Top Max Horkheimer Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Max Horkheimer Biography

Max Horkheimer (February 14, 1895 – July 7, 1973) was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the 'Frankfurt School' of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason (1947), Between Philosophy and Social Science (1930–1938) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, supported and made other significant works possible.

Read about Max Horkheimer in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Max Horkheimer Quotes

Calvin's theocentric irrationalism eventually revealed itself as the cunning to technocratic reason which had to shape its human material. Misery and the poor laws did not suffice to drive men into the workshops of the early capitalistic era. The new spirit helped to supplement external pressures with a concern for wife and child to which the moral autonomy of the introverted subject in reality was tantamount.

Children, Human, Irrationalism, Material, Men, Reality

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.

Bad, Collapsed, Democracies Have, Opposites, Philosophical, Statement

Pragmatism , in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt.

Intellectual, Trying, Spheres, Counterpart, Belt, Prototype

A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.

Belief, Careers, Interesting, Prison, Titles, Wages

Plato and his objectivistic successors. . . preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.

Awareness, Mankind, Philosophy, Plato, Present, Thinking

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.

Philosophical, Thinking, Ego, Abolition, Impossible

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.

Connection, Connections, Doe, Exist, Perception, World

When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.

Build, Mean, Rational, Reason, Tanks, Yield

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.

Goal, Leading, Politics, Thinking, Views

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.

Blatant, Conforms, Lying, Manipulation, Propagation, Reason

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.

Fate, Men, Class, Man, Metaphysical, Hole

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.

Character, Expression, Life, Science, Theoretical, Theoretical Physics

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 empiricists posits the forms of being as constant.

Conception, Experience, Form, Judgment, Synthetic

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.

Acceptance, Doctrine, Doctrines, Documents, Law, Modern

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.

Law, Men, Obey, Swallows, Thinking

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.

Brotherly, Dangerous, Elements, Humility, Philosophical, Religious

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.

Lying, Thinking, Intellectual, Symbols, Entity, Accepted

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.

Consists, Dark, Differences, Meaning, Metaphysical, Thinking

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.

Father, Ideas, Opposites, Truth, Enjoyed, Criterion

Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.

Advanced, Economy, Facts, Long, Men

1