructure’, has a socio-epistemological basis. Benjamin, however, attempted to rethink immediacy and mediation [Vermittlung] in terms of language. For Adorno, ‘anthropology’ signifies a naturalist reduction of spirit – a monistic conflation of the mind–body dualism – while Benjamin employs the notion to explore a realm that precedes and transcends the bifurcation of sensibility and understanding.
Benjamin’s anthropological materialism is an integral part of what he describes in 1938 as his contribution to the work of the Frankfurt Institute, namely, his studies of ‘the historical variables of human perception’ (Benjamin, 2002a: 310). These variables, condensed in his mimetic understanding of language, co-constitute the ‘bridge’ he envisioned between dialectical materialism and his early theory of language. Benjamin’s peculiar entwinement of anthropology and philosophy of history surfaces in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935–6), where his anthropological notion of perception works as the driving force behind the essay’s aesthetic and political concepts (Lindner, 2012: 371–92). The same notion of perception underlies the ‘weak messianic power’ that gathers the sensuous and affective ‘understanding’ of the past to interrupt the historical continuum of guilt and violence (Benjamin, 2003: 390; also Honneth, 1993).
Horkheimer explicitly engages with philosophical anthropology in a series of essays from the 1930s (Abromeit, 2011: 248–82). These works reveal a ‘negative anthropology’ that Jay (1973: 56) describes as ‘an implicit but still powerful presence’ in Horkheimer’s earlier thinking. When Horkheimer returns to the issue during the 1950s, his views have changed, casting the School’s internal tensions regarding anthropology in sharper relief.
In his early essay ‘History and Psychology’, Horkheimer (1993b: 121) proposes to integrate a ‘differentiated group psychology’ as an auxiliary science for Critical Theory. This proposition breaks with Hegel’s exclusion of psychology from the philosophy of history, abandoning the security granted by the metaphysical interpretation of history and society characteristic of orthodox dialectical materialism. In his critique of what he considers to be philosophical anthropology – Scheler and Heidegger – Horkheimer denies almost all essence of the human being; almost, since an absolute denial would again result in a trans-historical, metaphysical position. Instead, he develops a historical psychology of human beings as they are under the social conditions of the present. This psychology studies
the extent to which the function of the individual in the production process is determined by the individual’s fate in a certain kind of family, by the effect of socialization at this point in the social space, but also by the way in which the individual’s own labor in the economy shapes the forms of character and consciousness. (1993b: 121)
Because Heidegger’s notion of historicity is ‘too narrow’ to capture the variety of social groups, Horkheimer suggests transforming the ‘doctrine of being within man [Lehre vom Sein im Menschen]’ along with ‘all kinds of philosophical anthropology from a static ontology into the psychology of human beings living in a definite historical epoch’ (1993b: 112–13; trans. changed).
Horkheimer proposes a similar transformation with respect to Dilthey’s belief that ‘the unitary human essence originally given in every individual unfolds itself in its various aspects in the great historical cultures’ (Horkheimer, 1993b: 126). More uncompromisingly than Marcuse and Fromm, Horkheimer considers this unitary essence to be a metaphysical residue that has no place in critical psychology (1993b: 127). Neither the structure of economic transformation, nor the individual’s mental dispositions remain stable. Only the premise that all concepts have to be derived from the historical present and the observation that certain ‘motifs’ run through history offer some orientation. Based on these premises, Horkheimer (1993b: 128) distinguishes periods of consolidation and dissolution. The dispositions of some groups gravitate toward new social relations even before the change occurs, while others remain bound to the obsolete relations even after their transformation.
In his ‘Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology’ (1935), one of the earliest critical discussions of the anthropological problematic, Horkheimer proposes to integrate a certain interpretation of philosophical anthropology as another auxiliary discipline. While he continues to oppose the view that ‘a constant and unchanging human nature functions as the foundation for an epoch’ (Horkheimer, 1993c: 151), Horkheimer now proceeds to criticize the idea that a power independent of the human being dictates the historical process (1993c: 153). He rejects the attempt of Scheler’s Man’s Place in Nature (1928) to show how ‘all the specific achievements and works of man […] arise from the basic structure of human existence’, which, in Horkheimer’s eyes, perpetuates the idealist project of establishing ‘absolute principles that provide a rationale for action’ (1993c: 154). For the same reason, he dismisses Heidegger’s efforts to provide a deeper meaning for human existence by introducing notions of ‘authentic’ life and death.
