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“Absolutized Logic is Ideology”Three German Perspectives on Analytic Philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s

D. Timothy GoeringRuhr-University of Bochum

[email protected]

Abstract

This essay wishes to probe why in the 1960s and 1970s the German historical discipline did not integrate debates promoted by analytic philosophy into its own debates about theory of history (Geschichtstheorie), even though the topics debated by both camps were strikingly similar. I concentrate on the so-called Positivism Dispute, the Ritter School and research group “Poetik und Hermeneutik” (Poetics and Hermeneutics) and show how some of the writings of analytic philosophers were received and discussed. I conclude by suggesting that most German historians and philosophers did not prin-cipally object to the assertions or philosophical arguments made by analytic philoso-phers, rather they rejected the ethical posture or intellectual deportment attributed to the practice of analytical philosophy. The ideal of systematizing the facts of the world into a coherent system was rejected on the grounds that it postulated a moral self, ill-suited to engage the modern world.

Keywords

analytic philosophy – Positivism Dispute – Ritter School – Poetik und Hermeneutik

A first version of this paper was presented at the conference “Philosophy, Theory and History in Germany since 1945” that took place at the Ruhr-University Bochum in September 2014. I would like to express my gratitude to Mark Bevir, Jörn Rüsen, Michael Beaney, Chris Lorenz, Doris Gerber, Admir Skodo and the other participants of the conference for commenting on a draft of this paper that was presented at the conference.

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journal of the philosophy of history (2016) 1–25

1 Introduction

One of the most fascinating sources for those interested in understanding the relationship between Anglo-American analytic philosophy and European con-tinental philosophy, is undoubtedly Ernest Nagel’s article “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe”, published in January 1936 in The Journal of Philosophy. Unbeknownst to the author, the article resembles a 19th century travel report, in which a young American travels through the foreign lands of Europe in an effort to understand the doings of other peoples. “I am very conscious that in this paper”, Nagel conceded humbly at the out-set, “I am reporting less what certain European schools of philosophy profess, and more what I got out of a year’s study abroad.”1 During his stay in Europe in 1935 he traveled to the universities of Cambridge, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw and Lwów and documented a delightful American view on analytic philosophy before it had made inroads into American philosophy department. “European analytical philosophy,” Nagel remarked, “is influenced little by American winds of doctrine, in part because American writings are not easily accessible, and in part because American thinkers are not sufficiently analytic for European purposes.”2 Bearing in mind his studies in America he could only marvel at the “devotion to disinterested study”3 at Lwów and at the very sober analytic mindset at Cambridge. And he recounts with gentle humor a story he heard “of a Chinese visitor to Cambridge who hoped to learn from [G. E.] Moore the nature of the universe, but to his mock-dismay learned instead a considerable amount about the correct English usage of certain words.”4

There are many fascinating observations that Nagel makes, but of special interest here is his perception of what he calls the “sociological motivations”5 of the European analytic philosophers. In Vienna for instance he detected a serious tension between what he called “speculative and analytic philosophy.”6 He writes: “I am persuaded that this tension exists not merely because tradi-tional speculative philosophy frequently cultivates mystification and conscious irrationalism in matters of strict philosophy, but because it has repercussions

1 Ernest Nagel, ʻImpressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe Iʼ, The Journal of Philosophy, 33, 1 (1936), pp. 5–24, here p. 5.

2 Ibid., here p. 9.3 Ibid., here p. 8.4 Ibid., here p. 16.5 Ibid., here p. 16.6 Ibid., here p. 9.

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upon social theory and practice, as recent events have amply shown.”7 And then he goes on to note that: “Analytic philosophy has thus a double function: it provides quiet green pastures for intellectual analysis, wherein its practi-tioners can find refuge from a troubled world and cultivate their intellectual games with chess-like indifference to its course; and it is also a keen, shining sword helping to dispel irrational beliefs and to make evident the structure of ideas. It is at once the pastime of a recluse and a terribly serious adven-ture: it aims to make as clear as possible what it is we really know.”8 Nagel’s account of European analytic philosophy in 1935 as an escapist adventure with covert but nonetheless explosive political implications could be questioned. What interests me here about his account, however, is not what but how he describes the philosophical movements he encounters. I would not like to fol-low his characterization of analytic philosophy, however I believe his mode of inquiry is worthwhile for historical analysis.

In this essay, I wish to probe why in the 1960s and 1970s German academic culture and specifically the German historical discipline did not constructively integrate debates promoted by analytic philosophy into its own debates about philosophy or theory of history (Geschichtstheorie), even though the topics debated by both camps were strikingly similar.9 Just like Nagel, I want to keep the “sociological motivations”10 and the content of philosophical debate in focus at the same time, without privileging one at the expense of the other. And just like Nagel, I will also go on a journey and take three stops. My first stop will be Tübingen in 1961. It is hard to underestimate the influence of the Frankfurt School in the 1960s and I will therefore concentrate on the so-called Positivism Dispute which began at that time. My next stop will be Münster. If the Frankfurt School was on the left of the political spectrum, then the philo-sophical school in Münster grouped around Joachim Ritter was on the right, “liberal-conservative”11 political spectrum. I will especially discuss Ritter’s, Odo

7 Ibid., here p. 8.8 Ibid., here p. 9.9 I am not suggesting or implying a German Sonderweg here. Germany is most likely no

exception. Analytic philosophy had little impact on theory of history in other countries as well. But the question is not where, but rather why it failed to have an impact. The non-relationship between analytic philosophy and theory of history needs explaining and this is best done in a close cultural and national context. And that is why I will concentrate on Germany here.

10 Ibid., here p. 16.11 For the concept liberal-conservative see: Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die

liberalkonservative Begründung der Bundesrepublik, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).

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Marquard’s and Hermann Lübbe’s positions. Finally, my third stop will be the Reichenau Island in 1970. Every other year from the 1960s until the 1990s an academic research group (‘Forschergruppe’) called “Poetics and Hermeneutics” met there initiating a host of debates in the German academe. I will especially highlight one conference organized by Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel which took place on the Reichenau Island in 1970. Once again, my goal with all these “stops” is to show how some of the writings of analytic philoso-phers (of history) were received and discussed, while keeping my eyes open for the “sociological motivations” as well as the content of the discussions.

2 The Positivism Dispute

In August 1961 a number of well-known sociologists and philosophers met in Tübingen for a conference held by the German Sociological Association. After a number of discussions in the past, a discussion of the philosophical founda-tions of sociology seemed an appropriate point of departure for making clear the existing differences between Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno. In fact, the Tübingen-discussion was a silent continuation of the one whose first round had taken place between the Max Horkheimer and the Vienna Circle already in the thirties, under the heading “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics”.12 It was here that the label “positivism” was used to attack what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno viewed as a dubious and potentially dangerous philo-sophical movement.

Many of the differences between Popper and Adorno were not merely bound to the realm of sociology, but were inherently linked to questions of philosophy of history. Popper’s famous article, and later book, The Poverty of Historicism had been published four years prior to the conference of the German Sociological Association in Tübingen.13 And both of the volumes of

12 See: Max Horkheimer, ʻThe Latest Attack on Metaphysics (1937)ʼ, in Max Horkheimer, ed., Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum Pub. Corp., 1982), pp. 132–187.

