9
In his article in 1909 for Der Kampf entitled “Wozu brauchen wir Theorien?” (Why do we need theories?), Friedrich Adler stated: “A single individual can only have a limited amount of experience himself. He depends, therefore, on other people’s theories concerning experience in his own approach to the manifold of life. . . . The child who listens to his mother when she says: ‘Don’t touch the oven, it burns, other children have already tried it,’ can live a whole life without burning his fingers.”1
At the time this article was written, Friedrich Adler was still under the thumb of his father, not yet having crossed the bridge to political action and Austrian Social Democracy. The article, with its major thesis that theory guides the individual through dark and possibly painful areas beyond his experience, can be read as the Rosetta stone of Friedrich Adler’s, theoretical language. Adler’s relation to Marxism is grounded in the mediating, protective role the theories of his “fathers” played in his life. Whether during the period when the words of Marx, his father, and the programs of Austrian Social Democracy were considered as holy writ, or during the period when he sought to add his own exegesis of them, theory was the omnipresent force that guided Adler’s footsteps:
The animal who through a stimulus has a wish, an expression of will, arise in him, follows this will automatically and reacts immediately. The moth sees the lamp; he has the wish to come closer to it, and flies into the fire. The child reacts in the beginning like an animal: only gradually does he learn to use a tool that will serve him as a protection from injury: theory. The adult bridles his will, reacts in the first instance with his brain, tests the consequences of his action with theory. If he finds that the impulse of his will leads to a destruction of self, then he seeks to become master of this will; if he sees that his will leads toward a higher personal development, then he allows his will its freedom quite happily.2
Friedrich was the moth who circled nearer and nearer to the flame of his own life until 1917. The intensity of the flame, his life energy, was screened at first by the theories of Victor Adler and the influences of Victor Adler’s world. But as Friedrich Adler got closer to this flame, the theories that served as a screen and a shield became his own, allowing more of the light to penetrate yet preserving him from dissolution in the fire. An examination of the theory of Friedrich Adler will show a development from the realms of abstraction most removed from his own life flame toward a theoretical construct that all but touches the living flame. For Friedrich Adler eventually involved himself in the area of phenomenology and in the immediate images of his existence. As with Max Adler, however, the full implications of phenomenology escaped Friedrich Adler, and he followed a derivative direction that spared him the trial of direct contact with its content. There were moments when his wings were singed, but on the whole, his theory kept the insect that sought warmth intact within the protective penumbra of abstraction. The freeing death, the fiery baptism, was never wholly to be Friedrich Adler’s experience.
Friedrich Adler’s writings before 1914 are almost wholly concerned with his attempt to discover the epistemological relation between physics and Marxism,3 a relation that would create a bridge that led out of the abstract exile to which he had been condemned and toward the whole personality represented by the socialist ideal. If he could portray physics in its social origins, he would be able to win a ground that connected him with much of the body that had been denied him. After this ground had been won, Friedrich began with self-assurance to write articles on political topics. His tactical contributions to Austrian Social Democratic politics can be viewed as a corollary of this psychologically motivated search for a more direct contact with the ground of his existence. Thus we will first examine Adler’s growth as a theoretical physicist and then turn to his more manifest relation to political Marxism.
As a youth Friedrich developed a love for mathematics, a subject that he stated he could not live without.4 This passion that he used as a tool to force his father to allow him to prepare for a Matura and entrance to a university can be viewed as Friedrich’s first step to escape from the world of his father’s will. His love for mathematics, although an expression of his own will, at the same time removed Friedrich even further from the heart of his life, the life hidden within the domain controlled by his father. In facing his father and the source of his own existence controlled by his father, however, he had to divorce himself, at first, from the painful facts of the family situation. The abstract and eternal language of mathematics proved an ideal means to dwell painlessly and freely in a universe that seemingly belonged totally to himself.5 As he grew older, this esoteric realm proved too limited, too lacking in the essential warmth that had been denied to him by his existence as an appendage to the will of his father. In the University of Zurich, first in chemistry, then in physics, he sought an exit from the pristine world of natural science to the world of man. The theoretical vehicles used in these first efforts to liberate himself from his intellectual exile were those of historical materialism.6 The eclectic application of dialectical materialism to physics failed, however, to provide the bridge that he sought. Although Marxism remained the manifest goal of his attempts at contact with the world, its inherited language as expressed by the historical materialists ceased to be used by Friedrich as a theoretical tool in his efforts to free himself from the puerile abstractions of his academic studies. In his attempt to make more meaningful his engagement with physics, by showing how physics was an outgrowth of man’s relation to his environment, Friedrich was simultaneously to transform the words of his spiritual fathers into syllables that reflected his own self.
