## CAN CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS BE CRITICAL? A SHORT COMMENTARY ON THIS QUESTION VIA HORKHEIMER'S CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE AND REASON

## Josefine Wikström

The past 10 to 15 years, with a definitive marker of Donald Trump's winning of the US presidential election in 2016, is conventionally characterized as a period haunted by an epistemological crisis. Previously objective truths such as election results, medical judgments and scientific reports are increasingly dismissed. 1 The speed of AI technology's ability to produce deepfake films and authoritarian leaders' attacks on independent journalism have also made this a period that is characterized by disinformation and propaganda. 2 As a consequence, categories such as truth and falsehood, science and non-science, and fundamental, liberal democratic institutions and ideals such as the free press and the freedom of speech have been, and still are, under attack. What is the role of the over 200year-old discipline of aesthetics in this 'age of unreason'? Put differently, what is the status of aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, in the present? This is the topic or philosophical problem proposed for this specific issue of the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics . Rather than answering this question head-on, in this brief commentary, I will attempt to slightly reformulate the problem by confronting aesthetics' understanding of itself as a science of sensible knowledge and aesthetic reason . I will do so with Frankfurt-school thinker Max Horkheimer's more than seventy years ago criticism of what he termed 'the eclipse of reason.' 3 The main argument that I would like  to  make is that contemporary aesthetics has a tendency to operate with an ahistorical concept of reason, and that this has to do with a lack of critique of itself as a discipline of sensible reason, that is with it its own constitutive foundation. If contemporary aesthetics is to continue to be understood as a science of sensible knowledge and aesthetic reason, it needs to operate with a historicallymediated concept of reason. Although contemporary aesthetics have been concerned with economics, technology and other historically-specific aspects, the role of reason has received fairly little comment. I want to suggest that aesthetics needs to be understood, not as a metaphysical discipline or science that uses the same categories  as  it  always  has,  such  as  reason,  beauty,  and  sensibility. Instead, aesthetics, like all other modern scientific disciplines, is historically mediated. Only through this understanding can aesthetics be relevant for itself in the present and the transformations it is now undergoing.

Horkheimer, for many years the director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) did not write about the discipline of aesthetics specifically , although he is probably best-known for co-writing his and Theodor Adorno's critique of mass culture in Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments , published in 1944. 4 That book, as was the case of most of Horkheimer's work, was dedicated to two main things: on the one hand, to questioning the role of a modern concept of reason, and, on the other, to critically examining the borders of science and scientific disciplines, above all, investigating a new kind of discipline, social philosophy. 5 Horkheimer was a harsh critic of dogmatic Marxism as much as of metaphysics, and his thoughts on scientific disciplines and reason are useful in an investigation into the the question of the discipline of aesthetics' understanding of itself as a science of sensible reason, particularly as Horkheimer's early work was written at a time not dissimilar to our contemporary moment, with authoritarian leaders and ongoing economic crises. 6

## CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS AND ITS LACK OF CRITIQUE

Contemporary philosophical and art theory writings-both analytically- and continentally-oriented versions-and those that are identified as writing on aesthetics and/or philosophical aesthetics, share at least two major positions: first, aesthetics should be understood as a branch of philosophy based on knowledge of the sensible and as the privileging 'of aesthetic reason or experience'; 7 second, that aesthetics should be thought of as the overarching discipline that describes human beings' relationship to the fine arts, and which, it is argued, was made intelligible via the discipline of aesthetics. 8 The primary reference used in this narrative is Alexander Baumgarten's 1735 introduction of the term 'epistêmê aisthetikê': the science of what is sensed and imagined, a conflation of the ancients' aisthéta and noéta (things of sensibility and of the mind). However, it is Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and the section on 'Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgement'-in which Kant famously states that the judgement of taste is aesthetic-that have institutionalized the discipline of aesthetics as concerned with sensible forms of knowledge, with art and with the idea of aesthetic experience. Such a position is prevalent in the major contemporary introductions to the field, by both analytical philosophers such as Paul Guyer and by more continentally-oriented thinkers such as Thierry de Duve. Whereas Guyer writes that 'the core subject matter of the discipline of aesthetics [is] the study of the nature and the value of aspects of the human experience of art (and sometimes) nature,' 9 de Duve maintains that Kant's aesthetic judgments are as relevant today as they were in 1790, and that they should be applied to  contemporary art. 10 Also,  Marxist-leaning  thinkers,  such  as Sianne Ngai-who mediate the role of art through various capitalist periodisations-use Kant's idea of the aesthetic judgment as a 'formalizing activity' to be used on artworks (e.g. Henry James's novels, and  broader  cultural  forms  such  as  musicals,  for  e.g.  the  1959 Broadway musical Gypsy). 11