On the early roots of the Positivism Dispute see: Hans-Joachim Dahms, Positivismus-streit: Die Auseinandersetzungen der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus und dem kritischen Rationalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), p. 16f; Hans-Joachim Dahms, ʻPolitisierung der Wissenschaft: Die drei Positivismusstreiteʼ, in Reinhard Neck (ed.), Was bleibt vom Positivismusstreit?, (Frank-furt, New York, 2008), pp. 19–40; Peter M. R. Stirk, ʻThe Development of Post-War German Social and Political Thoughtʼ, History of European Ideas, 39, 1 (2013), pp. 19–34.

13 The Poverty of Historicism was first written in 1935 and was read as a paper at a meeting at Alfred Braunthal’s house. Parts of it were published in 1945. Later it was published in full



his The Open Society and its Enemies had been published in German at roughly the same time.14 Due to these works, it was naturally expected that in Tübingen Popper would play the role of a no-nonsense critic of a sociology clothing itself in the garb of Hegelian philosophy of history. And Adorno’s and the Frankfurt School’s allegiance to Hegel was well known.15

In a revealing letter, written by Hans Albert to Karl Popper in May 1961 before the conference in Tübingen convened, the tension in the German cli-mate becomes quite apparent. Albert wanted to warn Popper how he might be received by his German audience. “The group around [René] König,” he wrote, “is likely to be the one who will be most on your side, [Helmut] Schelsky will probably distance himself a little and [Theodor] Adorno will be very much against you on some points if he thinks he must see you as a ‘positivist’. He will probably recognize the difference between your positivism and the typi-cal positivistic approach, but only if you emphasize it clearly.”16 Later in his letter he once again warned Popper about Adorno and the Frankfurt School. “They are strongly influenced by Hegel and Marx”, he wrote. “Adorno com-bines empirical social research with social-philosophical speculation in a rather peculiar way. [. . .] His opinions are essentially at least to be viewed as historicist in the meaning of The Poverty of Historicism.”17 Everything seemed set for a showdown between Popper and Adorno. And many in the audience of the conference in Tübingen braced themselves to witness a heated debate between the two. But what actually followed surprised many in the audience.

Remarkably both talks were strikingly alike in content and the following debate did not bring about a Hegelian thunderstorm.18 It was true that Adorno

as a book, first in English then in German. For this information see: Karl R. Popper, Das Elend des Historizismus (5th edn, Tübingen, 1979), pp. VII ff.

14 Karl R. Popper, Der Zauber Platons, (Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde, vol. 1, München, 1957); Karl R. Popper, Falsche Propheten: Hegel, Marx und die Folgen, (Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde, vol. 2, München, 1958).

15 For the role that Hegel played for Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno see: John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 349ff.; Alex Demirovic, Der nonkonformisti-sche Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 623ff.

16 Hans Albert and Karl R. Popper, Briefwechsel 1958–1994 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2005), p. 49 (My translation).

17 Ibid., p. 46f.18 The papers were later printed as: Theodor W. Adorno, ʻSociology and Empirical Researchʼ,

in Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Harald Pilot, Jürgen Habermas and Karl R. Popper, eds., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology: Translated by Glyn

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and Popper were very different in style and appearance, but the expected oppo-sition could not be made out in the papers they presented. Ralf Dahrendorf, who chaired the discussion and played the role of a mediator, later wrote: “At times, it could indeed have appeared, astonishingly enough, as if Popper and Adorno were in agreement.”19 Only towards the end of the discussion some of the actual differences appeared. After Adorno had been nudged by a question from the audience encouraging him to talk about the political impli-cations of his critical theory of society, the discussion started to touch on what really separated both antagonists. Adorno distanced himself in no ambiguous terms from the “dogma” of the Marxists; even more so, he also effusively waved his hands at any political effort aimed at improving the world. “If today one behaved as if one could change the world tomorrow, then one would be a liar”,20 he stated in his reply.

This statement aroused Popper’s attention replying in turn, as if awoken out of a slumber, that Adorno’s view was ill-taken and caused him to accuse Adorno of wallowing in the mire of “pessimism”.21 Popper was proud to view himself as an “optimist”, though claiming to be “satisfied with small steps for-ward, with a piecemeal procedure.”22

Dahrendorf noted that it was only at this occasion one could evince the “inner connection between certain conceptions of the task of sociology, between certain epistemological and logical-scientific positions and between certain moral principles which also possess political relevance.”23 But this inner connection still remained murky. It was clear that Adorno and Popper fundamentally disagreed about many issues pertaining philosophy, history and sociology, but the dispute in Tübingen in 1961 equally made clear that these differences were less directly related to philosophical and sociological claims than many had expected. Many were left wondering how the political differ-ences were connected to philosophical ones. If both adopted similar positions

Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 68–86; Karl R. Popper, ʻThe Logic of the Social Sciencesʼ, in Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Harald Pilot, Jürgen Habermas and Karl R. Popper, eds., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology: Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 87–104.

19 Ralf Dahrendorf, ʻRemarks on the Discussionʼ, in Theodor W. Adorno, Hans Albert, Ralf Dahrendorf, Harald Pilot, Jürgen Habermas and Karl R. Popper, eds., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology: Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976), 123–130, here p. 124.

20 Ibid., here p. 129.21 Ibid., here p. 129.22 Ibid., here p. 129.23 Ibid., here p. 129.



regarding knowledge, society and truth where, then, was the root of Adorno’s “pessimism” and Popper’s “optimism” to be found?

Much more could be said about how the clash between Popper and Adorno unfolded after the conference in Tübingen in 1961.24 But one text deserves special consideration. After the conference in Tübingen, Adorno decided to put an exclamation mark behind his critique of Popper and to transform the whole debate into one between what he called “Positivism” and his own Critical Theory. He decided to collect the papers he and Popper presented in Tübingen, add a number of other papers – those by the young Jürgen Habermas, Hans Albert and a few others who joined the debate – and to top it off, he wrote a fiery introduction. This collection of essays was then published under the title Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie in 1969.25

In this collection of essays and especially in Adorno’s introduction, I argue, many of the arguments can be found customarily leveled against ana-lytic philosophy in German academe. In his introduction Adorno exposed why positivism – explicitly identified by him with “the recent development of ‘analytic philosophy’ ”26 – was compelled to defend the political status quo due to its methodology. The steps of his argument ran something like this: positivism posits an ideal knower stripped of passions, historical background and social surroundings. Liberated from all accidental limitations and confu-sions inhibiting the path to truth, this ideal knower can acquire knowledge by instrumentally employing his faculty of reason. For Adorno, this approach was paradigmatic of positivism and of how it combined hubris with blindness. Above all, it created a kind of human type that terrified him. “Positivism is

24 For the further details of the Positivism Dispute see: D. Frisby, ʻThe Popper-Adorno Controversy. The Methodological Dispute in German Sociologyʼ, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2, 1 (1972), pp. 105–119; A. Heller, ʻThe Positivism Dispute as a Turning Point in German Post-War Theoryʼ, New German Critique, 15 (1978), pp. 49–56; Hans-Joachim Dahms, Positivismusstreit: Die Auseinandersetzungen der Frankfurter Schule mit dem logischen Positivismus, dem amerikanischen Pragmatismus und dem kritischen Rationalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994); Reinhard Neck, ed., Was bleibt vom Positivismusstreit? (Frankfurt, New York: P. Lang, 2008).

