Horkheimer grounded existential finitude in historical materialism against Heidegger and Sartre

Evidence

In all this there was an echo, which was not heard in his inaugural lecture in 1931, of the Schopenhauerian consciousness of the finiteness, physicality and solidarity of creatures, rather than the activist pathos of German Idealism. It was, in a way, as if an awareness of the finiteness and transitoriness of human existence was being given a historical-materialist backbone. The existential transformation of transcendental philosophy was once again being modified in a sociohistorical direction. Heidegger’s position was that we cannot define Dasein's essence by citing a "what" of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter [eines sachhaltigen Was] . . . its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own', and Sartre's position later on was that there was no such thing as human nature, but that human beings are what they make themselves’. Horkheimer’s view was that `When the sociologist Mannheim speaks of the “being” Man, whose development takes place and is expressed through or within cultural forms, it is hard to know what he is talking about … To the extent that history does not stem from the conscious purpose of the human beings who plan and determine it, it has no purpose.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 203

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions Horkheimer against Heidegger’s Dasein and Sartre’s self-making: human finitude is socially and historically conditioned, not self-constituted.
• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School’s running debate with existentialism and phenomenology, a thread also relevant to later Habermas’s communicative action theory. — connects to: Schopenhauerian finitude consciousness grounded Horkheimer’s historical-materialist critique — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 203; Post-Auschwitz metaphysics was forced to confront material bodily existence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2572; Horkheimer and Adorno rejected history as autonomous substance and grounded theory in social material — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 186 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer and Adorno rejected history as autonomous substance and grounded theory in social material #corroborates (0.82) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 186
• Horkheimer’s critique of Lebensphilosophie defined Critical Theory’s foundations #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 214
• Historical materialism is fundamentally historicist, not metaphysical #expands (0.72)