The London-based philosopher John Robinson interviewed me in summer 2022 about my book Street Life and Morals German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime (Reaktion Books, 2021)This is an extract from that interview, which was entitled ‘The Philosophers of Bare Life’.
LC: German Idealism- essentially the legacy of Kant – had collapsed [in Hitler’s lifetime 1889-1945]… In Street Life and Morals I tried to understand the historical and cultural crisis that made it happen…
JR: You look in detail at five philosophers [Heidegger, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno and the early Hannah Arendt]
From where we are now, to those who aren’t very familiar with German philosophy, Walter Benjamin is a shadowy figure, out there on the periphery. But clearly he was very important to those who he was working with. Do you think he has a legacy of his own?
LC: He was a very good intellectual friend to Theodor Adorno and to Hannah Arendt, and he has a huge cultural legacy today, especially as a critic. And he absolutely has a place in the story of the crisis of Kantian philosophy. He’s interested in how we derive meaning from experience. He goes out into the streets of Paris – street life – and his mind fills with objects. Objects in shops, objects in the street. It’s a method related to phenomenology. But Benjamin develops it in an extraordinary way. He says that we extrapolate from those objects and impressions, and create the concepts that give our lives meaning. Kant needed the a priori [concepts embedded in our minds] to understand our experience, but in Benjamin it is experience—[what Kant calls the] a posteriori that comes first.
Benjamin was another philosopher who brought “bare life” into the picture [and this was the real revolution in German philosophy of the 1910s and after]. I thought of Benjamin when I came up with my title Street Life and Morals. He was not exactly homeless, but he moved around (latterly as a Jew in flight from the Nazis) and his existence was often not comfortable. He wandered about Europe as an observer of material culture in constant flux. He wondered how to describe and order it. He liked to talk about “constellations” of meaning, rather than concepts, to account for how we understand the ways things change over time, and can then get reassembled from a different point of view.
JR: Of the philosophers that you look at in detail, Max Horkheimer is the one who is most closely interested in progressing the social sciences. You mention that he wants to update Kant for the Marxism of the 1930s.
LC: To find a bridge between the legacy of Kant and the kind of sociology that would be adequate to theorising about modern society, many philosophers felt Marxism showed the path. Marxism was working with materialist concepts that answered Idealism, that showed its shortcomings. It became a huge influence on the method of Horkheimer and Adorno.
Horkheimer was the more orthodox philosopher of the two. By comparison, Adorno was a composer and musicologist, and his philosophy was marked by a longing for the old Germany which upheld the highest cultural values for art, including literature and music. He had a huge admiration for the atonal Schoenberg, as a model of how something artistically and conceptually new might be made.
Horkheimer did say at the end of his life that, despite being a Marxist, he had always remained true to Kantian principles. He couldn’t give up the idea of personal integrity he found guaranteed in Kant’s moral philosophy: the idea that every human individual has it in his or her power to determine their own moral experience. That was Kant’s idea of moral autonomy, and, as it was absorbed into German culture, it stressed the need of individuals to shape their chosen value-world.
The emphasis on self-creation harked back, once again, to German philosophy’s Greek legacy. But Kant set it out in a peculiarly German theoretical way that was also Christian. According to Kant, the moral law confronts the individual with a free choice. On the other hand, it is the human way of things that individuals incline to choose the good. This is Kant rewriting the Christian idea of free will. There is a kind of moral signpost and, as a human being, you are inclined to go in the direction that would once have been God’s will but is now only what any good human being would choose.
Horkheimer both held on to his moral Kant and found new uses for him, for instance in the 1930s when he worried about how individuals might defend themselves against totalitarianism. We know of course that there’s no defence against brutality. There’s no defence against the destruction of the body. Horkheimer, on behalf of the entire Kantian-Christian-German moral tradition, faces the totalitarian political threat. I suspect his hope was to marry this old ethic with a new decency derived from Marxism, and so combine the old individualism with a new social concern.
In fact, this need to co-opt Kant to meet the greatest German emergency of all – the moral chaos of the Nazi years — lies at the heart of my book.
Find Street Life and Morals on Amazon.
Read the whole interview in The Philosopher Summer 2022, Vol.110, No 3. The Philosopher | Public Philosophy Journal | United Kingdom (thephilosopher1923.org).
Lesley Chamberlain 