These rather different thinkers rely on a concept of aesthetics that is found in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement , and use it as a lens through which to view art, as well as broader cultural phenomena. As such they opt out the first definition of aesthetics that Kant gave in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). As is well-known, and as has been commented on by many, 'aesthetics' famously function in two ways in Kant's work. In the Critique of Pure Reason , aesthetics is a part of cognition, since aesthetics is merely the name of the intuitions of space and time needed for cognition to happen. As such, aesthetics is a crucial element in all accounts of human knowledge and experience, and is part of Kant's transcendental critique and self-critique of reason. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment , aesthetics is thought of differently . Here, aesthetics is dedicated to aesthetic judgments that are different from logical and moral judgments. 12 Here, the critical move lies in the aesthetic judgment's indeterminacy and groundlessness, since it pleases without a concept. 13 Yet, as has been debated, the question is whether art is included in the aesthetic judgment, since Kant hardly ever mentions art, but instead used examples from nature. 14 Here, the debate comes down to the oft-cited footnote in The Critique of Pure Reason , where Kant states that there cannot be any science of art, only critique. 15 To be critical then is to make a standpoint from which to critique the limits of reason. Contemporary aesthetics focuses solely on aesthetics as outlined in the Critique of the Power of Judgment and so may run the risk of becoming a placeholder for a constant ahistorical unification of the sensible and the reasonable. Whereas what is needed is a critique of reason, perhaps in the sense that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason posed, that is, as a critique of the conditions of reason itself.

Whereas thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno famously thought of art as a historically mediated concept, they did not propose a philosophical aesthetic in a sense that followed the tradition discussed above. Rather they followed Hegel's dictum that 'aesthetics is improper (unpassend) and superficial (oberflächlig) […] since it refers to the beautiful in general and not to the beautiful as artistic creation.' 16 Benjamin and Adorno instead worked with a historical concept of the philosophy of art, most notably in Benjamin's 1920  inaugural  thesis, The  Concept  of  Art  Criticism  in  German Romanticism . 17 However, although they did present a critique of art, they did not write specifically about the concept of reason. Their colleague, Horkheimer, in his turn, did not work much on art and/ or aesthetics, but wrote a lot about the concept of reason and his critique of it. Therefore, what follows is an attempt to consider the discipline of aesthetics through Horkheimer's concept and critique of reason. What might Horkheimer's critique of reason say about the current changes in reason? In what way may it develop contemporary aesthetics in critical directions?

## HORKHEIMER'S CRITIQUE OF REASON

Two main thoughts that appear in Horkheimer's critique of reason and science may be useful here. First, Horkheimer works with a historically-mediated conception of science, that is, science as intrinsically connected with society and its crises, yet which is not validated by its applicability to society (for example, by its ability to solve its crises). Second, and as is popularized in the Dialectic of Enlightenment , he holds that the Enlightenment's concept of reason with modernity has lost its dimension of self-critique, and instead become irrational  and  thus  must  be  criticized.  As  Adorno  and Horkheimer explicitly stated, 'Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.' 18 Both these thoughts in Horkheimer's work-science as a historically-mediated discipline integral to society and the necessary critique of an enlightenment concept of reason-are relevant to the question of the role of aesthetics as a scientific discipline concerned with aesthetic or sensible reason. The idea that science is entwined with society was formulated by Horkheimer as early as in an essay of 1932, to which I will turn first, and I will then unpack the idea of subjective reason in his later writings, and to finally come back to contemporary aesthetics as a discipline of sensible knowledge specifically suited to an understanding of art and culture.

'Notes on Science and the Crisis' was originally published in the Institute's own journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , and is one of many essays in which Horkheimer attempts to outline a new methodology for his social philosophy, a philosophy that may be approached only through the simultaneous application and negation of the social sciences as a certain kind of philosophy, and thus it is as critical of positivism and empiricism as of metaphysics. And although, as will become clear, it is a philosophy that cannot be judged on its use to society, it is a philosophy that stands in relation to  society,  and  that  ultimately  attempts  to  make  life  better  for humans. As he stated in his inaugural lecture at the Institute one year earlier, in 1931:

Its ultimate aim is the philosophical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human fate-the fate of humans not as mere individuals, however, but as members of a community. It is thus above all concerned with phenomena that can only be understood in the context  of  human  social  life:  with  the  state,  law,  economy, religion-in short, with the entire material and intellectual culture of humanity. 19

