Horkheimer held that knowledge’s historical limits give it practical relevance, not relativity
Evidence
The determinedness and limitedness of knowledge are precisely what gives it its significance for the improvement of conditions which are determining and limiting: this was the version of a concrete, existentialist position (although he did not call it this) which Horkheimer was to support emphatically in The Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History as well. A science which took no account of the suffering, misery and limitations of its period would be entirely lacking in practical interest. Anyone who took the historical determinedness of intellectual ideas to be invalidating evidence of their mere relativity and vagueness, rather than evidence of their relevance to current human interests, was only demonstrating a disinterest in the real problems of those mortal human beings who were struggling with the outward afflictions of daily life. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 201
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines Horkheimer’s concrete existentialist stance: determinedness of knowledge as practical significance rather than ideological relativity.
- XREF: Connects to Horkheimer and Adorno’s later Dialectic of Enlightenment and the critique of instrumental reason — the same insistence that truth is practical and historical, not timeless. — connects to: Historical determination of knowledge is evidence of relevance, not of relativity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 200; Unknown reality is a relative historical condition, not a metaphysical unknowable; Absolute Knowledge is knowledge of its own limit, not closed totality