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Max Horkheimer war ein deutscher Sozialphilosoph und führender Kopf der Frankfurter Schule.



✵ 14. Februar 1895 – 7. Juli 1973
Max Horkheimer Foto
Max Horkheimer: 72 Zitate8 Gefällt mir

Max Horkheimer Berühmte Zitate

„Zwischen der Ahnungslosigkeit gegenüber den Schandtaten in totalitären Staaten und der Gleichgültigkeit gegenüber der am Tier begangenen Gemeinheit, die auch in den freien existiert, besteht ein Zusammenhang. Beide leben vom stillen Mittun der Massen bei dem, was ohnehin geschieht.“

Max Horkheimer

„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.“

Max Horkheimer

Dämmerung. Notizen in Deutschland. Oprecht & Helbing, Zürich 1934, S. 239.

„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.“

Max Horkheimer

Zum Begriff der Vernunft. Festrede bei der Rektoratsübergabe der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität am 20. November 1951. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1962, S. 10.

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

Max Horkheimer

Die Juden und Europa. In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Band 8. The Institute of social research, New York 1939, S. 115.

„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.“

Max Horkheimer

[Dankesrede]. In: Reden anläßlich der Verleihung des Lessing-Preises 1971 an Max Horkheimer. [o.V.], Hamburg 1971, S. 26.

„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.“

Max Horkheimer

Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen. Hamburg Furche Verlag 1970, S. 80.

Max Horkheimer Zitate und Sprüche

„Technische Rationalität heute ist die Rationalität der Herrschaft selbst.“

Max Horkheimer buch Dialektik der Aufklärung

Dialektik der Aufklärung, zusammen mit Theodor W. Adorno. Querido Verlag N.V., Amsterdam 1947, S. 145.

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

Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft. Aus den Vorträgen und Aufzeichnungen seit Kriegsende. Herausgegeben von Alfred Schmidt. >Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft< (Teil I dieses Buches) wurde von Dr. Alfred Schmidt aus dem Englischen übersetzt. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1967, S. 155.

„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.“

Max Horkheimer

Zur Idee der Seele. In: Hans Jürgen Schultz (Hrsg.): Was weiss man von der Seele? Erforschung und Erfahrung. Kreuz-Verlag, Stuttgart/Berlin 1967, S. 18.

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

Max Horkheimer

Um die Freiheit. Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1962, S. 27.

„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.“

Max Horkheimer

(Mit Theodor W. Adorno): Vorrede. In: Theodor W. Adorno/Walter Dirks (Hrsg.): Freud in der Gegenwart. Ein Vortragszyklus der Universitäten Frankfurt und Heidelberg zum hundertsten Geburtstag. Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1957, S. IX.

Max Horkheimer: Zitate auf Englisch

“The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. … Psychologically, the father is … replaced by the world of things.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 41-42.

“In the subjectivist view, when ‘reason’ is used to connote a thing or idea rather than an act, it refers exclusively to the relation of such an object or concept to a purpose, not to the object or concept itself. It means that the thing or the idea is good for something else. There is no reasonable aim as such, and to discuss the superiority of one aim over another in terms of reason becomes meaningless. From the subjective approach, such a discussion is possible only if both aims serve a third and higher one, that is, if they are means, not ends.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 6.

“All things in nature become identical with the phenomena they present when submitted to the practices of our laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and interests of society as it is. This view may be compared with that of a criminologist maintaining that trustworthy knowledge of a human being can be obtained only by the well-tested and streamlined examining methods applied to a suspect in the hands of the metropolitan police.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

describing the pragmatist view, p. 49.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 34.

“The characteristic activity of science is not construction, but induction. The more often something has occurred in the past, the more certain that it will in all the future. Knowledge relates solely to what is and to its recurrence. New forms of being, especially those arising from the historical activity of man, lie beyond empiricist theory. Thoughts which are not simply carried over from the prevailing pattern of consciousness, but arise from the aims and resolves of the individual, in short, all historical tendencies that reach beyond what is present and recurrent, do not belong to the domain of science.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 144.

“In the face of the idea that truth might afford the opposite of satisfaction and turn out to be completely shocking to humanity at any given historical moment, … the fathers of pragmatism made the satisfaction of the subject the criterion of truth. For such a doctrine there is no possibility of rejecting or even criticizing any species of belief that is enjoyed by its adherents.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 52.

“Spinoza, for example, thought that insight into the essence of reality, into the harmonious structure of the eternal universe, necessarily awakens love for this universe. For him, ethical conduct is entirely determined by such insight into nature, just as our devotion to a person may be determined by insight into his greatness or genius. Fears and petty passions, alien to the great love of the universe, which is logos itself, will vanish, according to Spinoza, once our understanding of reality is deep enough.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 14.

“If the subjectivist view hold true, thinking cannot be of any help in determining the desirability of any goal in itself. The acceptability of ideals, the criteria for our actions and beliefs, the leading principles of ethics and politics, all our ultimate decisions are made to depend upon factors other than reason. They are supposed to be matters of choice and predilection, and it has become meaningless to speak of truth in making practical, moral or esthetic decisions.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), pp. 7-8.

“No criticism can be brought against a branch of technical science from outside; no thought fitted out with the knowledge of a period and setting its course by definite historical aims could have anything to say to the specialist. Such thought and the critical, dialectical element it communicates to the process of cognition, thereby maintaining conscious connection between that process and historical life, do not exist for empiricism; nor do the associated categories, such as the distinction between essence and appearance, identity in change, and rationality of ends, indeed, the concept of man, of personality, even of society and class taken in the sense that presupposes specific viewpoints and directions of interest.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 145.

“If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Pierce, who has told us that he ‘learned philosophy out of Kant,’ one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

describing the pragmatist view, p. 42.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 22.

“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

“The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 133.

“Thought must be judged by something that is not thought, by its effect on production or its impact on social conduct, as art today is being ultimately gauged in every detail by something that is not art, be it box-office or propaganda value.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

describing the pragmatist view, p. 51.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

“The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas’ or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

describing the pragmatist view, pp. 46-47.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

“In the world of action, we know that it is disastrous to treat animals or human beings as though they were stocks and stones. Why should we suppose this treatment to be any less mistaken in the world of ideas?”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 21.

“The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.”

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Max Horkheimer

"Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129.

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 23.

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 29.

“The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, ‘spleen.’ The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its ‘absurdity’ and ‘perverseness,’ as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way—service for a purpose.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 38.

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), pp. 26-27.

“At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which … offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 133.

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 33.

“Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws—this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. … Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 29.

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), pp. 21-22.

“Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 146.

“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.”

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Max Horkheimer buch Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft

Quelle: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 23.

“With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left. … Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 39.

“The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience … produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 34.

“The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connection in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freefom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort make B follow A.”

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Max Horkheimer

Quelle: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 150.

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