From the early 1960s onwards, Alfred Schmidt (May 19, 1931, Berlin – August 28, 2012, Frankfurt am Main) provided a decisive impulse for the critical reappropriation of Marx’s theory and the further development of critical theory in West Germany and beyond. His work on the philosophical-historical presuppositions of the critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, and his confrontation with French structuralism, especially the Althusser school, attracted attention even beyond academic philosophical debates. In addition, Schmidt focused on the history of philosophical materialism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Goethe’s philosophy of nature, Sigmund Freud’s philosophy and – in light of his interest in the intellectual history of Freemasonry – the modern Deism of the Enlightenment. Furthermore, from the 1960s he translated or published numerous works by Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre and Anton Pannekoek. As the editor of Max Horkheimer’s collected works (together with Gunzelin Schmid Noerr) and the editor of the republished Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, he laid the decisive foundations for the reception of original critical theory.
In contrast to his teachers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Schmidt did not come from an upper-class or educated middle-class home. Born in Berlin as the son of a mechanic, he spent his youth in the North Hessen province of Rotenburg an der Fulda, where the family ended up as a result of the war. There, in the spring of 1952, he passed the school-leaving examination. In the summer semester of that year, he began his studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Frankfurt, initially studying History, English and Latin. Attending the lectures of Max Horkheimer sparked his academic interest in philosophy. He chose philosophy as his main subject, sociology as his second and English philology as his third; he also studied classical philology. From 1957 to 1961, Schmidt was a graduate assistant and from 1961 onwards a research assistant for Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno at the University of Frankfurt (Jeske, 2015).
On July 13, 1960, Schmidt graduated with a doctorate in philosophy with the topic ‘The Concept of Nature in Marx’s Conception of Society’. His thesis, supervised by Horkheimer and Adorno, was published for the first time in 1962 under the title The Concept of Nature in Marx as the eleventh volume of the ‘Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology’ series, edited by Adorno and Walter Dirks. The work attracted international attention. It was translated into 12 languages and went through a total of four editions in Germany during Schmidt’s lifetime, as well as a series of pirated prints. In the summer semester of 1965, Schmidt received a university teaching position in the Philosophical Seminar at the University of Frankfurt on Lessons in the History of Philosophy, in particular the Enlightenment and its Tradition. In the following semesters, he dealt with the themes of Left-Hegelianism, the sociology of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx’s critique of political economy and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre. In 1972, after the departure of Jürgen Habermas to Starnberg as co-director (alongside physicist and philosopher Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker) of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Living Conditions of the Scientific and Technical World, Schmidt was appointed to Horkheimer’s former chair as Habermas’ successor. Schmidt held this chair until his retirement in 1999 (when Habermas returned to Frankfurt in 1983, a new chair had to be established for him in Social Philosophy and the Philosophy of History).
According to the official dedication of this Professorship for Philosophy and Sociology, Schmidt lectured in both subjects during the first years but then limited himself to courses in the field of philosophy. He remained faithful to his listeners as an emeritus professor, giving lectures on Herbert Marcuse, Ludwig Feuerbach, Heine, Spinoza, Lessing, Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. In addition, he wrote studies on Goethe, in whom he was primarily interested as a natural scientist and natural philosopher; he was also especially fascinated with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Schmidt continued lecturing and reading about the history of materialism, the sociology of worldviews in the nineteenth century, the German Enlightenment and the philosophy of German Romanticism. Furthermore, Schmidt was active in the university’s interdisciplinary Institute for Research in the Philosophy of Religion, which he co-founded; he worked as a lecturer in adult education in Frankfurt, in trade union education at the Academy of Labour and in the context of the Masonic movement (Jeske, 2015; Schmidt, 2014a). In November 2012, the Archive Center of the Johann Christian Senckenberg University Library of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main received his entire estate, including correspondence, manuscripts, electronic documents from three computers and his extensive private library.
The manner in which the Frankfurt School is usually presented, which divides the representatives of critical theory into a first, second, third and now even fourth generation, makes it difficult to elucidate Schmidt’s specific contribution. In the 1960s at the Philosophical Seminar at the University of Frankfurt, Schmidt was teaching together with his teachers, like Karl-Heinz Haag (1924–2011) and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (1928–2015). As a student of Horkheimer and Adorno, he saw himself primarily committed to the continuation of their thought. He did not partake in Habermas’ critique of the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ and its rejection of the critical potential of Marx’s concept of labour. Nor did he take part in the communicative turn in critical theory. The primary goal of his philosophical work was to explicate the theoretical motives and philosophical-historical presuppositions of the critical theory of Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. In this way, he embodied a counterbalance to the linguistic-analytic, action-theoretical or system-theoretical ‘reconstructions’ of critical theory, which, in his opinion, ran the risk of missing the specific impetus of critical theory. In contrast, his aspiration was to preserve and convey the original content and authentic form of critical theory.
