Horkheimer favored dialectical insight over empirical research into the facts.
Evidence
What Horkheimer stated here was said on the basis of his knowledge of the
dark' writers of the bourgeois period, whom he thought so much of, and it was more or less independent of any particular scientific research. This was one more example, alongside his wide-ranging contribution to Studies on Authority and the Family, and his 1938 study on the change in the function of scepticism,Montaigne and the Function of Scepticism’, of how much faith he put in his dialectical insight into what lay behind the facts, without wasting too much time on research into the facts themselves. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 745
Categorization
- SHARE: A pointed, slightly contrarian observation for anyone interested in the Frankfurt School’s actual relation to empirical method — the ‘critical theory’ founders were more speculative than their institutional framing suggests.
- XREF: connects to: Horkheimer’s dialectics project responded to scientific rationality’s restriction and scientism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 726; Horkheimer’s contempt for systematic empirical analysis undermined collaboration with Kirchheimer — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 976; Horkheimer steered the Institute toward empirical research while retaining theoretical control — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1495 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Horkheimer steered the Institute toward empirical research while retaining theoretical control
#contradicts(0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1495 - Horkheimer’s contempt for systematic empirical analysis undermined collaboration with Kirchheimer
#expands(0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 976 - Horkheimer attacked pragmatism for reducing truth to what conforms to present reality
#expands(0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 308