Horkheimer’s Habilitation rejected Kant’s teleological correspondence between reason and nature

Evidence

The dissertation restricted itself to a discussion, based on assumptions drawn from gestalt psychology and Cornelius’s transcendental philosophy, of the fact that formal purposefulness in nature, the purposefulness of aesthetic objects on the one hand and of organic objects on the other, did not show any accidental and miraculous correspondence between theoretical and practical reason, as Kant had thought. Instead, these were `states of affairs necessarily produced by the connectedness of our consciousness’ which could be conceived of in a purely epistemological way and indicated nothing more than that the realm of ideas and the realm of nature were not in principle separate. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 181

Categorization

• DEFINE: Documents Horkheimer’s early philosophical position: purposefulness as a product of consciousness’s connectedness rather than a Kantian bridge between theoretical and practical reason — a useful reference anchor for his intellectual trajectory.
• XREF: Prefigures the Frankfurt School’s later anti-idealist stance that ideas and nature are not separate realms — a proto-materialist position still framed in gestalt and transcendental terms. — connects to: Horkheimer’s objective-subjective reason distinction evaded the grounding problem — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2168; Adorno’s 1927 Habilitation failed because his supervisor deemed it unoriginal

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer’s objective-subjective reason distinction evaded the grounding problem #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2168