Schmidt’s 1962 thesis on the concept of nature in the teaching of Karl Marx had an unusually strong resonance. On the one hand, it was directed against a dogmatic dialectics of nature taught as state doctrine at that time in the Soviet Union, the GDR and the countries of Eastern Europe; on the other hand, it went against a pure philosophy-of-praxis perspective, which tends to dissolve history into a dynamic of interaction detached from the metabolic process between humans and nature, thereby ignoring the natural constraints of human existence.
In their preliminary remark, Horkheimer and Adorno summarise Schmidt’s work within the ‘Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology’ as follows:
Even where nature is not a topic [in Marx; H.K.], conceptions of nature are implied in the theories of labour, value and commodity. Thus the responsible presentation of the concept of nature also illuminates other parts of the theory. For example, Schmidt corrects the conception of a radical opposition between idealist and materialist dialectics, and thus also straightens out the often cited phrase of Marx that his method merely flirts with dialectics. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2003: 9)
Schmidt drew upon the entire corpus of Marx available at that time, including documents from different phases of his theoretical development, particularly the Grundrisse, whose philosophical significance Schmidt recognised early on.
In contrast to the philosophical discussion of Marx in the West at that time, Schmidt’s thesis studied Marx’s early writings intensively in order to establish the connection with certain themes of the middle and mature Marx. He did not, therefore, reduce the philosophical thought of Marx to the anthropology of the Paris manuscripts. On the contrary, Schmidt stressed that Marx is by no means at his most philosophical when he employs the traditional academic language of philosophy, and so Schmidt thoroughly incorporates the political and economic writings of the middle and mature Marx into the discussion. He thus clarifies the philosophical significance of Marx’s critique of economics, which is crucial for a critical concept of materialism; at the same time, he notes that Marx’s critique of political economy is not exhausted by a technical-economic analysis. Indeed, Marx’s critique is fundamentally a critique of economic categories. To illustrate Marx’s position, Schmidt repeatedly draws upon individual writings by Engels – for example, with reference to the concept of the dialectics of nature – and does not shy away from bringing out the differences between the authors.
According to Schmidt, the problem of nature and the dogmatic conception of the dialectics of nature could not be solved by elegantly avoiding the entire subject and sticking to a half-baked Marx concerned only with the philosophy of praxis. This tendency could be read in Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, and the philosophers grouped around the journal Praxis. Although arising from legitimate opposition to the dogmatic ‘diamat’ worldview prevailing in Eastern Europe, but also among many communist intellectuals in the West, these philosophers risked throwing out the baby with the bathwater by eliminating the theme of nature, thus reducing Marxism to a philosophy of history. For Schmidt, the task was to critically incorporate nature into reflection as a historical category mediated by human practice. From the Holy Family, Marx and Engels’ first joint text, published in Frankfurt in 1845, to Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring in 1878, nature is regarded as mediated by social practice: nature is developed and constituted by human practice, but it cannot be dissolved in this way without a remainder. It is the object of human appropriation and yet does not arise through it. The nature-mediating social-labour process, as a metabolic process between humans and nature, is itself a part of nature. Society is not a mere communication system; rather, it is a specific mode of human social reproduction.
In addition to the simultaneous emphasis on the social mediation of nature and the irreducibility of nature, which is not completely absorbed in this mediation through social practice, we find in Marx the notion borrowed from Hegel of a second nature of incomprehensible coercive social forces. Even though, in knowledge as well as in practical appropriation, we nowhere encounter nature in itself, but always only nature already mediated by human practice, it would be ill-conceived to absolutise this aspect of mediation. Such an absolutised mediation, which makes the irreducible particularity of nature and individuals into practically subordinate moments of a universal system of mediation, represents for Marx the capital relation, which asserts itself as the ‘automatic subject’ of the processes of social reproduction. The objection against such an absolutised mediation formed a crucial motive for critique, which saw in this totalisation of mediation new natural constraints at work, precisely the constraints of a socially produced second nature.
Against a mere standpoint philosophy, which believes it can reach truth through the unwavering absolutisation of isolated ideological certainties, Schmidt always claimed that knowledge can only be attained in the critical passage through conflicting positions – that is to say, neither as a middle position between extremes nor through the simple affirmation of one side. This is best exemplified in his portrayal of the relation between Hegel and Feuerbach:
It was not Marx’s intention simply to replace Hegel’s ‘World Spirit’ with a material ‘World Substance’ which would be an equally metaphysical principle. He did not reject Hegelian idealism abstractly like Feuerbach, but rather saw in it truth expressed in an untrue form. Marx accepted the idealist view that the world is mediated through the Subject. He considered however that he could bring home the full significance of this idea by showing what was the true pathos of ‘creation’ as presented by philosophers from Kant to Hegel: the creator of the objective world is the socio-historical life-process of human beings. In modern times extra-human natural existence has been reduced more and more to a function of human social organization. The philosophical reflection of this is that the determinations of objectivity have entered in greater and greater measure into the Subject, until at the culminating point of post-Kantian speculation they become completely absorbed in it. (Schmidt, 2014b: 27)
The aim of critical materialism is to help human beings escape the self-made prison of economic determinations in which they let themselves be degraded into objects of a blind and mechanical economic dynamic. The laws of economics for Marx do not form a universal metaphysical principle of explanation:
The ‘materialist’ character of Marxist theory does not amount to a confession of the incurable primacy of the economy, that anti-human abstraction achieved by the real situation. It is rather an attempt to direct men’s attention towards the ghostly internal logic of their own conditions, towards this pseudophysics that makes them commodities and at the same time provides the ideology according to which they are already in control of their own destinies. (Schmidt, 2014b: 41)
At this point, Schmidt refers to Horkheimer’s diagnosis: ‘The process is accomplished not under the control of a conscious will but as a natural occurrence. Everyday life results blindly, accidentally, and badly from the chaotic activity of individuals, industries and states’ (Horkheimer, 1986, cited in Schmidt, 2014b: 41).