25 Seven years later this volume was translated and published in English as: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology: Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976).

26 Adorno, ʻIntroductionʼ, p. 31. Adorno was not the only one to equate positivism with analytic philosophy at this time. See also: Karl-Otto Apel, ʻSzientistik, Hermeneutik, Ideologiekritik. Entwurf einer Wissenschaftslehre in erkenntnisanthropologischer Sichtʼ, in Karl-Otto Apel, Claus von Bormann and Rüdiger Bubner, eds., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik: Theorie-Diskussion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 7–44, here p. 17.

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geared to the human type,” he wrote, “that is devoid of experience and conti-nuity, and it encourages the latter – like [George F.] Babbitt – to see himself as the crown of creation.”27

For Adorno, Popper’s “positivism” and its tenets basically presented every-thing that was wrong about modern 20th century philosophy. Eventually, he believed, by trying to transform the philosophical inquirer into an abstract knower, positivism was bound to result in political conformism. Being a posi-tivist was tantamount to being a pawn in an unknown game. Methodologically positivism was aimed at making the ideal knower deaf and dumb to its histori-cal and social surroundings, thus throwing the doors wide open to ideology. Positivism and analytic philosophy adapted, albeit unwittingly, to the existing political climate. “The repression, which the positivist mind creates for itself,” Adorno wrote, “suppresses what is not like itself. This causes positivism – despite its avowal of neutrality, if not by virtue of this avowal – to be a political fact. Its categories are latently the practical categories of the bourgeois class.”28 Because Adorno believed positivism to be a political fact instead of a philo-sophical method, he went on to state that: “An absolutized logic is ideology.”29

One of the more fascinating facets of Adorno’s critique was how he com-bined his criticism of “positivism” with his criticism of American politics and liberalism. The above mentioned allusion to Sinclair Lewis’ satire Babbitt is one example.30 But there are more. In one particularly dynamic passage he suggested that the military disasters the United States were experiencing dur-ing the Vietnam War were rooted in a “positivist” mindset. “The defamation of fantasy, and the inability to conceive of what does not yet exist,” Adorno wrote roughly one year after the Tet Offensive, “become sand in the mechanism of the apparatus itself, as soon as it finds itself confronted with phenomena not provided for in its schemata. Undoubtedly, part of the blame for the Americans’ helplessness in the Vietnamese guerilla war is borne by [. . .] bureaucratic gen-erals [who] pursue a calculating strategy that is unable to anticipate Giap’s tactics, which are irrational according to their norms. [. . .] Scientific manage-

27 Babbitt is a reference to Sinclar Lewis’ satire about American businessmen. See Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York, 1922). Adorno, ̒ Introductionʼ, p. 58. (In the original German text, Adorno misspells Babbitt in writing: “[. . .] sich wie Babbit für die Krone der Schöpfung zu halten.” Theodor W. Adorno, ʻEinleitungʼ, in Theodor W. Adorno, Ralf Dahrendorf, Harald Pilot, Hans Albert, Jürgen Habermas and Karl R. Popper, eds., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, vol. 58: Soziologische Texte (Berlin, 1972), 7–79, here p. 70).

28 Adorno, ʻEinleitungʼ, here p. 57.29 Adorno, ʻEinleitungʼ, here p. 28.30 Babbitt was a popular satirical novel of American middle class and culture written by

Sinclair Lewis in 1922. See: Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt, New York 1922.



ment, which is what the strategy of warfare has become, results in military disadvantage.”31 The point to be stressed here is that Adorno’s critique of phil-osophical “positivism” was intricately coupled with his critique of American politics. One was read into the other.

Of course, Adorno was not the only one to criticize “positivism” at this time. The young Jürgen Habermas jumped to the side of Adorno during the dispute – just as Hans Albert joined arms with Popper.32 Especially Habermas’s work of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrates how closely the Positivism Dispute was related to the critical reception of analytical philosophy in Germany. Habermas contributed two papers to the collection The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology originally published in 1963 and added another paper pub-lished a year earlier. The nature of the debate kept center stage in Habermas’s interests, even after the Positivism Dispute had slowly but surely petered out. He continued to write about the deficient nature of an analytic-posi-tivistic approach compared to a critical social philosophy,33 and specifically addressed these issues in his book Knowledge and Human Interests published in German in 1968.34 This book was in fact planned to be the first of a trilogy, in which the other two volumes would have contained a “critical reconstruc-tion of the development of analytical philosophy”, as he later explained.35 He eventually dropped this plan and instead turned to working out his theory of

31 Adorno, ʻEinleitungʼ, here p. 50f.32 In fact the debates between Habermas and Albert could be viewed as the second and

perhaps even more influential round of the Positivism Dispute. After the conference in Tübingen, where Adorno and Popper presented their papers, Habermas wrote the article ʻThe Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics. A Postscript to the Controversy Between Popper and Adornoʼ, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 131–162. To this, Albert replied in Hans Albert, ʻThe Myth of Total Reason. Dialectical Claims in the Light of Undialectical Criticismʼ, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 163–197, to which Habermas in turn responded in ʻA Positivistically Bisected Rationalismʼ, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 198–225. Albert finally replied a last time in: Hans Albert, ̒ Behind Positivism’s Back? A Critical Illumination of Dialectical Digressionsʼ, in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 226–257.

33 For instance in: Jürgen Habermas, ʻDogmatismus, Vernunft und Entscheidung – Zur Theorie und Praxis in der verwissenschaftlichten Zivilisationʼ, in Jürgen Habermas, ed., Theorie und Praxis: Sozialphilosophische Studien (Neuwied/Berlinn, 1963), pp. 231–257; Jürgen Habermas, ed., Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).

34 The English translation followed a few years later: Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

35 Jürgen Habermas and Christian Lenhardt, ʻA Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interestsʼ, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3, 1 (1973), pp. 157–189, here p. 159.

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communicative action. This change of plans also sounded the bell for a much more fruitful and positive interaction with analytic philosophy in Habermas’ work. The point to be stressed here is how the Positivism Dispute must be viewed as part of a battle between analytic philosophy and German social phi-losophy. Even as late as 1979, Thomas Nipperdey still identified Popper with “analytic philosophy” when talking about the merits and shortcomings of ana-lytical philosophy for theory of history. 36

To summarize this part, in the Positivism Dispute and in the introduction that Adorno wrote in 1969 we witness one of the battlefields of the 1960s and 1970s between analytic philosophy and German social philosophy. “Positivism” was equated with “analytic philosophy” and rejected because it supposedly aimed at positing an ideal knower, estranged from society and history. The Frankfurt School believed that this philosophy simply camouflaged hidden ambitions. For Adorno and Habermas “positivism” was more than just a philo-sophical movement. It was a mindset. The “positivist”, in this interpretation, was inseparably related to an American neo-liberal way of life.

