Horkheimer’s anti-metaphysics grew from Nietzsche, Dilthey and Bergson

Evidence

Horkheimer’s hostility to metaphysics was partly a reaction to the sclerosis of Marxism produced by its transformation into a body of received truths. … More important still was the impact of three late nineteenth-century thinkers, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson, all of whom had emphasized the relation of thought to human life. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Traces the intellectual lineage that orients the tradition — Nietzsche/Bergson into Critical Theory rather than the usual Marx-Hegel genealogy. — connects to: Leibniz and Bergson treated temporality as mere immanent continuity; Marcuse’s early work rested on Dilthey’s meaning-centered, not causal, concept of history — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 275; Horkheimer’s lifelong dialectics project opposed both scientism and irrationalist metaphysics — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 726 (+1 more)