In Marx, materialism does not entail the identification of the prevailing conditions, and similarly the concept of nature does not aim at romantic transfiguration.
Hegel described the first nature, a world of things existing outside men, as a blind conceptless occurrence. The world of men as it takes shape in the state, law, society, and the economy, is for him ‘second nature’, manifested reason, objective Spirit. Marxist analysis opposes to this the view that Hegel’s ‘second nature’ should rather be described in the terms he applied to the first: namely, as the area of conceptlessness, where blind necessity and blind chance coincide. The ‘second nature’ is still the ‘first’. Mankind has still not stepped beyond natural history. This fact explains the closeness of the method of Marxist sociology to that of natural science [Naturwissenschaft]. Many critics of Marx regard this method as inappropriate, but in fact the ‘nature-like’ constitution of its object of investigation ensures that it is not a human science [Geisteswissenschaft]. When Marx treated the history of previous human society as a ‘process of natural history’, this had first of all the critical meaning that ‘the laws of economics confront men in all… planless and incoherent production as objective laws over which they have no power, therefore in the form of laws of nature’. (Schmidt, 2014b: 42)
With regard to the natural basis of human life, Schmidt acknowledges the ineliminable requirement of a metabolism between humans and nature: even if hunger, poverty and exploitation are overcome, and the human being confronts the material world in a qualitatively new way as ‘overseer and regulator’ (Schmidt, 2014b: 147), as Marx put it in the Grundrisse, this does not overcome the relationship with the natural foundation of human life (Marx, 1986). Even after the economic compulsions of commodified labour are abolished, freedom remains dependent on the interaction with nature.
The philosophical themes of his dissertation also characterise Schmidt’s further works. In his essay ‘On the Relation between History and Nature in Dialectical Materialism’, originally written for the book Existentialism and Marxism (1965) and from 1971 onwards attached to the new editions of the thesis as an appendix, he again takes up the question of a dialectics of nature. He develops his argument into a critique of the complementary yet one-sided thesis of Lukács and Western Marxism, according to which dialectics is strictly bound to human practice. This thesis, according to Schmidt, threatens to conceive of nature only as a social category and thus lose sight of the natural basis of human existence, the metabolism with nature.
In a postscript from 1971, Schmidt emphasises again that Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’ should not be understood simply as a positive theory of economic development and some law-governed transition to socialism, as is often the case in the official Marxism of the labour movement. In the new edition of 1993, he adds the preface from the French version, which appeared in the same year, and carries the subtitle ‘For an ecological materialism’. Schmidt points out that Marx is not a consistent apologist for the development of the productive forces but rather in the early writing criticises the ‘degradation of nature’. Also in Capital, Marx refers to the ‘natural limits of the exploitability of nature’ and emphasises that the productivity of labour itself is bound to natural conditions. Nevertheless, Schmidt critically finds an anthropocentrism in Marx’s conception of nature. What Marx and Engels criticised in their time as a defect of ‘contemplative materialism’ has today to be rediscovered for the sake of regaining an unobstructed understanding of nature (Schmidt, 1993: xi; see also 1973a). If we want to experience nature not only as an object of science or as raw material, then this ‘requires a philosophical approach that goes beyond the separation between humans and nature established by the subject-object-schema of the process of labour and knowledge’ (1993: xii). The perspective oriented to human practice and history is not invalidated, but it is certainly relativised. The question of an ‘ecological materialism’ thus arises from within the context of contemporary experience.