3 The Ritter School

If we take a step back and look to the larger intellectual landscape of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, it will become clear that the Frankfurt School cannot be seen as representative of the more general political climate in the German aca-deme. Many voices – often quite different from the Frankfurters – contributed to the “intellectual foundation” of the Federal Republic of Germany.37 Almost

36 Thomas Nipperdey, ʻGeschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse. Analytik und Pragmatik der Historie by Hermann Lübbeʼ, Historische Zeitschrift, 228, 1 (1979), 109–113, here p. 109.

37 For a long time the Frankfurt School received much attention from historians when look-ing to the “intellectual foundation” of the Federal Republic of Germany. See instance Clemens Albrecht, Günter C. Behrmann, Michael Bock, Harald Homann and Friedrich H. Tenbruck, eds., Die intellektuelle Gründung der Bundesrepublik: Eine Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus-Verl., 2007); Wolfgang Kraushaar, ed., Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail: 1946–1995, 3 vols. (Hamburg: Rogner & Bernhard, 1998); Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973).

In the past decades, however, a number of studies have stressed the importance of other intellectual currents for German intellectual climate and for the acceptance of the legiti-macy of liberal democracy. See for instance: Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Begründung der Bundesrepublik, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck



diametrically opposed to the Frankfurt School was the so-called Ritter School, to which I now turn.

What was the Ritter School and what was its relation to analytic philoso-phy and theory of history respectively? Joachim Ritter, who was something like the father of the group, was born in 1903 and in the 1920s became Ernst Cassirer’s student and later his assistant. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP even though he had sympathized with communism during the 1920s and though his wife, Marie Johanna Einstein, who died in 1928, had been Jewish.38 He survived the war and was not barred from pursuing an academic career after the Third Reich had collapsed. In 1946 Ritter started teaching in Münster as a philosophy professor and one year later he encountered the new “skeptical generation” of students in an Oberseminar that was soon called the Collegium Philosophicum. “The circle [of the Collegium] was not an informal discussion group”, Robert Spaemann later wrote. “What held it together was neither a method nor a canon of opinions, but rather that we all shared the same questions.”39 And Odo Marquard wrote about the Collegium Philosophicum: “The liveliness of the Ritter School was a result not only of the talents of individuals but also of the heterogeneous composition of Ritter’s Collegium Philosophicum; which

& Ruprecht, 2006); Jens Hacke, ed., Streit um den Staat: Intellektuelle Debatten in der Bundesrepublik 1960–1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); Sean Forner, ʻFür eine demokratische Erneuerung Deutschlands. Kommunikationsprozesse und Deutungsmuster engagierter Demokraten nach 1945ʼ, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 33, 2 (2007), pp. 228–257; Frank Biess, ʻThinking after Hitler. The new intellectual history of the Federal Republic of Germanyʼ, History and Theory, 51, 2 (2012), pp. 221–245; Sean Forner, German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

38 See: Jürgen Seifert, ʻJoachim Ritters ‚Collegium Philosophicum‘. Ein Forum offenen Denkensʼ, in Richard Faber and Christine Holste, eds., Kreise, Gruppen, Bünde: Zur Soziologie moderner Intellektuellenassoziation (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), pp. 189–198; Jens Thiel, ʻAkademische ‚Zinnsoldaten‘? Karrieren deutscher Geisteswissenschaftler zwischen Beruf und Berufung (1933/1945)ʼ, in Rüdiger Vom Bruch, Uta Gerhardt and Aleksandra Pawliczek, eds., Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1: Wissenschaft, Politik und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006), 167–194, especially pp. 185ff; Jens Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit: Die liberalkonservative Begründung der Bundesrepublik, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 37ff.; Mark Schweda, Entzweiung und Kompensation: Joachim Ritters philosophische Theorie der modernen Welt (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2014), 135, pp. 36–92.

39 Robert Spaemann, ʻDas Natürliche ist nicht das Naturwüchsige. Denker der Entzweiung: Zum hundertsten Geburtstag des Philosophen Joachim Ritterʼ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 Apr. 2003, 39 (my translation).

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combined Thomists, evangelical theologians, positivists, logicians, Marxists, and skeptics.”40 The Collegium experienced the zenith of its creative energy between the years 1955 and 1965.41 In the 1960s until the 1980s some of the Ritter students became professors and developed their own distinct voices in ongoing German philosophical and historical debates.

The Collegium sought to return to the foundations of modern philosophy in order to gain a deeper understanding of modernity. In 1956 Joachim Ritter delivered his famous talk “Hegel and the French Revolution”, published a year later, in which he characterized the modern period as one in a state of “rupture” (Entzweiung), an age in which a “lost unity is yearned for with ardent desire”,42 but that could never be completely restored. In the modern period, Ritter argued, both the principle of emancipation and its opposite, the prin-ciple of order, were inseparably bound together under one yoke. Living in the modern epoch meant organizing one’s life in a world on the brink of rupturing, literally breaking into two (‘Ent-zwei-ung’). “The political constitution of free-dom through the Revolution”, he stated, “stands under the law of dichotomy; this is the basic condition of the age.”43 This stigma of the modern period was created by striving for freedom on the one side and by constituting this free-dom with a state of order on the other. Every political movement and revolu-tion that had existed in the modern period could not escape this common fate.

There were political and conservative overtones implicit in this character-ization of modernity. The attainment of his stance enabled Ritter and many of his students to place their trust in the existing political order and its institutions as the framework within which freedom could be invested, albeit imperfectly realized. Jens Hacke has argued that Ritter’s philosophy with its emphasis on common sense and its legitimization of institutions paved a path to a liberal-conservative understanding of democracy in 20th century Germany.44

However, the basic claim that modernity was the epoch of inescapable dichotomy cut both ways. It also entailed that Ritter and his students were categorically skeptical towards each and any blue print of a better world. Any

40 Odo Marquard, ʻFarewell to Matters of Principle (Another Autobiographical Introductionʼ, in Odo Marquard, ed., Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Translated by Robert M. Wallace, Susan Bernstein and James I. Porter: Odéon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 3–21, here p. 6.

41 Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit, p. 36.42 Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution. Essays on the Philosophy of Right:

Translated with an Introduction by Richard Dien Winfield (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), p. 63.

43 Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution, p. 74.44 See Hacke, Philosophie der Bürgerlichkeit.



aspiration to dissolve the dichotomy between emancipation and order was dis-credited by labeling this aspiration as utopian or illusory. And this is what sep-arated the Ritter School from their Frankfurt counterparts: while for some the Frankfurt School was somewhat too critical, to the point of being pessimistic (or paranoid), Ritter and his students believed that the Frankfurt School was simply not critical enough.45 Both liberal ideology as well as Marxist utopia-nism, which was believed to be at the core of Frankfurt School thought, were rejected for the same reason: both were taken to be futile attempts to right the wrongs of the world.