Horkheimer argues that philosophical anthropology, like phenomenology, derives an ideal ‘ought’ from values found in a unified essence. Critical Theory, rejects such positive normativity. ‘A theory free from illusions’, Horkheimer (1993c: 159, 156–7) writes, ‘can only conceive of human purpose negatively, and reveals the inherent contradiction between the conditions of existence and everything that the great philosophies have postulated as a purpose’. This negative conception promotes the humanist belief in the ‘unfolding of human powers’ without projecting ideals into the future. It also implies, however, that the ‘denial of an unchanging, constant human nature’ cannot be absolute. For Horkheimer, Critical Theory has to recognize ‘that happiness and misery run constantly through history; that human beings as they are have their limits and deserve consideration; and that there is a price to be paid for overlooking those limits’ (1993c: 175).
In ‘Egoism and Freedom Movements: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era’ (1936), Horkheimer demonstrates his materialist integration of psychology and anthropology by presenting egoism as a psychological trait that is meaningful only with respect to the social conditions of a specific historical period. ‘The badness of egoism lies not in itself but in the historical situation; when this changes, its conception will merge with that of the rational [vernünftigen] society’ (Horkheimer, 1993a: 108). Horkheimer’s analysis reveals that anthropological doctrines such as Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s condemn egoism, while social reality forces the isolated individual to internalize the demand for happiness articulated in these doctrines. Bourgeois humanism ‘shows a double face’ (1993a: 98); it glorifies the human being’s self-determination, while its actual power to determine its situation is so limited and unequally distributed that the denied realization of freedom returns as the idolization of the modern leader, endowed with the magical qualities of self-determination that the individual lacks.
Horkheimer is convinced that ‘the practical but also the theoretical solution to the anthropological question can be attained only by the progress of society itself, and […] no philosophy and no clever education methods will be adequate to this problem’ (1993a: 108). Anthropological doctrines have only diagnostic value as precipitations of the various historical attempts to distort and cover up the contradictions of social reality. Critical Theory interprets the discrepancies between what these doctrines proclaim and the results of concrete historical and psychological analyses. These discrepancies help understand the present’s tendencies to transgress oppression and deprivation, but do not allow for any inferences about the future.
Although Horkheimer continued to study up-to-date ethnological literature during his work on the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Wiggershaus, 1995: 321–2), after World War II and the publication of The Eclipse of Reason (1947) his tone became more sober, and his critique of anthropology less empirically grounded. In 1952, he noted under the title ‘Negative Humanism’: ‘The essence of the human being cannot be determined, but surely that which is inhumane; not what is good, but what is not good’ (Horkheimer, 1988: 200; my trans.). Truth can be approached exclusively through the process of determinate negation. Traditional concepts mobilized against each other by nation states have to be destroyed; the positive can only be found ‘in the negation of what is merely preliminary or became a fetter long ago’ (1988: 200; my trans.). Surprisingly, around the same time he and Adorno defended Freud’s ‘biological materialism’ against the proponents of ‘revised psychoanalysis’ (Horkheimer, 1948: 111; Adorno, 1972; Wiggershaus 1995: 271, 502), a determinism that they simultaneously criticized in the works of Fromm and Marcuse.
In ‘The Concept of Man’, a text originally written for Plessner’s Festschrift from 1957, Horkheimer (1974: 11) compares the way in which ontological philosophy speaks about existence to the ‘critical view of the human being’ that emerged from Kant’s philosophy. In the light of the transcendental ideas, finite existence is imbued with the hopeful task of realizing a just moral order. This ‘utopic element’, preserved in the difference between the finite and the infinite, ‘has disappeared from the relation between being and concrete existence [Dasein]’ (1974: 16). ‘Quite differently than in the context of critical philosophy, to speak about man today is to engage in the endless question of the ground of man and, since in ontological philosophy ground supplies direction, in the endless quest for an image of man that will provide orientation and guidance’ (1974: 13).