While Schmidt’s thesis was published in the official ‘Frankfurt Contribution to Sociology’ series of the Institute for Social Research, and while other important works from the 1960s appeared in edition suhrkamp, which was important for the intellectual development of West Germany, the Critique of Political Economy Today: 100 Years of Capital, which Schmidt co-edited with Walter Euchner, was somewhat removed from public attention. This book, which was published in 1968 by the Europäische Verlagsanstalt, recorded the presentations and discussion remarks of a colloquium organised by the Institute for Political Science in Frankfurt in September 1967. The director of the institute, Iring Fetscher, succeeded in gathering experts on Marxist theory from West and East Germany, the United States, France, Belgium, Austria, Yugoslavia and Poland. The speakers ranged from Wolfgang Abendroth to Oswald von Nell-Breuning, from Ernest Mandel to Nicos Poulantzas, from Roman Rosdolsky to Elmar Altvater. While the hundredth birthday of Marx’s Capital provided the occasion for the colloquium, remarkably the subtitle of Capital was chosen as the title for the event: critique of political economy. The underlying vision can be found in Schmidt’s paper ‘On the Concept of Knowledge in the Critique of Political Economy’ and also in many of his published discussion remarks. Its implied reading of Marx was soon to become significant for what was later called the ‘new reading of Marx’ (Elbe, 2008) in West Germany and beyond (especially in the works of Hans-Georg Backhaus, Hans-Jürgen Krahl and Helmut Reichelt). Indeed, Schmidt’s discussion with Nicos Poulantzas already anticipates the confrontation of a Frankfurt School-inspired reading of Marx and the Marx interpretation of the Althusser school, as formulated in the extensive critical essays ‘The Structuralist Attack on History’ (Schmidt, 1969) and ‘History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist Theories of History’. In fact, the discussions at the colloquium can be regarded as the starting point for the development of critical theory outside the academic and institutional framework exemplified by the intellectual histories of the Frankfurt School by Martin Jay, Helmut Dubiel, Hauke Brunkhorst and Rolf Wiggershaus.
After the presentation of Roman Rosdolsky, who was unable to deliver in person his ‘Comments on the Method of Marx’s Capital and Its Importance for Contemporary Marxist Scholarship’, and following Nicos Poulantzas, Schmidt took a pointed stand on the question of Hegel’s role in the method of Marx’s critique of political economy. For Schmidt, there is something like an ‘ironic’ repetition of certain passages of Hegel’s logic in Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. For Schmidt, this does not mean, however, that Marx is simply a Hegelian. On the contrary, it is a question of thinking with Marx
the extent to which the specific character of bourgeois society, which in reality ultimately underlies Hegel’s philosophy, does not compel ideas of an ‘existing abstraction,’ and the extent to which the value-form […] does not represent an abstraction carried out by the empirical world itself. The social world contains a conceptual element insofar as it reduces the concrete labour of individuals and their products to quantifiable expressions of general human labour. Although this ‘conceptual’ character of tangible empirical processes brings to the fore certain theoretical parallels to Hegel’s thought, one should not be tempted to consider Hegelian and Marxist dialectics as homologous. (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 26)
What initially looks like the adoption of the speculative premises of Hegel’s logic thus does not entail endorsement of absolute idealism, according to Schmidt, but rather the conceptual doubling of a real process occurring in social practice:
When Marx says that human beings would be portrayed by him as personifications of economic categories, this obviously sounds ‘idealist’, but it is an idealism that the world itself forces on people every day. For the ‘materialist’ aspect of Marx’s economy, if we are to speak in these terms, is precisely the domination of individuals by incomprehensible abstractions, which determines empirical reality as capitalist. One could say that Hegel’s philosophy – which Marx famously accused of making the second into the first and the first into the second – is bourgeois society conceived as ontology. Hegel posits what is already present in the bourgeois mode of production, namely, the demotion of the genetically first, use-value creating concrete labour, to an appendage of what derives from it, abstract labour. (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 27)
How can one comprehend this rule by abstractions without falling into a circle, such that reality can only be described with the aid of Hegel’s categories, which, in turn, are legitimised through their congruence with the very reality that they posited in thought? Hegel’s logic does not reconstruct the thoughts of God before the creation of the world, as Hegel himself wanted, but rather unintentionally expresses the secret of bourgeois society, albeit as ontology. In this manner, and despite its transformation into ontology, Hegel’s philosophy already provides the conceptual means for grasping the objective structures of social reality. Schmidt formulates the critical point of Marxist theory with reference to the theme of his thesis:
The methodologically most important thought of materialist dialectics seems to me to consist in the distinction between nature as first nature – in the sense of the metabolism which grounds human existence – from second nature. This forms the specifically capitalist problem of materialism, while the metabolism between humans and nature is a material fact that can indeed change, yet traverses mankind’s history in general. I believe that we should keep this double foundation of Marx’s argument in mind, and think about whether we are discussing second or first nature. Therefore, whether we are discussing the problematic of alienation, that is, commodity fetishism, or materialism in a much more elementary sense, as is also found in Marx. (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 29)
In his own paper, ‘Zum Erkenntnisbegriff der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie’ (On the Concept of Cognition in the Critique of Political Economy), Schmidt defends Marx against the accusation of economism: ‘As the investigations of Capital show, the one-sided, idealistically deplored “economism” is an abstraction which is accomplished not by the theorist but by social reality on a daily basis’ (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 33). With the characterisation of his theory as a ‘critique of political economy’, Marx makes his specific intention clear:
He understands it in a double sense, first as a critique of the real, political-economic relations which necessarily arise from the capitalist mode of production, and second as a critique of political economy as the comprehensive science of the whole life-process – le monde moral as it was called in the 18th century – in which the theoretical self-understanding of bourgeois society expressed itself most adequately. The empirically given relations of production form the immediate object of Marx’s investigation. But – and Marx emphatically pointed this out against Lassalle – it is not possible to conceptualise this given object in its immediacy. The actual ‘system of bourgeois economy’ is apprehended by means of a ‘critique of economic categories’ as they appeared in the history of economic thinking. In this respect Marx’s critique of capitalism is largely a critique of the theories of political economy, from William Petty to David Ricardo. By keeping the intellectual premises of bourgeois economy in tight focus, he exposes the contradictions between these premises and their social reality, and through them the objective contradictions of social reality itself. Dialectics, therefore, is by no means ‘ontologically’ asserted by Marx. Dialectics is not simply a matter of the process of thought, but of reality, too. However, this reality is not independent of the concepts through which it is grasped. But – different from Hegel – reality is not reducible to its very concept. One should neither suppress the mediation of Marx’s object of ‘critique’ through theory and its historical interest nor deny the fact that the object is mediated in itself, which makes the theory into an objective one. (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 34)
While in Hegel’s logic, ‘the method is the form of movement of the absolute itself and the total sequence of categories coincides with the eternal object’ (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 34), for Marx, the method and object are not identical. Modes of inquiry and modes of presentation must therefore be ‘formally’ distinguished for Marx. Indeed, in his Philosophy of Nature and in certain parts of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel too distinguishes between inquiry, the ‘path of emergence of science’ and presentation, the ‘path in itself when it is complete’, as Schmidt vividly points out. This distinction arises where the material analysed with the aid of ‘concepts of the understanding’ must be converted into ‘concepts of reason’. In summary, Schmidt states ‘that the correct understanding of Marx’s method in Capital stands and falls with the concept of “presentation”’ (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 35). It is at this point that he refers to Lire le Capital [Reading Capital], published in 1965, highlighting the contribution of Jacques Rancière’s ‘The Concept of “Critique” and the “Critique of Political Economy”: From the 1844 Manuscript to Capital’ (Althusser et al., 2016). With reference to Horkheimer’s 1934 article in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, ‘The Rationalism Debate in Contemporary Philosophy’ (Horkheimer, 1993), Schmidt points out that the distinction between inquiry and presentation, between isolated analytical dissection and the integrating presentation of the dissected material, which brings the living whole – grasped by the individual sciences only one-sidedly – to ‘concrete’ unity, corresponds with the methodological self-understanding of the Institute for Social Research at that time (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 36).
Logically, the presentation does not simply follow the course of history. On the contrary, it pursues ‘a path opposite to the real development’. It begins with the finished product of the process of development (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 37). Here, Schmidt provides an important correction to a long-held view that assumes, with Engels, that in the opening chapters of Capital, Marx wanted to depict by means of historical summary a phase of pre-capitalist ‘simple commodity production’. Marx’s presentation does not follow the course of history; it often takes the opposite path: chronological sequence and logical order of presentation do not coincide.
For the Marxist understanding of science as well as for the self-understanding of the founding generation of the Frankfurt School, the distinction between inquiry and presentation as well as the distinction between essence and appearance is constitutive: ‘all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence’ (Marx, 1991: 956; see also Marx, 1998: 804). The distinction between essence and appearance, between the ‘apparent and real movement’, has direct consequences for both the methodological self-understanding of the theory and its substantive content. This becomes clear in contrasting classical political economy and so-called ‘vulgar economics’. Schmidt argues that Marx presents a twofold opposition against classical economics on the one hand and ‘vulgar economics’ on the other hand, starting with Say. This contrast is based on the distinction between society in its immediate appearance and law, appearance and essence, which Marx identifies with the scientific approach:
He acknowledges that the classical economists, and especially Ricardo, despite their class standpoint which regarded the capitalist mode of production as natural and constant, all sought to systematically investigate its ‘inner connection,’ while vulgar economics (that is, all economics since the dissolution of the Ricardo school) moved only within the context of appearance, falling into the crude empiricism of ideological consciousness. (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 40)
However, Schmidt does not declare the difference between essence and appearance formulated here as a methodologically universal principle, but ties it back to a historically specific form of social relations. The non-identity of appearance and essence, constitutive for Marx, does not reside in society as such but rather in capitalist social relations. Pre-capitalist forms of domination are thus more transparent because they ‘are not abstract, but based on personal relations of dependency’ (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 42).
Against the claims to objectivity of economic analysis, particularly by scientists from the Soviet Bloc at the aforementioned meeting, Schmidt asserts alongside the early Engels that the natural laws of capitalist development ultimately depend on the unconsciousness of the participants. According to Marx, the
purpose of economics is precisely for human beings to consciously shape their conditions and not be bound by any second nature, which is much more violent than the first, inasmuch as the subject has objectified itself in it. The more subjectivity is embodied in objectivity, the more ‘consciousness-independent’ it is – thus requiring its critique and abolition. (Euchner and Schmidt, 1968: 57)
Here, it is easy to see that the Frankfurt School reading of Marx took its starting point from very different themes from those of the Parisian Althusser group, which conceived of Marx’s theory as a breakthrough to a scientific analysis of social processes. Schmidt follows a philosophical interpretation, characteristic of critical theory in general, according to which Marx’s theory is to be seen as an attempt to overcome philosophy by its practical realisation (Schmidt, 1973b). The aim of overcoming philosophy is emancipation and liberation, not scientification. From this understanding of Marx’s critique, Schmidt’s argument establishes connections to a philosophy of praxis and, in particular, to the existentialist interpretation of Marx by the early Marcuse (Marcuse and Schmidt, 1973). In contrast to Habermas, Schmidt was not primarily concerned with making certain elements of Marx’s theory scientifically ‘compatible’ through an attempt at reconstruction or through their translation into another theoretical language. His aim was, in essence, to liberate Marx’s theory from the ideological ballast of traditional party Marxism in order to lay bare the critical character of Marx’s theory.