The metamorphosis of physics, of Marxism, and thus of Friedrich Adler, began after he had acquired his doctoral degree in physics and had plunged into the epistemological studies so long denied him by his father. Through these studies, which lasted from 1903 to 1907, Friedrich became a confirmed follower of Ernst Mach.7 The story of his conversion to the ideas of Mach is also the story of his conversion to a stance that permitted closer contact with the flame of his inner life.
Friedrich Adler’s doctoral dissertation, written in 1902, while he was still a disciple of historical materialism, was entitled “Die Abhaengkeit der specifischen Waerme des Chrome von der Temperatur” (Dependence of the specific warmth of chrome on the temperature). The theme stands as a symbolic witness to the nature of his involvement with physics and his quest for warmth, which in its wake would bring a change in his physical constitution. Physics was still dominated by the conception of unchanging physical bodies. The physicists of his day adhered to the atomic theory of constant molecules; although some had postulated the existence of electrons, these more basic entities were held to be as indivisible and constant in their weight and characteristics as the molecules had been.8 Friedrich’s research into the dependency of the specific warmth of chrome upon temperature opened the question of the constancy and indivisibility of the molecular or electronic makeup of metals. The raising of this question, which touched on his own physical condition, led to the bridge that he had sought between physics and Marxism. Friedrich wrote his dissertation as a convinced mechanical materialist, that is, as one who accepted the notion of constancy and indivisibility in physical bodies; his study was only to determine the range of variation within the metal chrome. Although chrome was shown to change in its physical characteristics to some degree, it was still held to be a constant mass.
Ernst Mach had challenged the notion of constancy and indivisibility in physical masses in 1867. Mach first introduced the notion of relativity within physics, that is, the idea that the definition of a physical body depends upon the context within which it is investigated.9 Whereas other thinkers in physics and in other areas of German Kultur grounded all certain knowledge within a unified system, Mach’s proposition of relativity asserted that no systematic knowledge of the universe was possible, because man’s context of investigation changed constantly.10 Adler wrote that in 1903, upon completion of his dissertation, he became attracted to Mach’s thought but did not understand the seeming conceptual abyss opened by relativity and therefore set out to attack Mach. The point of attack was to be Mach’s definition of mass, which Adler felt to be the keystone of his theory. Three years later, upon the publication of this study, Adler was a Machian.11
Adler’s identification with Ernst Mach provides the key to his conception of Mach’s thought, for Mach’s disciples went in many directions.12 Adler investigated Mach as a personality in a collection of essays that he published while in prison after having assassinated Count Stuergh. The book’s title, Ernst Machs Ueberwindung des mechanischen Materialismus (Ernst Mach’s vanquishing of mechanical materialism), gives some indication of the heroic role Mach was to play in his life. Adler wrote: “The advance in science accomplished by Mach was as all great advances, simultaneously a personal experience [Erlebnis]. This experience took place in the struggle between two powerful realms of thought.” These realms were the critical philosophy of Kant and the mechanical materialism of physics. Mach stated that his personality changed in the process of transformation that forged these two separate ideas into a new unity that reflected his own new self. Adler dwelled on this process of transformation: “In the completion of ‘this complete transformation’ lies the heart of Mach’s life work. His work had as its result the complete vanquishing of his earlier standpoint in physics, and at the same time the complete vanquishing . . . of his earlier attachment to Kant.” Moreover, Mach’s transformation of Kant and physics, not to mention himself, opened up horizons of theory that could deal with almost all of life’s questions, not just those in his particular area of endeavor: “Mach was compelled not only to investigate physics in its whole historical development, but also the profoundly related areas in the realm of science, above all physiology and psychology. He wished, as he said, ‘to gain a standpoint in physics that would allow him to view other fields without having to change his point of view.”13
As indicated by Adler’s use of italics in the above quotations, he identified Mach’s experiences and goals with his own life. He, too, sought a position from the field of physics that would allow him to deal with all the problems of his world, that would come from the vanquishing of an earlier set of opposites and their higher unity within a renewed personality. The earlier set of opposites in Friedrich Adler’s case was reflected in the “two powerful realms of thought” that divided his existence—the Marxist corpus of ideas and the abstract world of theoretical physics. These two realms symbolized the separation of body and mind, physiology and psychology, in his person. Marxist socialism represented the body that was denied to him, and physics served as an intellectual escape from this dispossession. Thus, through the symbiosis of physics and Marxism, a possibility offered by Mach, Friedrich Adler hoped to transform the past modes of thought and himself into a new condition. The question, of course, is to what degree he was eventually transformed through Machian thought. Mach stated that anyone who would follow his thinking must undergo “a psychological process of transformation like I myself had to undergo, which is quite difficult for one who is young.”14 The necessity of this psychological transformation, which could bring a new physical relation to the world, is evident in Mach’s teachings.
