Horkheimer attacked positivism and Lebensphilosophie as twin failures of reason.

Evidence

Positivism denied the validity of the traditional idea of reason as Vernunft, which it dismissed as empty metaphysics. At the time of the Frankfurt School the most significant proponents of this point of view were the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, who were forced to emigrate to the United States at about the same time. In America their impact was far greater than the Institut’s because of the congruence of their ideas with the basic traditions of American philosophy. In later years Horkheimer took pains to establish the similarities between such native schools as pragmatism and Logical Positivism. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 243 (#expands, via linked claim)

Horkheimer’s critique was not a mild one. He described the logical positivists as the modern representatives of the nominalist tendency, whose function had now become regressive instead of progressive. The transformation of the specialist sciences, with their ideals of objectivity and exactitude, had betrayed the progressive elements within liberalism by abandoning both the relation to a perceiving subject and the constructive power of reason, which aimed at the complete domination of nature and society. It implied silence in the face of the horrors which the totalitarian inheritors of the reactionary elements of liberalism had brought upon the world. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 204 (#expands, via linked claim)

In all of Horkheimer’s writings on the Lebensphilosophen, three major criticisms were repeatedly made. By examining these in some detail, we can better understand the foundations of Critical Theory. First, although the philosophers of life had been correct in trying to rescue the individual from the threats of modern society, they had gone too far in emphasizing subjectivity and inwardness. In doing so, they had minimized the importance of action in the historical world. Second, with an occasional exception such as Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism, they tended to neglect the material dimension of reality. Third and perhaps most important, in criticizing the degeneration of bourgeois rationalism into its abstract and formal aspects, they sometimes overstated their case and seemed to be rejecting reason itself. This ultimately led to the outright mindless irrationalism of their twentieth-century vulgarizers. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 214 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Both positivism and pragmatism shared philosophical assumptions Horkheimer opposed. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 243; Horkheimer read logical positivism as a regressive nominalism that abandoned reason’s constructive power. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 204; Horkheimer’s critique of Lebensphilosophie defined Critical Theory’s foundations — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 214

Broader Connections

• Both positivism and pragmatism shared philosophical assumptions Horkheimer opposed. #expands (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 243
• Horkheimer read logical positivism as a regressive nominalism that abandoned reason’s constructive power. #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 204
• Horkheimer’s critique of Lebensphilosophie defined Critical Theory’s foundations #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 214