Horkheimer’s dialectical method treats opposed philosophies as essentially identical.

Evidence

In 1936 what was probably Horkheimer’s greatest essay was published: `Egoism and the Freedom Movement: on the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Age’. It was one of the few pieces he wrote which was not concerned with the criticism of other tendencies or with the theory and programme of materialist knowledge. It was a contribution to a materialist theory of society. What can be learned from it about the methods of dialectical social theory? How plausible and how fruitful is it? The essay was dialectical to the extent that pessimistic and optimistic tendencies within bourgeois philosophical anthropology were, in Horkheimer’s critical eyes, not seen as remaining merely opposed to each other, but as transforming themselves into one another, as being essentially identical. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 732

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely demonstrates what Horkheimer’s dialectical method does: collapses opposed positions into identity.
• XREF: connects to: Non-identical thinking requires resisting the identity principle that flattens qualitative difference. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1246; Dialectics works by letting an opponent’s standpoint move itself to contradiction — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 766

Broader Connections

• Non-identical thinking requires resisting the identity principle that flattens qualitative difference. #complicates (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1246
• Dialectics works by letting an opponent’s standpoint move itself to contradiction #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 766