Mach introduced existentialism to Europe in the field of physics. He asserted that all truth is immediately given in the phenomena of the moment and that any knowledge of this moment is possible only as a description, not as an explanation of cause, because all statements about the phenomena were derivative experiences, that is, new phenomena.15 Mach’s ideas were similar to those developed by Husserl in his later years, but Mach never adhered to the strictness of the phenomenological method.16 His investigations into phenomena were encumbered by the spirit of his age; he attempted to bring into his descriptions a mathematical language, which he felt would be the one pure means of immediate description, a notion that since the turn of the century has been shown to harbor a narrow view about the “objectivity” of mathematics.17 Although he was not a true phenomenologist, the aphoristic style of his philosophic writings encouraged others to develop a phenomenology. Perhaps the most important concept that Mach introduced besides the notion of phenomenological investigation was that of the unity of subject and object in the phenomena of consciousness, that is, the understanding of the ego as merely a moment of a total field of experience. This insight was tremendous for his age, and in its existentialist basis antedated most of the cultural developments in science and literature in the Western world today.18 Such an insight could hardly have come from an eclectic reordering of past theories. It was part of the psychological breakthrough that Mach insisted all his disciples must personally undergo. Mach writes of this experience, which led to his revolutionary stance to traditional German thought: “Two or three years after reading Kant’s ‘Prolegomena’ I suddenly perceived the lazy role played by the thing-in-itself [Ding an Sich]. On a beautiful summer day in the country it seemed to me that the world and my ego were one coherent mass of sensations, only a little more coherent in the ego. Even though reflection set in and changed the impact of my impression, this moment was a definitive one for me in all my later experiences.”19
Mach struggled to capture in the language of his age the sensation of being one with nature, of having dissolved the abstract barrier between himself as cognizing ego and the world as objective presence. It was difficult to phrase such a view, for the ego in Mach’s time was assumed to be as indivisible and substantial as the material world. Even in the statement quoted above, Mach had trouble accounting for the change in perspective experienced by the ego and the role of the ego in this change. He found it necessary to maintain the concept of the ego even in the face of its seeming dissolution into the oneness of the immediate.20 As his thoughts developed over this experience on a summer day, Mach conceived the ego in twofold manner. On the one hand, the subject could reflect on the material of the phenomenon as it was immediately given, which would create an ego that existed only as a subordinate element of reflection that represented the total field it was part of; on the other hand, the subject could reflect upon his own sensations within the field of the phenomenon, which would create an ego that had a history of its own.21 For Mach, the ego, a troublesome conceptual inheritance from the past, existed always as a mode of reflection upon the flow of experience but never as an entity that could take objective positions over experience beyond its immediate place in the environment.
