Max Horkheimer

"The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society."

"In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, … they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind."

"The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is ‘metaphysical’ and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"The more the concept of reason becomes emasculated, the more easily it lends itself to ideological manipulation and to propagation of even the most blatant lies. … Subjective reason conforms to anything."

"The basic ideals and concepts of rationalist metaphysics were rooted in the concept of the universally human, of mankind, and their formalization implies that they have been severed from their human content. How this dehumanization of thinking affects the very foundations of our civilization can be illustrated by analysis of the principle of the majority, which is inseparable from the principle of democracy. In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. … What does it mean to say that “a man knows his own interests best”—how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, “A man knows [his own interests] best,” there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary … to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology. The great philosophical tradition that contributed to the founding of modern democracy was not guilty of this tautology, for it based the principles of government upon … the assumption that the same spiritual substance or moral consciousness is present in each human being. In other words, respect for the majority was based on a conviction that did not itself depend on the resolutions of the majority."

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

"Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea—its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed—has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle … has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform."

"The pathfinders of modern thought did not derive what is good from the law. … Their role in history was not that of adapting their words and actions to the text of old documents or generally accepted doctrines: they themselves created the documents and brought about the acceptance of their doctrines."

"When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle."

"We cannot credit our enjoyment of a flower or of the atmosphere of a room to an autonomous esthetic instinct. Man’s esthetic responsiveness relates in its prehistory to various forms of idolatry; his belief in the goodness or sacredness of a thing precedes his enjoyment of its beauty. The applies no less to such concepts as freedom and humanity."

"Wenn man das Entsetzen der heutigen Welt über die Lustmorde, besonders über Angriffe auf Kinder erfährt, könnte man glauben, dass ihr das Menschenleben und die gesunde Entwicklung des Individuums heilig wäre."

"Wer aber vom Kapitalismus nicht reden will, sollte auch vom Faschismus schweigen."

"Technische Rationalität heute ist die Rationalität der Herrschaft selbst."

"In zahlreichen theoretischen Arbeiten des Instituts [für Sozialforschung] wurde versucht, die Wechselwirkung von Gesellschaft und Psychologie weiter zu verfolgen. Stets freilich haben wir den gesellschaftlichen Druck — das, was [Sigmund] Freud selbst „Lebensnot” nannte — als das Primäre betrachtet."

"Die Entwicklung einer differenzierten autonomen Person wird um so seltener, als sie nicht mehr im selben Maß wirtschaftlich gefordert, ja beim Fortkommen zum Hemmnis wird."

"Philosophie verliert schon deshalb ihren Reiz, weil sie selbst zum Fach geworden ist, nur mit dem Unterschied, daß es niemand so recht brauchen kann."

"Zivilisation bestand weitgehend in der Bildung, das heißt Hineinbildung moralischer Gebote in den Menschen. Je tiefer einem durch Herkunft und Erziehung menschliches Verhalten zur Natur geworden war desto mehr Seele wurde ihm zugesprochen. Achtung vor dem Nächsten, Verantwortungsgefühl, Fähigkeit zur Freundschaft und zur Liebe waren in Moral mit eingeschlossen. Indem der Fortschritt Leben straffer ordnet, das Verhalten reguliert, Phantasie durch zweckvolles, systematisches Vorgehen, positive Affekte durch sichere Reaktionen, Gefühle durch Ratio ersetzt, gleichsam in der Rückschau, ist Seele nunmehr zum emphatischen Begriff geworden, zum Gegensatz der Kälte des auf Technik, schließlich zur Gefolgschaft ausgerichteten Subjekts. Die von Emotionen abgelöste Ratio schlägt um und wird zum Gegenteil von Anima."

"Es gibt keine Definition der Philosophie. Ihre Definition ist identisch mit der expliziten Darstellung dessen, was sie zu sagen hat."

"Die Mutter, die einen Beruf ausübt, ist etwas völlig anderes als die Mutter, deren Lebensaufgabe die Erziehung der Kinder war. Der Beruf verdinglicht ihre Gedanken. Dazu kommt noch etwas anderes. Sie ist gleichberechtigt. Sie strahlt, von Ausnahmen abgesehen, nicht mehr die Liebe aus wie vorher."

"Bereits im 18. Jahrhundert, von der Gegenwart zu schweigen, war der Gang der Wissenschaft wie des Glaubens nicht so sehr durch den Willen zum Guten, als durch das Interesse der Macht bedingt."