But not only the Frankfurt School, also the rigorous, analytic methodology of Anglo-American philosophy fell victim to the skepticism of the Ritter School. Ritter himself wrote in his article on “Hegel and the French Revolution” that the “the problems of the Revolution, the dichotomy of existence, and the dis-continuity of history for the culture of the age grounded in it, cannot be over-come in the speculative deduction of a new world that ought to be.”46 Only in German do you really hear the criticism of a philosophical idealism that strives to avert the disruptions and confusions of modern human existence: “Die Probleme der Revolution [. . .] und Entzweiung [. . .] können nicht in der spekulativen Deduktion einer neuen, seinsollenden Welt überwunden werden.”47 Thus, for Ritter a philosophy that relied solely on the deduction of purely rational laws and sought to view human existence from the vantage point of a ‘seinssollende’ world could not be a guide for modern life.

Many of his students, although abandoning some elements of his philos-ophy, fully embraced the most salient points of his thought: first, his skepti-cism towards idealist projects that tried to dissolve the rupture of modernity and second, his legitimization of institutions as the strongholds of society. One such student was Odo Marquard. He unequivocally stated in 1981: “from Ritter I learned [. . .] to appreciate institutions and the obligations that go with them [. . .]. [And that] that contradictions ought, if necessary, to be borne,

45 Although Marquard was sympathetic towards the Frankfurt School on minor points, he was one of its harshest critics. See for instance: Odo Marquard, ʻBeitrag zur Philosophie der Geschichte des Abschieds von der Philosophie der Geschichteʼ, in Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, eds., Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, vol. 5: Poetik und Hermeneutik (München: W. Fink, 1973), 241–250.

46 Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution, p. 67. 47 Joachim Ritter, ʻHegel und die französische Revolution (1956)ʼ, in Joachim Ritter, ed.,

Metaphysik und Politik: Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 183–233, here p. 218.

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and their apparent solution resisted.”48 Marquard eventually turned out to be philosophical skeptic with a twinkle in his eye. All solutions to the riddles of human existence were always apparent solutions, never definitive ones, he would argue. He was something of a Michel de Montaigne for the 20th century. He rejected every claim out of hand that was asserted as a matter of principle, on the pretext that the human experience was crooked and simply could not be spread out along the fine grid of all-embracing principles. In his book Farewell to Matters of Principle he declared: “Principles are long, life is short. We can-not spend our lives waiting for principled permission finally to begin living.”49 However, “hermeneutics”, he added, “is the art, which is vitally important for human beings, of orienting oneself by means of ‘understanding’ which among contingencies that one has both to hold fast to and to distance from oneself.”50

What Marquard and the Ritter School feared most was any and every system of thought that suffocated the richness and plurality of human experience. And it is at this juncture where they most clearly ran counter to what they perceived to be the goal of analytic philosophy, or what Marquard called “pure philosophy”. Life was not as pure and simple as formal logic made it out to be. “The age of pure philosophers has gone by”, Marquard remarked, “when they insist on purity, they end up forfeiting philosophy.”51 He called any attempt to cram the world of facts and the richness of human experience into one sin-gle coherent systematic framework a “monomyth”. In his article “In Praise of Polytheism” he accused monomythic philosophy of being “always dangerous”.52 “Polymyths, on the other hand,” he added, “are harmless.”53 For him philoso-phy and history had to cherish the plurality of truths and the contingency of human life. There was not a single plain of truth to climb upon, just as there was no single historical trajectory one could examine as an historian.

48 Odo Marquard, ̒ Farewell to Matters of Principle (Another Autobiographical Introductionʼ, in Odo Marquard, ed., Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Translated by Robert M. Wallace, Susan Bernstein and James I. Porter: Odéon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–21, here p. 7.

49 Ibid., here p. 18. Somewhat curiously, Marquard was not very apprehensive about the fact that this was asserted as a principle.

50 Ibid., here p. 18.51 Odo Marquard, ʻCompetence in Compensating for Incompetence? (On the Competence

and Incompetence of Philosophy)ʼ, in Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies, pp. 22–37, here p. 27.

52 Odo Marquard, ʻIn Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and Polymythical Thinking)ʼ, in Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies, pp. 87–110, here p. 98.

53 Ibid.



It is quite remarkable how obsessed the Ritter School was with history and the philosophy of history – an obsession that was surely part of their skep-tical, anti-utopian posture. Marquard stressed often that history contained multitudes of histories. Adhering to Reinhart Koselleck’s work54 and Wilhelm Schapp’s work55 he believed that historians just as “pure philosophers” had been caught in a monomythic trap, believing history to be a single continuous unfolding line of time. For him, thinking of history in the singular was in fact one of the many “monomyths” in the “age of singularizations”,56 roughly since 1750. Marquard bemoaned: “Modern philosophy of history, which, strictly speaking, is not a secularized theology but rather the only theology in regard to which secularization, so far, has failed. [. . .] This philosophy of history needs singularizing hermeneutics in order – repressing the polymythical multiplicity of the many stories and demanding the monomythical simplicity of the one history – once again to discover and to promote, in all ‘dealings’ and actions and thoughts and texts, the one absolute history.”57

Another well-known student of the Ritter School was Hermann Lübbe.58 He was a personality completely different from Marquard and can in some sense be viewed as his very counterpart. In his book Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse (1977) he directly engaged the debate about theory of his-tory. “The historical sciences”, he asserted in the very first sentence of the book, “have once again weathered a so called foundational crisis [Grundlagenkrise].”59 The debates raged in the past ten years, he wrote, have changed the outlook of the historical discipline and forced it to face some of its unchallenged assumptions. One of the uprooting forces in the “Grundlagenkrise” was what Lübbe interchangeably called the “analytic theory of science” (“analytische Wissenschaftstheorie”),60 “linguistic analytic philosophy” (“sprachanalytische

54 See especially Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenese der bür-gerlichen Welt, 5th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985); Reinhart Koselleck, ed., Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984).

55 See especially Wilhelm Schapp, In Geschichten verstrickt. Zum Sein von Ding und Mensch (Hamburg: Meiner, 1953).

56 Marquard, here p. 94f.57 Odo Marquard, ʻThe Question, To What Question Is Hermeneutics the Answer?ʼ, in

Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies, pp. 111–139, here p. 124f.58 For one of the few treatments of Lübbe see: Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi

Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 149ff.59 Hermann Lübbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse: Analytik und Pragmatik der

Historie (Basel, Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1977), p. 9.60 Ibid., p. 13.

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Philosophie”)61 or “analytic philosophy” (“analytische Philosophie”).62 In contrast to Marquard, however, Lübbe did not see the philosophical move-ment of analytic philosophy as a threat. In fact he argued exactly the opposite. “Whenever it comes to asserting the autonomy of the historical dis-cipline epistemologically, culturally or from the standpoint of critical ideol-ogy [ideologiekritisch] against the demands to turn history into theory, then for this purpose the analytic theory of science is not an adversary, but an ally.”63 Lübbe quite extensively discussed Popper, Hempel, William Dray, John Passmore, W. B. Gallie and Arthur Danto. He saw no merit in calling for an all-out attack against analytic philosophy, because he did not perceive it as a coherent movement, but rather as one arguing with itself in an effort to opti-mize different philosophical hypotheses.64 And he believed one could make some good use in the context of the German debate of the 1970s of claims that had been developed by analytic philosophers. “Analytic philosophy”, he wrote concluding a chapter entitled “Analytic Historicism”, “methodologically safe-guards the indispensable interest of the historical tradition in the indepen-dence of the historical discipline.”65

What was important for him, however, was to discharge the theory of history of the prevalent themes in the theory of action associated with analytic philos-ophy. Lübbe especially was keen to square accounts with Jürgen von Kempski, on the basis that the theory of action postulated an intentionally acting agent capable of forging his own destiny. “Histories are processes that lead to some-thing that no one wanted who was actively involved,”66 Lübbe wrote. Instead of premising historical development on a rational agent he turned to Hegel’s exposition of the “cunning of reason”. In essence, he argued that humans do not possess full agency, at least not to the extent that they are be able to make their own history. Agency in history is fact not human, but trans-subjective and the historical process is not willed or intended, but radically contingent. “We can only know that history takes place in a way that was not expected by those involved.”67 This critique was not solely directed at analytic philosophy, but it was meant to keep theories at bay using mathematical or rational theories of action to interpret human behavior.