In 'Notes on Science and the Crisis,' science's dialectical relationship to society is developed, and specifically so to the then current political crisis of Germany at the time. By 1932 the Nazi party had become the second-biggest in Germany, and the country had suffered from economic depression for some years, a crisis to which the essay refers. Horkheimer divides his essay into ten bulleted points, and begins by establishing science as one of human beings' productive capacities, and therefore as one of society's means of production, which has supported the industrial system, for example, and therefore is a means of establishing social value in a society. Y et, as Horkheimer points out in the second note, this does not mean that just because science (as a productive means) contributes to the social reproduction of society, science can not be legitimated based on doing so. Exterior purposes must not be used to judge whether or not a scientific statement is true. Instead, whether something is true lies within the concept of science at a given historical development in time. 'It is not for social interests to decide what is or is not true; the criteria for truth have developed, rather, in connection with progress at the theoretical level.' 20 That is, science is a historical category, and as such, always connected to social relations, yet utilitarian ends must not determine the truth claims of such science. As should  be  clear  from  this  short  summary,  Horkheimer  did  not support a sociology of knowledge, but rather criticized it, both from the standpoint of metaphysics and from the standpoint of sociological empiricism.

After criticising the idea that science should be judged on its usefulness to society, Horkheimer dialectically goes on to argue that the present economic crisis clearly shows how scientific developments have not been able to make use of the wealth they have generated, and the real needs of mankind, which in its turn hinders the development of science. Instead, those who do engage in rational thinking have either been subordinated to its application in industry or have been relegated as merely useful for the psyche. By confining rational thinking to mere applicability and to 'matters of the soul' scientific thinking has not been able to grasp society in its totality, Horkheimer contains.

Though Horkheimer fiercely criticises the modern idea of science and its instrumental reasoning, in his essay there is no nostalgia for earlier conceptions of science. In his fifth note, he argues against what he understands as an early modern idea of science that is mechanistic and that merely relies on classifying and generalizing phenomena. For Horkheimer, society is a dynamic structure that cannot be only recorded. Such mechanistic methods in science led to polarised ideas, such as 'the unchanging relationship of subject and object; the rigid distinction between mind and nature, soul and body, and other categorical formulations.' 21 Although throughout his writings Horkheimer is critical of metaphysics, historically he also contends that metaphysics in fact enabled science to take a broader standpoint on society in a way that mechanistic science failed to do. This had useful results, particularly for what Horkheimer calls 'the founding of sociology of knowledge.' 22 However, the problem, as is always the case for Horkheimer when it comes to metaphysics, is that it did not consider the causes of the different crises in society. Instead, it merely made the structure of society ahistorical, and thereby  essentialized  man  and  the  social  processes.  Thus,  for Horkheimer, metaphysics is as ideological as mechanistic views of science  that  it  criticizes,  since  it  fails  to  see  the  contradictory tensions within society.

The internal tension between a mechanistic and a metaphysical idea of science has led to the present contradictions in science that are inseparable from the conflicts in economics. Such conflict is caused by the  dominance  of  monopolies,  the  disorganization  of  world economics and the fact that despite the affluence generated by capitalism, human needs it lacks a theoretical basis from which to act, which makes its results arbitrary, and second, that it is applied with no knowledge of society and the way in which it is entangled in society. 'For science too, is determined in the scope and direction of its work not by its own tendencies alone but, in the last analysis, by the necessities of social life as well.' 23

Horkheimer ends his essay by arguing, as he does in most of his writings, for a viewpoint where he favours idealism against metaphysics. According to Horkheimer, the former was incorrect in hypostatizing the human mind and the absolute, but at least ascribed intellectual capacities to human being, which metaphysics failed to do. He also contends that the current crisis in science is inseparable from the general crisis of economics and of society. Science has been limited to being a merely productive force and a means of production. Therefore, it has not even been able to address the social value of human life, since people still suffer. 'Understanding of the crisis of science, depends on a correct theory of the present social situation; for science as a social function reflects at present the contradictions within society.' 24

The main argument of 'Notes on Science and the Crisis' is the dialectically difficult idea that science must be understood as inseparable from society, yet must not be judged on the basis of its application and use to societal issues. This is a concept of science as self-reflexive and as aware of the historical conditions according to which it works, and which therefore eludes any absolutizing of concepts or ideas. Horkheimer's notes do not give a more concrete idea of what this science might be, but the critique of metaphysics and of materialism opens the way to Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason in his writings in the 1940s.

## SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE REASON

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno criticises an enlightenment concept of reason that during its transformation in modernity-through an overbelief and mechanistic view of technology, a lack of self-critique and so on-has become fully instrumental, and therefore irrational. A similar concept of reason was developed by Horkheimer in Eclipse of Reason (1946), a book based on a series of lectures that he delivered while in exile during the spring of 1944 at Columbia University, where the Institut für Sozialforschung was relocated. As Horkheimer states in the preface, the aim of the book is 'to inquiry into the concept of rationality that underlies our contemporary industrial culture, in order to discover whether this concept does not contain defects that vitiate it essentially .' 25 In  the  book's first chapter, entitled 'Means and Ends,' Horkheimer introduces a distinction between subjective and objective reason (a distinction that Horkheimer also relates to different historical phases), which connects to his critique of science in his 1932 essay, discussed above.

Subjective reason is a form of reason that classifies, deduces, and generalizes phenomena, not unlike the early modern idea of science that Horkheimer criticised in 'Notes on Science and the Crisis.' Therefore, subjective reason is mainly concerned with means, and little or not at all with ends. Rather than questioning the ends in themselves, subjective reason's only purpose is 'the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory. It attaches little importance to the question whether the purposes as such are reasonable.' 26 Therefore, subjective reason is incapable of imagining that something can be reasonable merely for its own end. 'Ultimately subjective reason proves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end.' 27 In contrast to subjective reason, Horkheimer presents objective reason as concerned with ends, and which understands itself, 'as a force not only in the individual mind but also in the objective world-in relations among human beings and between social classes, in social institutions, and in nature and its  manifestations.' 28 Objective  reason  does  more  than  merely regulate means in relation to ends: objective reason is 'the instrument for understanding the ends, for determining them.' 29

Historically, Horkheimer argued for subjective reason as a more recent phenomenon of modernity, whereas objective reason may be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and was further developed by Scholasticism and German idealism. These systems were founded on an objective theory of reason that 'aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all being, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a man's life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions.' 30 For Horkheimer, the aim of objective reason has always been to create a structure outside of itself, an objectivity of its own. For example, this is what happened with Platonism, where 'the Pythagorean theory of numbers, which originated in astral mythology, was transformed into the theory of ideas that attempts to define the supreme content of thinking as an absolute objectivity ultimately beyond, though related to, the faculty of thinking.' 31

In his 1932 essay, Horkheimer emphasizes the economic crisis and its  relationship  to  scientific  development,  but  in  the Eclipse of Reason , the main problem outlined is that the crisis of scientific development-its eclipse-is that it has lost its ability to achieve the objectivity it needs. Instead, reason has become subjectivized by being used merely for fulfilling unquestioned ends through specific means. Therefore, the objective concept of reason erased its self-critique and its legitimacy. Horkheimer's two thoughts-that objective reason has been subjectivized and that science stands in a dialectical relationship to society-are relevant when we return to the role of aesthetics-a science of sensible reason-and its relationship to contemporary ideas of reason.

## PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS

As Horkheimer notes in the preface to his essays on critical theory, all his writings are written for specific historical circumstances, and must never be used dogmatically, but must be mediated historically in the present. This goes together with his understanding of reason and science as historical categories and cultural forms mediated by other societal forms, such as the state, economics, and religion. To return to the question of aesthetics via Horkheimer's critique of reason and science, some preliminary, non-dogmatic, remarks may be made.

First,  if  we  take  aesthetics-as  may  be  seen  all  the  way  from Baumgarten to today's analytical, continental and even Marxistoriented thinkers about aesthetics-as something like a science of sensible reason, and that enables the thinking of the fine arts, we must critique the historical concept of reason currently at work in the contemporary moment, what Horkheimer calls subjective reason. This means questioning how ideas such as liberalism and freedom are understood in present authoritarian and far-right politics in Europe and elsewhere. It further implies investigating the current 'age of unreason' by critically questioning the several economic crises in the West that have occurred since 2008, and the relations of these to authoritarian leadership. Yet, this does not mean that aesthetics as a discipline should be seen as one to be used by capitalist states or by positivist Marxists, either, for example, in the name of profit or scientific useability . In short, if we take a self-critique of aesthetics as a science of the sensible, or as aesthetic reason, to be possible, this means understanding aesthetics as a science whose relevance hinges on its self-awareness of being re-lated to the broader dynamic social structure that makes up society and its institutions, such as capital, the state and religion.

