Hegel and Horkheimer: the Unfolding of Theory

Hegel and Horkheimer: the Unfolding of Theory
Philosophical Problems in the Social Sciences
Terese Howard
4/16/10

G. W. F. Hegel’s treatment of scientific cognition in contrast to the Understanding in Phenomenology of Spirit, and Max Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical theory have a common critique of staticness and focus on process, as well as turning to interior content over the exterior surveying of content. Horkheimer’s critiques of what he calls “traditional theory” are to some extent an extension of Hegel’s critique of the Understanding. Hegel and Horkheimer both use terms to designate the approaches they are critiquing that refer to the status quo, or the “normal” or “everyday” understanding: the “Understanding” and “traditional theory.” This terminology sets both Hegel and Horkheimer in opposition to the dominate theory of their day.
In the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel articulates what he calls scientific cognition as his preferred method of cognition. While ordinary understanding sees things as static parts, lifeless data that adds up to a whole, scientific cognition gets to the subject-matter itself. Hegel explains that, “in the ordinary view of anatomy, for instance (say, the knowledge of the parts of the body regarded as inanimate), we are quite sure that we do not as yet possess the subject-matter itself, the content of this science, but must in addition exert ourselves to know the particulars” (PoS, 1). For Hegel the ordinary view “has no right to bear the name of Science” (Pos, 1) because it does not get to the life content of the subject. To the ordinary understanding the body is seen as a totality of inanimate parts. In scientific cognition the body is seen with life as the content. The use of the word “life” here emphasizes the dynamic nature of the content. Scientific cognition is the way of getting to the actual content of a subject itself – a content interior to the subject. Life cannot be understood in a static moment. The Understanding never gets inside of the subject to its content, but always stays on the exterior. Hegel explains, “The Understanding, in its pigeon-holing process, keeps the necessity and Notion [concept] of the content to itself – all that constitutes the concreteness, the actuality, the living movement of the reality which it arranges….A table of contents is all if offers, the content itself it does not offer at all” (PoS, 32). By pigeon-holing particular areas of a subject, such as body parts, and taking those as isolated facts, the Understanding keeps isolated everything necessary to the content (which refers to its dynamic relation to other parts, to the whole, to alterity). Neither the necessity nor the concept of the content is grasped when it is treated as static parts. The immanent content which scientific cognition reaches “consists partly in becoming other than itself” (PoS, 32). As scientific cognition looks not just too independent existents but to that which is imminently other than those existents, it unfolds the interior content of these existents in a way that the Understanding does not.
Max Horkheimer’s articulation of critical theory in opposition to traditional theory also emphasizes the interiority of the content as the life of the subject. In the traditional understanding of theory “the order of the world is captured by a deductive chain of thought” (CT, 239). Particulars are treated as truth propositions, independent facts, which create the basis for more general (or universal) truth claims. In traditional thought, theory “is the sum-total of propositions about a subject, the propositions being so linked with each other that a few are basic and the rest derive from these” (CT, 239). So long as the basic premises are true all general conclusions which are derived from those should also be true. This mode of thinking isolates things into propositions which can be evaluated in themselves without any reference to their history or context. Political science using traditional theory makes political truth claims based on claims which are defined as basic truth propositions (i.e. a country thrives with a strong middle class, safety requires weapons…). Once a statement is defined as basic (a process which uses deductive logic to make that claim), all claims which are derived from it must also be true so long as they are only using true claims. Horkheimer’s critique of traditional theory as a totaling of isolated parts through deductive reasoning is much like Hegel’s critique of the Understanding as a “table of contents” rather than the content itself. Traditional theory tells what is true but does not show how it is true. It does not trace its truth past itself. As an “enclosed system of propositions for a science as a whole” (239), traditional theory, like Hegel’s Understanding, only skims over the content, listing it as propositions and stopping there, instead of getting inside of the content itself. Horkheimer’s understanding of the alienation of labor under the paradigm of traditional theory, which draws both from Hegel and Marx, is based in this idea of external truth. Through the division of labor, “the activity of the scholar which takes place alongside all the other activities of a society…[is] in no immediately clear connection with them” (242). Alienation, in this way, is a result of the traditional theory which treats ideas, things, workers, and scholars as isolated producers with no real connection to the process or product.
None of this so far, however, has told us how to get to the content itself, or, much less, what that content is, which for Hegel cannot be handed as such to anyone but must be worked through. In this way one must ask how to get to the content before being able to say what the content is. This necessity of the “how” in understanding the content reveals the difference between traditional theory and critical theory. In asking “how” to get to the content of a thing one is forced to trace back within the thing instead of staying on the surface. For Hegel, and similarly for Horkheimer though with different terminology, the method (scientific cognition) is one of unfolding.
The unfolding process which get to the content itself can be found in Hegel’s incessant triads such as the “in-itself, for-itself, in-and-for-itself” which guide the movement toward knowledge or realization of the Real. The in-itself unfolds with the for-itself in the in-and-for-itself. That is to say, the inner content becomes outer and visa versa through the movement. Hegel explains, “The movement of a being that immediately is, consists partly in becoming an other than itself, and thus becoming its own immanent content; partly in taking back into itself this unfolding [of its content] or this existence of it” (PoS, 32). In becoming other than itself a thing realizes itself such that they can be joined through this unfolding – the “it” and its other as the it-other (or in-and-for-itself). Scientific cognition is a process. The truth of a thing cannot be grasped in a static moment but must be unfolded through time.
Horkheimer holds this same idea of cognition (or theory) as a historical process of unfolding. The process and historical nature of theory is a social process such that “the world of an individual is “a product of the activity of society as a whole” (PoS, 242). Truth propositions are not isolated from the structure of the society that made them. Their truth unfolds through recognizing their process of coming to be. This recognition happens through the critique of capitalist labor divisions. By reconciling with ones alienation from their labor (including the labor of theory in academia) one can move through its own otherness. This reconciliation happens in critical theory through seeing truth as a process of the modes of production, of history, of society – as an entanglement of these forces in a folding and unfolding process. Critical theory approaches truth as irreducible to any single moment. Social and historical factors always give the truth its truth.
Both Hegel and Horkheimer turn inward to the content of cognition or theory by taking the content as an unfolding process. As Hegel looks for the content of cognition in its relationship to its own otherness, thus unfolding the inner content out, so Horkheimer sets forth a theory of theory that looks to its relationship to its own alienation in historical process. Scientific cognition and critical theory stand in opposition to the everyday understandings of the day by taking in the past, present, and future, otherness, and alienation.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, tran. A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press: New York, 1977.
Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: the essential reader, ed David
Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram, Paragon House: St. Paul, 1992.