Mach used his insight to attack Kant’s conception of the thing-in-itself, for he felt that in the immediacy of the phenomenological experience all of the “thing” is known because man’s ego is part of this thing-in-itself. Thus with one stroke Mach removed all the epistemological problems that presented an abstract barrier between man and his touch with existence. Mach did borrow from Kant the negative helpmeet that man’s culture is built upon the conceptual language of consciousness, that is, the derived statements that seek to interpret the original experience. Thus Mach introduced a third major innovation into his culture: recognizing that man is largely a product of inherited language which immediately interferes with the purity of the phenomenological insight, he reduced the whole of man’s past knowledge to the value of time-bound hypothesis.22 Gone was the nineteenth-century positivistic belief in the progress of Western civilization. All knowledge from the cave man to the present was considered equally profound. The main task of modern science, according to Mach, was to recognize this fact and strive to simplify language and develop a more accurate means of description to deal with the phenomena of the environment. In this Heraclitian view that saw all life to be a flow, a river whose water constantly changes, man’s desire for an objective standpoint could be achieved only if he let go of all props and allowed the current to carry him. In this state of flux, language would be employed “economically.”23 Realizing that he could never return to exactly the same contextual moment to prove the observations of earlier moments, man must employ language that did not depend on a continuity of the same experience, as a language of cause and effect would necessitate. The problem arises, of course, as to what language could best fulfill this “economy” and still enable man to act upon his insights. Thus Mach turned to mathematics as a language of description for the physical world, and, as a language of description for psychological understanding of man, he employed an aphoristic vocabulary later used by Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian thinker who carried Mach’s path to more radical conclusions.24
We can now introduce the question, What did Mach offer Marxism? In what way could Friedrich Adler employ the path of Mach in his understanding of Marxism? The most obvious path of action for a Machian, as for Mach himself, would be a quiet, introspective life withdrawn from environmental commitments such as politics, for as we have seen in the case of Max Adler, an engagement in the full phenomena of life leaves no time for such abstractions as political programs.25 This is by no means to deny the presence of a psychological and physical revolution for the Machian, for in recognizing the abstract basis of culture, man is thrown back upon his own truth, his own insight, and all action is based upon the existentiality of his every moment. Friedrich Adler used Mach’s ideas literally and metaphorically. Literally, Mach’s relativization of cultural truth permitted an “existential” Marxism, a radical posture to social development that encouraged revolutionary changes. Metaphorically, Mach became a support for an existential lifestyle, with radical breaks in the continuity of his associations and habits. Mach became a palette of aphorism that Adler employed in the expressionistic picture of his life. In his first contact with Mach, Adler was attracted by the concept of the divisibility of mass, the relativity of body.
As an example of the misguided constancy theory of mass, Adler describes the great efforts expended to keep the International standard measure of length unchanged. His description can be read as an extended metaphor for his father’s efforts to keep him in an unchanging role, and the pain he must have experienced in this struggle. Theory, for Friedrich, always functioned literally, and symbolically for his personal drama:
At the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, in its own [eigenen] building, the fundamental measure of length is preserved—the archetype of the meter. The walls of the building are hollow in order to allow liquids of a definite temperature to run through them so that the warmth of the internal space where the meter is found may be kept constant. In this way it is hoped that the meter will remain a constant length. But that is not enough in itself to keep the temperature of the meter constant and protect it from extending itself; it must also be submerged in a bath of water of constant temperature; moreover, this bar of metal . . . must take a certain form to prevent bending, that of a cross. . . . We cannot here go into all the various measures taken to keep this bar of metal from changing. We see, however, that the physicists have engaged in an enormous amount of work and the employees of the “Bureau” also, in order that one body be kept unchanged. Thereby is this primordinal measure [Urmass] of length, aside from its practical meaning for measuring, the clearest proof of the changeability of all bodies.26
Mach’s relativism was an idea that promised that all situations change, as well as the measure of what is truth for any situation. Just as the primal measure of length could not be kept from extending itself, so Friedrich could not be kept from growing out of the confinement of his father’s house.