Furthermore, if the 'subjective reason' of today is rooted in illiberal ideas of politics (as shown by the restriction of the freedom of expression  and  the  diminishing  of  science  in  the  past  decades) aesthetics must be used to question the political foundations of such politics.  Second,  following  Horkheimer's critique of subjective reason and science, it would imply that contemporary aesthetics is critiqued specifically as a science or regime of the sensible. That is, contemporary aesthetics would have to question the fundamental foundations of aesthetics itself as has been outlined since the 1700s. Can aesthetics hold the self-critique that it partly evaded when it opted out Kant's self-critical turn in the First Critique ? Can aesthetics be critical? We see that although even sophisticated and, in many ways, crucial contemporary thinkers such as Sianne Ngai analyses new aesthetic categories such as the gimmick, she still holds on to Kant's aesthetic judgment as a placeholder for such an aesthetic judgment. Yet, can an aesthetic judgment such as the gimmick pose a critique of itself as an aesthetic judgment, that is, can it produce another form of objective reason? I do not have the answer here in contemporary aesthetics there seems to be a reliance on an idea of aesthetics, in the sense of what Horkheimer would call subjective reason, that is, a presupposition of not only what reason is, but what aesthetics is, as a counterpoint to what reason is. Even if we take aesthetics as a critical position (as Kant outlined in the Critique of the Power of Judgment ), what still seems to be missing in contemporary discussions of aesthetics is the reliance of such a position on aesthetics itself as aesthetic reason.

In short, contemporary aesthetics can and should be critical. It may be so, if it poses a critique of itself as a discipline of sensible knowledge and work out the implications of this in relation to contemporary ideas of reason. Only through such a self-critique can it then make a development of its own objective structures and reason, yet an objective reason that is self-critical, never stuck in metaphysical categories and thus always has an understanding of itself and its categories  as  historically  mediated.  This  is  what  Horkeheimer's critique of reason can teach aesthetics, that is, it can critique itself and thus pose that criticism outwards. Thus, and to return to the discussion surrounding Kant's two distinctions of aesthetics, I would argue that, regardless of whether aesthetics is to be understood as a critique of, or an aspect of reason-a sensible form of reason-neither aesthetic knowledge nor reason may be thought of in terms of unmediated categories of aesthetics as a discipline. Whether or not contemporary aesthetics may be critical or hinges on a critique of itself and its foundation as a science of sensible reason.

- 1 Lee MacIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2018).
- 2 Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Post-Truth, FakeNews and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood (London/New York: Routledge, 2019).
- 3 Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2013 [1947]). See also James Schmidt, 'The 'Eclipse of Reason' and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,' New German Critique 100 (Winter 2007): 47-76.
- 4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- 5 See, for example, Chapters 4-6 in John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 141-243.
- 6 Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge, Oxford and New York: Polity Press, 2021); Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (London: Yale University Press, 2023).
- 7 J.M. Bernstein, 'Introduction,' in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics , ed. J.M. Bernstein (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), vii.
- 8 For various accounts of the development of aesthetics as a discipline, e.g., Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics , Volume 1 (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Bernstein, Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics ; Terry Eagleton, 'The Ideology of the Aesthetic,' Poetics Today 9, no. 2 (1988): 327-338; Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents , trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press 2009 [2004]). Notably. Rancière uses the term 'the regime of aesthetics,' rather than 'discipline.'
- 9 Guyer, A History …, 1.
- 10 Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large , Volume I, Art, Ethics, Politics (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2018).
- 11 Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
- 12 See, for example, Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (London: Blackwell, 1995); Cassin, Barbara et. al. eds. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2014).
- 13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , eds. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §1-9.
- 14 Karl Axelsson, Camilla Flodin, and Mattias Pirholt, eds., 'Introduction' in Beyond Autonomy in EighteenthCentury British and German Aesthetic (London: Routledge, 2021): 4; Casey Haskins, 'Kant and the Autonomy of Art,' The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 43; Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 43.
- 15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 2 I IB 3 5.
- 16 Dictionary of Untranslatables , 15.
- 17 For one of the best introductions to this work by Benjamin, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 'Introduction to Walter Benjamin's 'The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,' Romanticism 31, no. 4, (Winter, 1992): 421-432.
- 18 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , 2.
- 19 Max Horkheimer, 'The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research,' inaugural lecture given in 1931, Max Horkheimer Archive, last accessed March 13, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ horkheimer/1931/present-situation.htm.
- 20  Max Horkheimer, 'Notes on Science and the Crisis,' in Critical Theory: Selected Essays Max Horkheimer , trans. Matthew J. O'Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 1972), 3.
- 21  Horkheimer, 'Notes on…,' 6.
- 22  Horkheimer, 'Notes on…,' 6.
- 23  Horkheimer, 'Notes on…,' 8.
- 24  Horkheimer, 'Notes on…,' 9.
- 25  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , vii.
- 26  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 1.
- 27  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 2.
- 28  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 2.
- 29  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 6.
- 30  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 2.
- 31  Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 4.