![]() ![]() ![]() There, Nietzsche is accused of “maliciously celebrat the mighty and their cruelty” (77) and advocating a “cult of strength” which taken to its “absurd conclusion” as a “world-historical doctrine” results in atrocities like German fascism (79). But the most stringent critique of all appears in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the very same text in which Adorno and Horkheimer also praise him for his insight into the interpenetration of reason and power. At the same time, Horkheimer points out that the master morality Nietzsche articulated in response to the Christian slavishness of the nineteenth century metamorphosed into a projection of the oppressed masses, who having lost their spontaneity lionize the antics of faux-supermen (159–160). In Minima Moralia, a work already so indebted to Nietzsche, Adorno laments that the seemingly inescapable horrors of the twentieth-century transformed the well-known Nietzschean liberatory dictum amor fati into nothing more than a conservative “love of stone walls and barred windows,” the “last resort of someone who sees nothing and has nothing else to love” (98). Nietzsche’s influence and omnipresence were such that Rolf Wiggershaus, noted historian of the Frankfurt School, claimed that the original members of the Institute “find in him, as in no other philosopher, their own desires confirmed and accentuated” (145).ĭespite these clear continuities, we must also take stock of how the early Frankfurt School broke from and, in some cases, condemned Nietzsche. Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969)is a case in point: Marcuse explicitly invokes Nietzsche and the very same “gay science” in order to articulate an aesthetic ethos of liberation. Likewise, Nietzsche and the early Frankfurt School can be linked on account of a shared ethics of radical creation in the face of stupefying conformity. For example, Nietzsche’s aphoristic writing style is the guiding structure for the fragmentary form of Adorno’s Minima Moralia : Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), which he describes as a product of his “melancholy science”-a knowing inversion of Nietzsche’s famous “gay science” (in addition to the Magna Moralia once attributed to Aristotle). The continuities are more than merely thematic, however. ![]() ![]() In this way we might see, as Gillian Rose has argued, Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modernity’s self-undermining, indictment of modern culture, and critique of reason as foreshadowing many of Adorno and Horkheimer’s arguments in Dialectic. He formulated the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power” (36). In Dialectic of Enlightenment(1944), Adorno and Max Horkheimer place Friedrich Nietzsche alongside Hegel in “recogniz the dialectic of enlightenment. The more one looks, the more one finds Friedrich Nietzsche both implicitly and explicitly in the writings of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. As Theodor Adorno himself made clear in a 1963 lecture, “to tell the truth, of all the so-called great philosophers I owe the greatest debt-more even than to Hegel” (172). While no doubt a largely accurate account, this story leaves out a particular voice in the nineteenth-century German philosophical scene that profoundly shaped the Institute’s work. Thus, so the story goes, Frankfurt School forerunners György Lukács and Karl Korsch went beyond vulgar Marxism by looking back to its Hegelian roots and in doing so inspired the Hegelian-Marxism now closely associated with the Institute for Social Research. Ironically, this framework would eventually reify into a scientistic metaphysics of its own. Seeking to transcend Hegel’s heady idealism and wrest his legacy from the politically conservative Right-Hegelians, the so-called Left-Hegelians, among them Karl Marx, re-grounded philosophy in progressive practice by developing a materialist approach to apprehending social reality. A typical genealogy of the Frankfurt School traces the roots of its critical theory back to what Martin Jay calls the “intellectual ferment” of mid-nineteenth-century German intellectual history (41). ![]()
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