Leaving aside the debate with Nicos Poulantzas at the Frankfurt Colloquium and the mentioning of Althusser and Rancière in a footnote to his own paper at the seminar, Schmidt’s first reference to French structuralism comes in an essay from 1967, titled ‘On History and Historiography in Materialist Dialectics’, published as a contribution to the book Consequences of a Theory: Essays on Karl Marx’s Capital (Schmidt, 1967). Following Lucien Goldmann, Henri Lefebvre and Jean-Paul Sartre, Schmidt understands structuralism, and in particular Lévi-Strauss’ contribution, as proof that the empirical methods of social sciences were gradually displacing the critical role of philosophy for public discourse in France, too. Structuralism was not yet perceived as a rival interpretation of Marx’s theory but as a ‘new eleatism’, an unhistorical form of sociological thinking. In Schmidt’s argument, the new eleatism correspondes to a historical period of state intervention for the sake of preventing the eruption of major conflicts and crises. The structuralist method proceeds from the most general mental structures – supposedly common to all cultures, peoples and societies – and then prescribes them to acting subjects; this runs the risk, in a ciphered idealist form, of turning what Marx critiqued – that is, the rule by abstractions, reified society – into an affirmative normative stance. With Sartre, Schmidt arrives at the conclusion that structuralism would ultimately serve the ideological defence against historical materialism (Schmidt, 1967: 106). Already in 1923, in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács had formulated the crucial objections against the unhistorical or anti-historical essence of bourgeois thinking (Schmidt, 1967: 107). At this point in Schmidt’s intellectual development, he treated structuralism as an object for ideology critique rather than an intellectual challenge.
This changes in ‘The Structuralist Attack on History’, in the volume edited by Schmidt himself, Contributions to Materialist Epistemology. In particular, Althusser’s theoretical rejection of philosophical humanism, his definition of humanism as an ideology, and the dichotomising division of Marx’s work into an ideological phase and a scientific phase are not acceptable to Schmidt. Althusser’s doctrine of ideology (which Schmidt criticised even before Althusser formulated his theory of ideological state apparatuses and the concept of ‘interpellation’) appears to Schmidt as a hardly original recapitulation of Mannheimean ideas. It is at any rate incompatible with the idea of liberating human beings from domination by incomprehensible economic abstractions. Althusser, in fact, discards everything that embodies the emancipatory message of Marxism for Schmidt, and Schmidt places Althusser close to the functionalist systems theory of Talcott Parsons (Schmidt, 1969: 209). Schmidt’s essay, however, focuses mostly on the work of Lévi-Strauss, although he identifies Althusser with Lévi-Strauss’ stance through the collective singular term ‘structuralism’. The key points of his critique originate primarily from Sartre, Lefebvre and Goldmann.
In his 1971 book History and Structure, Schmidt considers Althusser’s reading of Marx as a positive challenge, even though he notes that ‘the “constructive” aspect of the method of Capital can be more adequately grounded in a materialist interpretation of Hegel’ (Schmidt, 1981: 6). At the centre of the debate with the ‘Althusser school’ is the relationship between the logical and the historical. Schmidt emphasises – with Althusser and against traditional Marxist orthodoxy – that the process of cognition is characterised by relative autonomy in the face of its object and does not simply reproduce its historical process (Schmidt, 1981: 32). He combines this with the thesis of the cognitive primacy of the logical rather than the historical. In this context, Schmidt returns to his earlier argument about the difference between the mode of inquiry and the mode of presentation, referring to analogous distinctions between analysis and dialectics in Hegel’s philosophy of nature. In Marx, as in Hegel, the ‘material’ gathered in the individual sciences is to be presented in a rational, i.e., philosophical, form (Schmidt, 1981: 37 ff.).
On the whole, Schmidt agrees with the Althusserians on one of their fundamental concerns: the critique of historicist interpretations of Marx’s work. In Capital, Marx advocates anything but an unreflective historicism that makes knowledge run directly parallel with the chronological sequence of events. Schmidt concurs with structuralist interpreters like Althusser and Poulantzas up to this point. The consensus ends when they deny the constitutive role of Hegel’s Logic for Marx’s economic work (Schmidt, 1981: 61). Indeed, in spite of itself, concerning value-form analysis, Althusser’s pointed formula, according to which the ‘simple only ever exists within a complex structure’, can easily be reformulated into Hegelian terms (Schmidt, 1981: 63).