Horkheimer lost faith in negating bourgeois humanism through empirical research and historical psychology alone. Instead, he appealed to the quasi-theological ideas of ‘the highest good and absolute justice’ (1974: 10) to distinguish humanity as it is from another humanity, capable of using the technologies of the present to realize these ideas. In existential ontology, Horkheimer still discerns nothing but superficial depth and resignation, and his discussions of youth, gender relations, labor conditions, and urban life demonstrate the kind of concreteness that existential ontology, in his eyes, could not achieve. The antagonistic social totality determines the character of the human being, he concludes, until ‘the rational spontaneity proper to society becomes the transparent principle of the individual’s existence. […] In other words, society becomes rational only to the extent that it fulfills the Kantian hope’ (1974: 36–7).
When the photography exhibition ‘Family of Man’ came to Frankfurt in 1958, Horkheimer (1989: 31) argued in his opening remarks that the pictures complement the ideas of enlightened philosophy. The exhibition would allow millions of visitors from all over the world to experience the ‘sameness’ [Selbigkeit] of humanity within the vast ethnographical and geographical particularities of the depicted situations and practices. This allegiance to the ideals of the Enlightenment, which falls prey to Horkheimer’s own early critique, is challenged, in different ways, by Fromm’s and Marcuse’s versions of humanist Marxism as well as by the negative anthropology of Adorno and Sonnemann.
Fromm and Marcuse differ from the rest of the first generation by maintaining a more positive formal anthropology, derived in large parts from their interpretations of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. Marcuse (1973: 29) wrote one of the first commentaries on these manuscripts, emphasizing Marx’s ‘discovery of the historical character of the human essence’. Man’s ‘existence is a “means” to the realization of his essence’, he continues, ‘or – in estrangement [Entfremdung] – his essence is a means to his mere physical existence. […] It is precisely the unerring contemplation of the essence of man that becomes the inexorable impulse for the initiation of radical revolution’. Alienated labor blocks the realization of human essence until this barrier is eliminated by ‘total revolution’. Marcuse’s version of Critical Theory supports this process through reflection on the human being’s unfulfilled potentials, as indicated by its contradictory existence under capitalism.
In 1948, Marcuse (1948: 322) published the Frankfurt School’s most comprehensive critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, reproaching it for its ontological concept of human essence. That Sartre’s demonstration of the subject’s absolute freedom ‘is ontologically correct and a time-honored and successful feature of idealism only proves the remoteness of this demonstration from the “réalité humaine”. […] Behind the nihilistic language of [Sartre’s] Existentialism lurks the ideology of free competition, free initiative, and equal opportunity’, a concealment resulting from the ‘fallacious identification of the ontological and historical subject’ (1948: 323–4). According to Marcuse, Sartre ignores that the subject freely choses class positions, nationalities, and ethnic identities that are produced by an antagonistic historical process. Reiterating Marx’s basic conviction, Marcuse concludes that the human being’s ‘concrete historical existence, is not (yet) the realization of the genus man’, or species being [Gattungswesen], since the ‘historical forms of society have crippled the development of the general human faculties, of the humanitas’ (Marcuse, 1948: 334).
During the years leading to the student movement of 1968, Marcuse replaced his Hegelian concept of reason and his ontological vocabulary with Freud’s metapsychology. As he argues in Eros and Civilization (1955), reason is the resolution of the dynamic struggle between Eros and Thanatos in favor of Eros’s emancipation (Marcuse et al., 1978: 36). This interpretation indicates that Marcuse was willing to embrace and formulate elements of a positive anthropology that were spurned by other members of the first generation such as Adorno and Horkheimer (Jay, 1973: 56, 74). In the Essay on Liberation, Marcuse (1969: 7–23) demands a ‘biological foundation’ for socialism, a ‘new anthropology, not only as theory, but also as form of existence’, resulting from ‘the emergence and development of vital needs for freedom’ (Marcuse, 1967: 15; my trans.). This ‘biological dimension’ he considered necessary for the masses to stand up and demand that the objectively available means of production are no longer used as instruments of domination, but as means for the realization of freedom.