61 Ibid., p. 125.62 Ibid., p. 126.63 Ibid., p. 13.64 See especially ibid., chapter 10.65 Ibid., p. 126.66 Ibid., p. 55.67 Ibid., p. 58.



Lübbe’s work shows the diversity and even incongruity of the Ritter School. Towards the end of the 1970s it is hard to speak of a single, coherent school of thought, due to the diverse writings and opinions. However, despite the later disparity, it is important to note the similarities between Ritter, Marquard and Lübbe as well as the difference in contrast to the Frankfurt School. The rejection of Marquard’s “pure philosophy” and Lübbe’s reservations against theory of action did not have the same political impetus as Adorno’s rejec-tion of “positivism”. Both Ritter and Marquard viewed themselves much more as performing metaphysical damage control, not as protecting Germany from proto-fascism or conformism. The emphasis on contingency was directed against the “age in which things are makeable”68 and this was the converg-ing point of Ritter’s, Marquard’s and Lübbe’s historical thought. They warned against controlling history, whether with methodological tools that “singu-larized” history, by tainting history with teleology or by postulating rational agents. The critique of controlling history was viewed, especially by Marquard, to be a critique of analytic methods in theory of history. And this point was stressed heavily. “The process of the whole of society that we call ‘history’ cannot at all be reduced to actions”, Hermann Lübbe wrote in the 1970s. “And therefore it is also not controllable in its entirety. History also does not have an assignable goal that transcends its present as a projection into the future. Hence, it is not only too difficult, but also meaningless to try to set a goal for the historical process.”69 The Ritter School in the 1960s and 1970s were thus a sec-ond, alternative stance against any kind of approach to historical inquiry that straightened the crooked path of history. “Pure philosophy”, just like Adorno’s “positivism” was fought as a potentially dangerous existential outlook, one that tended to flatten the abundance of human life.

4 Poetics and Hermeneutics

A third group that enjoyed a high reputation in the 1960s and 1970s was the scholarly research group called “Poetik und Hermeneutik” (Poetics and Hermeneutics) that existed between 1963–1994. Many myths have accumulated

68 Odo Marquard, ʻThe End of Fate? (Some Observations on the Inevitability of Things Over Which We Have No Power of Disposition)ʼ, in Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies, pp. 64–86, here p. 64.

69 Hermann Lübbe, ʻIdeologiekritik der Technokratie-Kritikʼ, in Hermann Lübbe, ed., Fortschritt als Orientierungsproblem: Aufklärung in der Gegenwart, vol. 76: Rombach Hochschul Paperback (Freiburg: Rombach, 1975), 121–134, here p. 130f. (My translation.)

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around this research group and these have often been perpetuated by the mem-bers themselves.70 Recently the actual impact of the group on the academic landscape has been called into question.71 But it nonetheless still stands that the group was distinctly famous for being famous. The major players and founders of the group were Hans Blumenberg and Hans Robert Jauß. Later Odo Marquard, Wolgang Iser and Reinhart Koselleck were also prominent mem-bers.72 Many other well-known historians, philosophers and literary theorists became members more or less by special invitation. Between 1963 and 1998 the group published 17 volumes of collected papers presented at the corresponding colloquia having taken place irregularly throughout these decades.

70 See e.g. Hans Robert Jauß, ʻEpilog auf die Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”ʼ, in Gerhart von Graevenitz, Odo Marquard and Matthias Christen, eds., Kontingenz, vol. 17: Poetik und Hermeneutik (München: W. Fink Verlag, 1998), 525–533; Hans Robert Jauß, ʻSymposion. Epilog auf die Forschungsgruppe ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’ʼ, Frankfurter Rundschau, 8 Mar. 1997.

71 Only in the last five years has the group “Poetics and Hermeneutics” been the subject of his-torical inquiry. See: Petra Boden, ̒ Arbeit an Begriffen. Zur Geschichte von Kontroversen in der Forschungsgruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik. Ein Forschungsprojektʼ, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL), 35, 1 (2010), pp. 103–121; Walter Erhart, ʻ’Wahrscheinlich haben wir beide recht’. Diskussion und Dissens unter ‘Laboratoriumsbedingungen’. Beobachtungen zu ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’ 1963–1966ʼ, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL), 35, 1 (2010), pp. 77–102; Carlos Spoerhase, ʻRezeption und Resonanz: Zur Faszinationsgeschichte der Forschungsgruppe ‚Poetik und Hermeneutik‘ʼ, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL), 35, 1 (2010), pp. 122–142; Julia Wagner, ʻAnfangen. Zur Konstitutionsphase der Forschungsgruppe ‘Poetik und Hermeneutik’ʼ, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL), 35, 1 (2010), pp. 53–76; Petra Boden, ʻVom Umgang mit Dissens und Kontroversen. Ein Forschungsbericht über das Projekt Arbeit an Begriffen. Zur Geschichte von Kontroversen in der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik“ (1966–1984)ʼ, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (IASL), 38, 2 (2013), pp. 281–314; Petra Boden, ʻVom Protokoll zum ide-alen Gespräch. Einblicke in die Werkstatt von “Poetik und Hermeneutik” ʼ, Zeitschrift für Germanistik. Neue Folge, 23, 2 (2013), pp. 359–373.

72 “Poetics and Hermeneutics” was a group of academics that developed its identity in opposition to the “Senatskommission für Begriffsgeschichte” that was commissioned by the German Research Foundation and led by Hans-Georg Gadamer. In the early 1960s the group had been associated with the university in Gießen, but eventually the group detached itself from any specific geographical space or academic institution. See: Boden, ʻVom Protokoll zum idealen Gespräch. Einblicke in die Werkstatt von “Poetik und Hermeneutik” ʼ; Spoerhase, ʻRezeption und Resonanz: Zur Faszinationsgeschichte der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik” ʼ; Wagner, ʻAnfangen. Zur Konstitutions-phase der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik” ʼ.



In the early 1960s the group was particularly interested in literary theory and aesthetics, but in the course of the 1970s the group “Poetics and Hermeneutics” became increasingly interested in history and the philosophy of history.73 In the summer of 1970 the group met for its 5. colloquium called “Histories and History” which was organized by Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, who also later functioned as the editors of the publication of the collection of papers to be entitled “History. Event and Narrative”. And it is here, at this colloquium in 1970, that a number of German scholars discussed some of the debates prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy of history.

Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, in light of contemporary climate was the levelheaded and almost indifferent manner in which the differences were discussed between more hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches to history as compared to the more analytical and explanatory approaches. There was nothing like a consensus at the colloquium and the topics that were discussed were disparate, such as narrativity, Hempel’s “covering law” and Koselleck’s work. Nevertheless, analytic philosophy of history was discussed to a considerable extent. Wolf-Dieter Stempel for instance presented a paper entitled “Narrative, Description and the Historical Discourse”74 in which he highlighted Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History at length and very positively. Karlheinz Stierle’s paper discussed Danto favorably as well in his paper “History as Example – The Example of History”.75

Despite the wide variety in the topics presented in the papers, one could nonetheless divide the papers into two different camps: those who were sym-pathetic to Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History, and those who felt that Danto was not actually saying anything wrong, but that his thoughts were beside the point. This second group was much more intrigued by Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis of the singularization of history occurring at the end of the 18th century than by anything Danto had to offer.

Interestingly, however, the fault line dividing the colloquium into two groups was not determined by the label “analytic philosophy” nor that of “posi-tivism”. Neither did the shortcut terms “understanding” or “explanation” play a

73 Erhart identifies 1966 as one major turning point of the group. See Erhart, ̒ “Wahrscheinlich haben wir beide recht”. Diskussion und Dissens unter ‘Laboratoriumsbedingungen’, especially pp. 91ff.

74 Wolf-Dieter Stempel, ʻErzählung, Beschreibung und der historische Diskursʼ, in Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, eds., Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, vol. 5: Poetik und Hermeneutik (München: W. Fink, 1973), pp. 325–346.

75 Karlheinz Stierle, ʻGeschichte als Exemplum – Exemplum als Geschichteʼ, in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, pp. 347–375.

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big role. Rather the explosive subject-matter appeared to be the role of human agency in history.76 The principal question was whether or not human beings as historical agents could “make” their own history, that is, whether they were in control of the conditions surrounding them or whether they are actually marching to the beat of a different drummer.77

One very influential group spearheaded above all by Reinhart Koselleck, essentially argued that human life was a continuous battle of compromises. Humans had to work with a limited amount of linguistic concepts and the socially pre-established contexts offered by the historically contingent present. Human behavior was not rigidly determined, he argued, nor did human beings have free reign over every aspect of their lives. More importantly, he argued that the human life did not proceed along a single temporal plain. The entire idea that time is only a one-dimensional line, flowing continually from the past into the future was an ideological and specifically modern construction, he argued, from which the historian must free himself in order to do justice to the past. He agreed that there was a natural chronology made up of before-and-after sequences, but one could only truly understand historical processes, if historians were to take the different “temporal extensions” into account that existed in the space of historical experience.78 This of course meant that the business of hermeneutic understanding garnered the highest accolades of the historical discipline. “Historical temporalities”, Koselleck wrote, “follow a sequence different from the temporal rhythms given in nature.”79 It was there-fore central for historians to “interrogate the temporal structures which may be characteristic of both history in the singular and histories in the plural.”80 He deplored that this is precisely what modern philosophy of history missed

76 This already became apparent before the group met in 1970. Until the 5. colloquium Hans Blumenberg had been an important member of the group. However, he eventually dropped out of the group due to his continual criticism of what he viewed to be an unwar-ranted Hegelian influence (see Boden, ‘Vom Umgang mit Dissens und Kontroversen’, S. 294).

77 That the topic of the subject of history was at the center of the conference was also later stressed by Hermann Lübbe. See: Lübbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse, pp. 70 and 81.

78 He specifically made this point in the discussion of the colloquium that was printed at the end of every publication of each colloquium. See Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel, eds., Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung (München: W. Fink, 1973), S. 563.

79 Koselleck, ʻHistory, Histories, and Formal Time Structuresʼ, p. 96; Koselleck, ʻGeschichte, Geschichten und formale Zeitstrukturenʼ, in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, p. 213.

80 Koselleck, ʻHistory, Histories, and Formal Time Structuresʼ, p. 94; Koselleck, ʻGeschichte, Geschichten und formale Zeitstrukturenʼ, in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, p. 212.



in the whole business of history. While modern philosophy of history under-stands history to be made up of events strung together as beads on a string, Koselleck conceptualized history rather as a plot of land having many tempo-ral layers beneath it at any given point. Basically, he accused modern philoso-phy of history of reducing the hidden richness of the past into one single layer, in an effort to make history manageable. And this project of trying to make history manageable, as he would go on to argue in a more complex argument, stood in line with other liberal projects of creating a utopian future.81

There were others who argued along similar lines. Hermann Lübbe did something very similar in his paper, arguing that one could not turn Hegel’s philosophy into a political battle cry in which human agents could further the course of history.82 He argued that Hegel’s “philosophy of world history” in fact denied the possibility to lay claim to any identifiable “social or political sub-ject of history”.83 Hegel’s philosophy of history, he claimed, was “unpolitical”84 because it did not ascribe political agency to individuals. “It stabilizes a lib-eral middle-class consciousness,”85 he went on to add (apparently assuming that liberal middle-class consciousness was by nature unpolitical). Anyone claiming to be able to divine the course of history was employing “ideological weaponry.”86 Ferdinand Fellmann argued explicitly against Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History in his paper with the very telling title “The End of the Laplacean Demon”.87 While agreeing with some of Danto’s theses, Fellmann argued that “despite all of the protestations of the philosophers to the contrary, it is by no means an apriori fact that the human being is the subject of history.”88 Fellmann eventually went on to write a book on The Vico-Axiom in which he dissected and criticized the claim that humans were the agents of history, trac-ing it back to Vico.89

81 See especially Reinhart Koselleck, ed., Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984).

82 Hermann Lübbe, ʻGeschichtsphilosophie und politische Praxisʼ, in Geschichte: Ereignis und Erzählung, pp. 223–240, p. 227.

83 Ibid., p. 237.84 Ibid., p. 240.85 Ibid., p. 240.86 Hermann Lübbe, ʻGeschichtsphilosophie und politische Praxisʼ, in Geschichte: Ereignis

und Erzählung, pp. 223–240, here p. 223.87 Ferdinand Fellmann, ʻDas Ende des Laplaceschen Dämonsʼ, in Geschichte: Ereignis und

Erzählung, pp. 115–138.88 Ibid., here p. 119.89 Ferdinand Fellmann, Das Vico-Axiom: Der Mensch macht die Geschichte (Freiburg, 1976).

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To summarize, by focusing on the colloquium in 1970, we see how debates about analytic philosophy of history, especially through the writings of Danto, did not go unnoticed by German historians and literary theorists interested in methodological questions. In contrast to the Positivism Dispute there was no heated debate, in which analytic philosophy was given short shrift. However, the reason the debate with analytic philosophy failed to exert much influence on authors such as Koselleck, Fellmann, or Lübbe was that it did not address questions of the self. The “analytic theory”, as some called it, allegedly presup-posed an image of the self and the role of the human agent in history that ran counter to their own existential commitments.