In the final part of his book, Schmidt discusses the role of Gaston Bachelard and the historical-epistemological work of Cavaillès, Canguilhem and Foucault for Althusser’s understanding of science and the history of science. He highlights the primacy of the logical in the reconstruction of historical processes. Against chronological sequence, Marx himself considers the anatomy of man as a key to the anatomy of the ape (Marx, 1986: 42). Schmidt, however, points to the danger that this methodological principle tends to solidify underhandedly into ontological certainties: ‘What is theoretically secondary for the present becomes null and void’ (Schmidt, 1981: 106). As Marx writes in 1858, ‘The dialectical form of presentation is right only when it knows its own limits’ (Marx, 1987: 505).
Schmidt never published the second volume of History and Structure, to which he repeatedly refers. In Critical Theory as a Philosophy of History (1976), which dates back to a lecture he gave in June 1974 on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Institute for Social Research, he revisits the decisive themes of his debate with Althusser and structuralism. Starting from Horkheimer’s confrontation with Dilthey, Heidegger and the Baden school of Neo-Kantianism, including Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, he explains the thesis of the ‘natural law’ character of history hitherto and the consequences that result for its (action-theoretical) ‘intelligibility’. Finally, his account turns to the historical-materialist notion of supersession [Aufhebbarkeit], which he develops against structuralism as the central historical-philosophical category of critical theory. For a critical theory of society, it is necessary to subordinate the hitherto blind natural power of the process of social production to human consciousness (Schmidt, 1976: 104). With Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Schmidt stressed that ‘those laws can be abolished’ and that the coming realm of freedom would be released from them (Adorno, 1973: 346). Schmidt’s argument is not unique as such. For Rosa Luxemburg, too, political economy comes to a close once the anarchic economy of capitalism makes way for consciously organised relations of social reproduction. That is why, according to Luxemburg, Marx conceived of his economic doctrine as a critique of political economy (Luxemburg, 1955: 491). Similarly, as Bukharin explained in 1920, ‘Theoretical political economy is the study of a social economy based upon the production of commodities, i.e., the study of an unorganized social economy’ (Bukharin, 1979: 57). Only where production is anarchic does social life manifest itself in the form of ‘elementary laws of nature’ independent of the will of individuals or communities, and thus function with the same ‘blind’ necessity as the law of gravity. Schmidt thus recalls that both the older critical theory and even the more reflective authors of orthodox Marxism at the beginning of the century by no means advocated a consistent historical determinism. The laws of capitalist development, as analysed by Marx, do not imply that social analysis should ultimately be pursued with the methods of natural science; rather, they point to a problem. According to Schmidt, critical theory conceptualises the socially constituted lawfulness of historical development that characterises the inverted [verkehrte] and perverted [verrückte] world of capitalist social relations.
In Schmidt’s philosophical works, undogmatic materialism, sensuality, corporeality and the social mediation of nature remain key, as does his insistence on the irreducibility of naturalness to social mediation. He places Marx in a tradition of materialism that does not reduce nature to the dimension of instrumental control but, with recourse to Feuerbach and Goethe, traces another approach to nature. As Horkheimer and Adorno emphasise in their preliminary remark to his thesis:
The dissolution of all reality into mere nature, into atomic particles, or whatever counts as the last component according to the state of science, is by no means unconditional… The quantifying conception of nature as it must prevail in laboratories today cannot immediately be the same as the concept of nature in a humanity no longer divided in itself, no longer entrapped in nature. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2003: 7)
Schmidt’s return to the subject of materialism was not primarily concerned with the reconstruction of Marx’s critique of political economy as a critical analysis of domination by incomprehensible abstractions. Rather, it was concerned with the very idea of materialism as the underlying premise of the critique of political economy. In his later dialogue with Feuerbach, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Freud, Schmidt continued his argument for a non-reductive materialism. He thus remained faithful to the topic of his thesis, where he turned his back on the then dominant debates about Marx. Similarly, his engagement with Werner Post in 1975, titled What Is Materialism?, furthered this trend (Post and Schmidt, 1975). For Schmidt, the touchstone of materialism is not its accordance with the latest state of research in the natural sciences but its capacity for insight into human suffering. When Schmidt deals with nature beyond human control, he is not concerned with a romantic idolatry of nature – this remains ultimately bound to its counter-image in the form of unbridled natural domination – but the insight that nature, in the here and now, must not be hypostatised into a norm.
Schmidt’s philosophising is characterised by an unpretentious proclivity for dialectical formulations. He does not discuss dialectics from the outside – from the perspective of traditional logic, for instance. Rather, he thinks dialectically, formulating his thoughts in dialectical terms, thereby expounding the social nature of capitalist society from within. He was sceptical of attempting an analytical reconstruction of dialectics without dialectical means. Dialectics for Schmidt is a medium of thought, not an object for rational reconstruction separate from the human condition.