Fromm disagreed even more strongly with Horkheimer and Adorno over Critical Theory’s interpretation of Freud, which was an important reason for his dismissal from the Institute in 1939 (Wiggershaus, 1995: 265–73). In the following decades, Fromm turned to Marx’s early writings in order to develop a humanist social psychology. In Marx’s Concept of Man, which includes the first complete English translation of the 1844 Manuscripts, Fromm (1966: 58) argues that ‘in spite of certain changes in concepts, in mood, in language, the core of the philosophy developed by the young Marx was never changed’, and that understanding Marx’s critique of capitalism is only possible ‘on the basis of the concept of man which he developed in his early writings’. Like Marcuse, Fromm finds this core in the idea of realizing the human being’s true potentials by overcoming alienated labor.
Unfolding his interpretation, Fromm (1966: 24) argues that Marx distinguished, like Dilthey, between ‘human nature in general’ and ‘human nature as modified with each historical period’, and based on this distinction between ‘constant’ and ‘relative’ drives. Examples of the first kind are hunger and sexual desire, which cannot be changed as such, but only in their form and directionality. The prime example of a ‘relative’ appetite is the drive for enrichment and accumulation, which, as a specific historical modification of the primary drives, can vanish entirely. These distinctions seek to bring out Marx’s ‘contribution to humanistic depth psychology’, a contribution in which Fromm (1970: 47) sees the potential to correct the ‘mechanistic parts’ and social blind spots of Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Wiggershaus (1995: 60) notes that Fromm’s social psychology eventually rests on circular reasoning, which he tried to escape by adopting a ‘messianic humanism’. The seamless workings of society did not allow for changes in the living conditions, while only such changes could transform the comportment of the masses. Reflecting on the theoretical implications of this dilemma, Jay (1972: 299–300) suggests that Fromm’s Marxist humanism could only fully emerge after he had freed himself from the ‘pessimistic elements’ of psychoanalysis such as libido theory and its biological determinism.
Although Fromm and Marcuse agreed with the rest of the early Frankfurt School that humanity creates itself and makes its own history, they adhered to the assumption that the human being’s fundamental drives condition and underlie historical change. Their willingness to grant ontological status to the process of ‘anthropogenesis’ distinguishes them decisively from Horkheimer, Adorno, and Sonnemann, creating a productive tension among the members of the first generation.
Adorno rejects anthropological assumptions more decisively than any other member of the School. Despite his overall dismissal, however, he practiced an implicit negative anthropology himself. By observing and interpreting the habits, language, and character traits of individuals and groups in comparison with what is ascribed to them as universal qualities, he follows Horkheimer and Benjamin in illuminating the dim intimations of a truly human comportment among what he sees as an increasingly damaged and dehumanized life.
In his first habilitation thesis, Adorno (1973a: 175; my trans.) tellingly remarks that ‘Kant’s anthropology’ – and the philosophical importance it grants to empirical knowledge –‘is still far from being sufficiently appreciated’. Related comments in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Adorno, 1989: 26, 33) distinguish Kierkegaard’s psychology from both ontology and anthropology, indicating that, for Adorno, the anthropological problematic is closely tied to the concept of existence. This concept, he recapitulates later, ‘impressed many as a philosophical approach, because it seemed to combine divergent things: the reflection on the subject – said to constitute every cognition and thus every entity – and the concrete, immediate individuation of each single subject’s experience’ (Adorno, 1973b: 123). This combination is characteristic of philosophical anthropology’s deceptive ontological circumvention of epistemology, Adorno argues, since the tension between constitutive subjectivity and particular experience is not merely an epistemological problem that can be solved by focusing on the ‘whole’ human being; it has objective social and historical reasons. ‘The principle of domination, which antagonistically tears apart society’, he writes with a side glance to Marx, ‘is the same principle which, spiritualized, brings about the difference between the concept and that which is subjugated to it’ (1973b: 48; trans. changed). Rather than conflating constitution and experience in a holistic notion of existence, dialectical thinking has to consider the human being as a social category of reflection.