5 Conclusion

Taking my cue from Ernest Nagel, I have traveled through the 1960s and 1970s in an effort to detect some of the moments in which German historians and philosophers encountered analytic philosophy. Due to space constraints I was not able to continue my “travel” beyond the 1970s. But the reason this article ends in the 1970s is not merely coincidental. In part it has to do with the gen-eral hesitation I have as an historian to investigate historical developments that are too closely tied to the present. But more importantly, the reason I end this article in the 1970s also has to do with my judgment that not all that much has changed since the 1970s with respect to the theoretical commitments endorsed by historians in Germany.

It was not only my interest to reconstruct the arguments in these set of debates, I also wanted to observe what Nagel called the “sociological moti-vations” in philosophical debate.90 Neither the Frankfurt School, the Ritter School nor the majority of the “Poetics and Hermeneutics” group were greatly concerned about arguments regarding epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, or logic. Nor was the rejection of theoretical philosophy inspired by political motivations alone. Both the Frankfurt School and the Ritter School, though on opposite ends of the political spectrum, were united in their defense against a fully-fledged analytic approach to history. So the qualms about analytic phi-losophy cannot be reduced to political agendas alone.

More important is how the philosophical arguments and the political com-mitments were tied to specific notions of the academic self. This may explain why questions surrounding human existence, or what one would have called at the time Anthropologie, were of greater interest than specific issues in epis-

90 Nagel, ʻImpressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe Iʼ, p. 16.



temology, logic or metaphysics. My suggestion is that we’d best try to analyze the encounter between Geschichtstheorie and analytic philosophy by exploring the wider social and ethical sway of the arguments involved and by looking at the cultural “ramifications”91 of the philosophical debates in question. When doing so we should concentrate on the differences between the roles of the theoretician of history vis-a-vis the analytic philosopher as social agents in their respective cultural contexts.92 In my view we will get a better pic-ture of the differences between Geschichtstheorie and analytic philosophy if we recognize what kind of people were viewed as bearers of authority and to decide why certain beliefs were accounted trustworthy and true. Looking at the encounter from this perspective requires us not to be satisfied with explicit verbal statements or doxastic commitments only, but also to analyze how phi-losophers positioned themselves in the academic culture of their time. It will not suffice to re-describe disembodied “battles of ideas”. We must addition-ally approach philosophical disputes, no matter how technical, as “integrated into patterns of activity. [. . .] We shall treat controversies over scientific [and philosophic] method as disputes over different patterns of doing things and of organizing men to practical ends.”93 It is from this vantage point, I believe, that we can determine the decisive points of difference between both philosophi-cal traditions.

What was rejected in all of the cases above, was first and foremost the ethi-cal posture or intellectual deportment attributed to the practice of analytical philosophy. It was not merely a provocative quirk that Adorno labeled positiv-ists as “Babbitts”. Theodor Adorno, Joachim Ritter, Odo Marquard and Reinhart Koselleck all rejected the ideal of the philosophical self as an ideal, pure, ratio-nal agent. They rejected the separation between theory and praxis, or between philosophy and politics. “A consciousness of theory and praxis”, Adorno wrote

91 See Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 3f.

92 Without going into detail, this methodological observation is inspired in part by Ian Hunter, Pierre Bourdieu and work done in Science Studies. See: Ian Hunter, ʻThe History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopherʼ, Modern Intellectual History, 4, 3 (2007), pp. 571–600; Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter, eds., The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1979), especially pp. 197–198; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

93 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 15.

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in the late 1960s, “must be produced that neither divides the two such that the-ory becomes powerless and praxis becomes arbitrary [. . .]. Thinking is a doing, theory a form of praxis; already the ideology of the purity of thinking deceives about this.”94 It was not only that they were principally skeptical of apriori formalisms. It was much less the logos than the ethos that they perceived in the movement of analytic philosophy.

One could say that they rejected what Charles Taylor has called the ideal of the “disengaged subject”, that is a subject “capable of objectifying not only the surrounding world but also his own emotions and inclinations, fears and com-pulsions, and achieving thereby a kind of distance and self-possession which allows him to act ‘rationally’.”95 Philosophy was taken rather to be an act of self-transformation, a “way of life”,96 a means to work on oneself, whether to embrace one’s fate, to fight fascist tendencies or to cherish the multitudes of one’s own existence. Academia provided tools to cope with the modern way of life. Measured by this standard, analytic philosophy appeared to be an utter failure, even before it made any formal arguments. It was merely devoted to “one-dimensional thought” of “one-dimensional men”.97 Adorno’s critical the-oretician, Marquard’s polymythical thinker, Koselleck’s historian who discerns the histories in the plural – all of these theories were in tune with an ethical posture and an intellectual deportment strongly at odds with the perceived disengaged subject of analytic philosophy. In a word, the rejection of analytic philosophy was related to the incitement to and cultivation of a certain kind of moral self.

This is also the reason why so many of these authors preferred to write in the genre of the essay. In his famous “The Essay as Form” Adorno celebrated the deliberate incompleteness and fragmentary nature of the essay which defies a systematic ordering of thought. The essay, he argued, “thinks in fragments, just as reality itself is fragmentary, and finds its unity in and through the breaks and not by glossing them over. An unequivocal logical order deceives us about

94 Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. European perspec-tives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 261.

95 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 21.

96 This is the popular phrase coined by Pierre Hadot that was later picked up by Foucault. See: Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995).

97 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge Press, 2007), especially pp. 127ff.



the antagonistic nature of what that order is imposed upon. Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its subject matter is always a conflict brought to a standstill.”98 The work of Ritter, Marquard, Lübbe and Koselleck is composed almost completely in the genre of essays.99 They rejected the idea of system-atizing their theses into a coherent architecture of thought. They were content with presenting isolated thoughts in a piecemeal manner, without ever synthe-sizing them into one whole consistent system.

In my view this goes a long way in explaining why there was so little inter-action between the work of Geschichtstheoretiker like Koselleck and Lübbe and analytic philosophers like Wilfrid Sellars or Donald Davidson in Germany during the 1960s and 1970s. The ideal of objectifying one’s emotions and incli-nations and the ideal of systematizing the facts of the world into a coherent system were rejected on the grounds that it postulated a moral self, ill-suited to engage the modern world. It was possible to accept single propositions taken from Hempel or Danto, but in the 1960s and 1970s it seemed impossible to adopt the philosophical deportment that was perceived as a vital part of ana-lytic philosophy.

Had Ernest Nagel written another article in the 1960s and 1970s about Germany, or had he sent his student Danto to do the same, he possibly would have been astonished at how different this atmosphere was compared to the atmosphere he experienced in the rest of Europe thirty years ago. The “devo-tion to disinterested study”100 was precisely the posture that was under attack. I’m not implying that this was necessarily a new development in Germany. Had Nagel visited Germany in the thirties, he probably would have encountered this same resistance. It was nonetheless, as I hope to have shown, the driving force behind the resistance against and stimulating the German reservations about analytic philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s.

98 Theodor W. Adorno, “Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature: Volume 1, ed. Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23, here p. 16.

99 Sometimes, as in the case of Lübbe, these essays were rewritten into books.100 Nagel, ʻImpressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe Iʼ, p. 8.

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