What comes into play with Schmidt against Althusser and structuralism as a science of society (which cannot seriously deny the presence of Hegelian motifs and their genetic significance in Marx, but, rather, to put it pointedly, follows motifs of linguistic structuralism for the sake of appropriating Hegel’s objective spirit without Hegel’s metaphysics) is also implicitly directed against certain tendencies within contemporary critical theory. Axel Honneth and Ulrich Oevermann also defend a theory of objective spirit, which they developed by different conceptual means. In their argument, social objectivity does not stand for social domination by incomprehensible economic abstractions. Rather, they treat it as an institutional order or objective structure of meaning. Schmidt, in contrast, keeps the occasionally uncomfortable memory of the negativism of critical theory alive. A theory of social objectivity, spelled out by means of speech-act theory, structuralism or variants of neo-pragmatism, risks resulting in a reified ontology that lacks critical consciousness and emancipatory insight. The step from the negative ontology of social nature to an apologetic ontology of social objectivity would in this manner be misunderstood as a theoretical advance. Against this, and beyond the critique of social objectivity as second nature, Schmidt develops a concept of nature unconstrained by the narrow confines of positivism, even if this means incorporating the metaphysical tradition of Spinoza and its reception by Goethe (Schmidt, 1984) or Schopenhauer’s ‘cryptomaterialism’ (Schmidt, 2004) into the argument.
Schmidt’s critical materialism of second nature opposes both traditional Marxism and the structuralist reading of Marx. The objectivity of the social is not an indication of its rationality but of its socially coercive character. In the concept of a second nature, however, conflicting contemporary interpretations of Hegel’s conception of objective spirit collide, and their tension-ridden character cannot simply be removed by decree. The objectivity of the social – which renders society an object of causal analysis – can be understood in terms of institutions, rules and conventions that acquire their own existence in opposition to the subjective ideas and intentions of individuals, yet without being completely separable from their actions. This raises the question of the extent to which the critical concept of social objectivity and social laws of nature can be extended into a generalised critique of linguistic rules, social conventions and institutional orders, without ultimately reproducing the methodological individualism of liberal theory as a utopian perspective of critique. Schmidt strictly binds the theory of social laws of nature developed by Marx to the structural features of a society characterised by capitalist commodity production. He thus rejects all attempts to understand this critical theory of the social nature of capitalist social relations as an ahistorical doctrine of invariants.
Another question arises in connection with the concept of second nature in light of John McDowell’s discussion of ‘naturalised Platonism’ (McDowell, 1996): how must nature be constructed so that it can be conceived not only as a space of causal relations of determination but also of socially embodied freedom and reason? This is not primarily a question about the conditions under which meaningful action, symbolic structures and normative orders can be causally effective (and how constraints of social nature can be overcome through rational practice). Rather, if we want to follow the conviction that, at least in principle, not only blind natural laws but also insights, reasons and arguments can be effective, then the question at issue is how to conceive nature in a way that makes this possible.
The critical theorist does not conclude that wherever human practice follows rules, these must be forms of alienation and socially produced unconsciousness. However, it is distinctive of this theory that it does not let itself be taken in by the socially objective character of institutions, rules and norms. On the contrary, it uncovers their coercive character and exposes them to critique. Social orders do not constitute an unquestionable primacy; they are philosophically on trial. When Marx describes capital as an ‘automatic subject’, this also implies a fundamental critique. This is true even if the depersonalised social relations of capitalist exchange and exploitation, when compared with pre-modern relations of bondage, are considered as ‘progress in the consciousness of freedom’ (Hegel) or ‘normative progress’ in Honneth’s sense (Deranty, 2009). A critical materialism of second nature is no ahistorical universalised negativism, which from the very start conceives every form of social objectivity only as an expression of reification. It implies, however, an important corrective against the social-theoretical gullibility currently shaping the debate on second nature, as can be seen, for example, from the call for abstracts for the 2017 International Hegel Congress on ‘Second Nature’(Internationale Hegelvereinigung, 2017).
In his philosophical-historical studies, Schmidt did not strive for superficial topicality. He did not shy away from pursuing allegedly esoteric detours through the history of materialism, working through now almost forgotten debates and reintroducing medieval heretics, ostracised precursors and lost strands of the Enlightenment. His works on the intellectual history of critical theory and its political-historical realm of experience are particularly important today, especially if we want to see Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse not just as precursors and instigators of contemporary varieties of critical theory (from communicative reason to recognition theory) but take them seriously in their own – nowadays seemingly old-fashioned – philosophical profiles, even though neither the philosophical materialism of the French Enlightenment nor the philosophy of Schopenhauer are currently en vogue. Schmidt’s engagement with Marx makes it clear that philosophical insights can often be won from intensive examination of the texts themselves and their material content rather than by superficial attempts at bringing them up to date, a task primarily concerned with the adaptation of relevant themes to the guiding ideas of the academic zeitgeist. Schmidt has supplied important impulses for the international discussion of Marx and for a critical concept of materialism. Even though these have not been mentioned in the official track record of critical theory until now, or figure only in the margins, their importance can be found in works outside the narrow specialist community of philosophy. In contrast to both the Althusser school and representatives of the ‘new reading of Marx’ (Elbe, 2008), Schmidt is not simply concerned with the internal reconstruction of the original programme of a critique of political economy. His reference to Marx is not blinded by the systematic character of Marx’s analysis: the grandiose systematic architecture of his theory is the expression of the tragedy of individuals.
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