In his early lectures and seminars, Adorno explores critical alternatives to existential ontology. In ‘The Idea of Natural History’, he juxtaposes Benjamin and Lukács to dialectically overcome the contradiction between nature and history, which is also at the heart of the anthropological problematic since Kant. According to the logic of extremes that Adorno (1984: 117) found in Benjamin’s works, nature can be deciphered as history where it is considered to be most ‘natural’ (or mythical) and vice versa. From this lecture until his last comments on this question, Adorno (1973b: 359–60) follows Benjamin in interpreting ‘decay’ [Verfall] – the ‘secular category pure and simple’ – as the moment of commensuration between nature and history. Regarding the question of philosophical anthropology, this means that only a dialectical optics and critical language that traces finitude’s dependencies on transcendence can discern possibilities of non-violent reconciliation amid the human being’s antagonistic life under capitalism.
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno (1973b: 124; trans. changed) articulates a complete theoretical refutation of philosophical anthropology. ‘We cannot say [angeben] what the human being is. Today, it is a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is attributed to it as invariant […]. To decipher the essence of the human being by the way it is now would sabotage its possibility’. Adorno’s claim that philosophy cannot determine the human being springs from his conviction that invariants limit historical possibilities; a claim that he supports by criticizing metaphysical monism. We cannot say what the human being is because such assertions totalize over the intrinsically fractured and conflicted condition of the individual. For Adorno, criticizing concepts like ‘man’ or ‘existence’ means ‘wrestling them away from the spell of monistic construction out of a single principle’ (Adorno, 1986: 262; my trans.). No anthropology seems to escape Adorno’s verdict. He even dismisses ‘so-called historical anthropology’, which ascribes ‘becoming’ and ‘openness’ as qualities to the human being, as an attempt to ‘pass off its own indefiniteness’ as positive knowledge. ‘That we cannot tell what man is,’ Adorno (1973b: 124) concludes, ‘does not establish a particularly majestic anthropology; it vetoes any anthropology’.
Despite this verdict, Adorno (1974: 18) contends in Minima Moralia that from ‘the narrowest private sphere […] follow considerations of broader social and anthropological scope; they concern psychology, aesthetics, [and] science in its relation to the subject’. This description reflects his early comment about the unrealized potentials of Kant’s anthropology. Minima Moralia is a strong example of Adorno’s attempts to trace residues of a truly human life amid the barbaric regressions of Western culture. In discussing themes such as friendship, labor conditions, and dwelling [wohnen], he brings out the increasing difficulty of relating in a respectful way to oneself and others. The reason is that the coldness and rigidity of the social sphere forces the individuals to retreat into the most occluded regions of life where their humanity is in constant danger of withering away.
Adorno interprets the individual’s actual constitution as the precipitation of the abstract laws that govern society as a whole. From this perspective, the ‘essence’ of the individual appears as the sedimentation of universal principles. Because the individual is ‘in the strict sense […] a monad, representing the whole in its contradictions’ (Adorno, 1967: 77), understanding the social process requires analyzing how these principles are mirrored in the minutest cells of the social fiber, where they virtually produce the individual as just another commodity. ‘With the dissolution of liberalism’, for example, ‘the truly bourgeois principle, that of competition, far from being overcome, has passed from the objectivity of the social process into the composition of its colliding and jostling atoms, and therewith as if into anthropology’ (Adorno, 1974: 27). In view of this conception, Stefan Breuer (1985: 34, 50; my trans.) argues that Adorno’s ‘negative anthropology’ is his ‘genuine contribution to the development of dialectical social theory’. Whether or not it is the ‘organizing center’ of his work, as Breuer contends, Adorno’s ‘turn toward second nature’ challenges his own verdict over anthropology. Like Benjamin and Horkheimer, Adorno opens Critical Theory toward the interpretation of particular social phenomena. His ‘Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life’ (Honneth, 2005) deciphers the individual as both the constituent of the whole and the manifestation of its organizing principles.
Adorno’s (2003: 69; my trans.) posthumously published ‘Notes on New Anthropology’ demonstrate the extent of his concern with the ‘new human type, forming under the conditions of monopoly and state capitalism’. These notes pertain to the fragments of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which, according to Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002: xix) preface, ‘relate to a dialectical anthropology’. In the ‘Notes’, Adorno suggests that, in his epoch, the human being’s ‘fundamental constitution [Grundbeschaffenheit]’ underwent such radical change that even the basic assumptions of psychoanalysis are rendered obsolete (Adorno, 2003: 62, 69–82; my trans.; also Coomann, 2017). Accordingly, in his Lectures on Negative Dialectics (Adorno, 2008: 46), he emphasizes the importance of ‘dialectical anthropology’ for understanding why the ‘revolutionary practice’, which his generation expected, ‘did not happen and why it could not happen’.
Ulrich Sonnemann was a psychologist, philosopher, writer, and friend of Adorno’s who fled to the United States in 1941. After his return to Germany in 1955, he became loosely connected to the Frankfurt School (Schmied-Kowarzik, 1999: 34). In his book Negative Anthropologie from 1969, he argues for the ‘determinate negation of the possibility of any non-contradictory positive anthropology’, and for the ‘inference [Erschließung] of what is human from its denial and absence’ (Sonnemann, 1969: 227; my trans.). The fallacy and malicious consequences of assuming that the human being can be the object of positive science is exemplified by the complementary failure of the ‘two main versions of anthropological determinism’, Marxism and psychoanalysis (1969: 87; my trans.). Both are trapped, according to Sonnemann, in a circular monologue due to their unreflected anthropological assumptions; Marx’s social philosophy because of its unacknowledged ‘interiority’ – the presupposition of a potential ‘real’ human being, which in truth depends entirely on its present condition – and Freud, because he neglects the social determinations of the history of the mind, epitomized by the naturalization of the drives. Marxism and psychoanalysis fail in the moment they are confronted with each other, revealing a shared defect: the restriction of human spontaneity (Sonnemann, 1969: 87–8).
Sonnemann (1969: 21; my trans.) insists that positivism blocks ‘spontaneity that acts, through thinking, in history’. The attempt to criticize this restriction conceptually as well as in the realm of language makes Negative Anthropologie a largely unexplored document of the student movement (Mettin, 2016), complementary in many ways to Foucault’s archaeologies of the human sciences. (Tellingly, both authors wrote on Ludwig Binswanger’s existential psychology in the mid 1950s.) In his review of Negative Anthropologie, Adorno (1986: 262–3; also Edinger, 2017) reads Sonnemann’s (2011: 361–3; my trans.) call for a ‘permanent anthropological revolution’ as a continuation of Horkheimer’s early engagement with anthropology, acknowledging the book’s effort to ‘defetishize’ the ontological fundaments of Marx and Freud. What distinguishes Adorno’s and Sonnemann’s negative anthropology from the approaches they criticize is their refusal to ‘define itself in any fixed way’, while ‘de-emphasizing’, without completely denying, the ‘autonomy of man’ (Geroulanos, 2010: 12; Jay, 1973: 65, 266).
The critical humanism of the Frankfurt School crystallizes around a series of struggles regarding the potentials and limitations of negative anthropology. After Benjamin unsettled the bourgeois understanding of ‘human language’ and the antithesis of nature and history, the members of the first generation were confronted with the decision to embrace or reject the more or less substantial anthropological underpinnings of historical materialism and psychoanalysis. While Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm were willing to ascribe an immutable demand for happiness and self-realization to the human being, Adorno and Sonnemann attempted to reject all anthropological assumptions, examining instead the human being’s practical and theoretical negations and deprivations under capitalism. As the members of the first generation developed their versions of critical theory, Heidegger’s existential ontology and Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology repeatedly forced them to reflect on the anthropological implications of their own works and approaches.
In Beschreibung des Menschen, Blumenberg indicates that at the heart of the struggle between Neo-Marxism and philosophical anthropology resides the question as to how much essence we are willing to ascribe to the beings that we are ourselves. If ‘human nature’ is considered to be entirely contingent, human beings deserve as much suffering as they deserve happiness, which leaves hardly any shared grounds for distinguishing between repressive and emancipatory forms of social organization. On the other hand, the more ontological qualities we attribute to the human being, the more we tend to generalize over ethnical, gender, class, and other differences, threatening to relapse into the dogmatic bourgeois humanism that Critical Theory opposed in the first place. Finding effective and versatile vocabularies to balance the demands of critical humanism and negative anthropology is one of Critical Theory’s ongoing challenges to the present day.
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