Mach’s recognition of language as the medium that gives physical phenomena the illusion of being constant was equally important to Friedrich. But his use of this insight differed from that of Mach. Adler writes:
Only a relatively small part of the knowledge of a single man comes from his own experience; the major portion of it supports itself on the statements of others concerning their experience. This fact conditions the particular belief that the scientific investigator cannot withdraw from the belief in the statements of other men. This belief is not blind. The statements of other men will be checked over and excluded from one’s knowledge if it appears that they contain faults of intellect or character. Thus there will occur many times a knowledge that is first formed on the basis of the statements of others, which later gains support in one’s own experience. This does not change the fact, however, that the greater portion of one’s knowledge comes from the statements of others.27
Adler used Mach’s insight that man’s knowledge of his own experience is constantly influenced by the inherited language of his culture to justify belief in statements beyond one’s experience, that is, until one sees that such statements have a fault in “character” or “intellect.” Adler laid the ground in this transition of Mach for his approach to the Austrian Social Democratic party and its program. He subtly raised the statements of others to a plane of necessity that the individual must accept until he is able to measure the statements with his own experience. The Machian emphasis that one must dwell in descriptive contact with his own experience because of the inaccurate abstractions of language within the culture loses its place in Friedrich’s interpretation. But in the years before 1911, when Adler’s lectures on Mach were first written (for a course at the University of Zurich from 1907 to 1910), he believed in the abstractions of Austrian Social Democracy of necessity, for within these statements beyond his experience lay the active unity he grew toward. As a corollary to his twisting of Mach’s view of language, Adler added a comment upon the form that science takes wherein we see the raising of past language to an absolute state that negates the individual initiative opened by Mach: “The statements over one’s knowledge can exist orally or be put down in writings. In the last case the same statement can find entrance to the knowledge of men of different ages. Under the concept of written statements . . . especially printed books, we understand the entity of science.”28
Mach’s major effort was to weaken the holy nature of the written word in his culture and to allow man to view science as merely time-bound descriptions, which within German culture in particular had taken the presence of imposing shibboleths. Mach sought to free man from the printed word and return his powers of individual observation. Why, then, did Adler reemphasize the written word? The answer to this question emerges from the nature of the end to which he employed Mach—the vanquishing of his father’s leadership and his usurpation of his father’s power. To be a leader of Austrian Social Democracy was to have ink in one’s veins, for the essential reality of this movement was that of the printed word. In a very un-Machian statement in 1917 before the Emergency Court that tried him for the assassination of Count Stuergh, Friedrich Adler was to give as his most basic motive his belief in the written principles of Marx and the Austrian Social Democratic party, adding, “Since I was in the Gymnasium . . . it was clear to me, and deeply and internally gripping, how holy was the written word. And that the greatest sin, the sin that could not be forgiven, was the sin against intellect.”29
Thus Mach’s work became another holy printed word and not primarily a method of life. Mach provided Adler with the belief that his fixed body and the fixed body of Austrian Social Democracy were relative entities, wholes that could assume new form on the basis of new definitions. But it was important that Austrian Social Democracy and its Marxist program not be too relativized, for then the major area of his struggle would lose its definition. Adler did not really desire the relativized ego preached by Mach; he merely wanted his own ego for the first time and used Mach as a tool for the dissolution of his ego-as-appendage-to-his-father so that his own ego might be established. An examination of Adler’s interpretation of Mach’s writings on the unity of subject and object, that is, the ego’s existence as part of a whole field of experience, shows Adler’s personal touch to the existentialist direction of Mach. Mach stated that the subject could reflect either on the environmental elements of phenomena or on the sensations of his ego as part of the phenomena. The ego in this twofold aspect was regarded, as outlined above, as a dependent moment of the total field of experience. Adler wrote in a further illustration of this essential point:
The entire world of experience in its development is for us a tremendously complicated context of a huge number of elements. A comprehension of the essence and the constitution of this complicated context [of subject and object] would be made easier if we employed for our first orientation a schematic picture. Such a picture would be a huge knot of threads, which was made up of smaller knots. . . . In this network we can differentiate certain parts that can be released [ausgeloest] from the total network, for example a cluster of threads [Knotenbueschel] that consists of one smaller knot, or a bunch of threads [Knotenbuendel] that consists of many knots. Every such release that separated these elements from the whole network without cutting the threads would create a series of knot branches [Knotengespalten]. . . . To this picture we tie on [knuepfen] the notion of a length of string between two (of the released) knots. This length of string would symbolize an element (i.e., the unity of subject and object); the knots themselves are nothing other than the crossing place [Kreuzigungstelle] of the lengths of string. . . . Every one of these released areas can be designated as a “thing.” Certain of the “things” will be called “subjects,” others will be designated as “objects.” Subject and object are the released entities from the whole (original) network.30
The “schematic picture” of Adler’s simplification of Mach is an illustration of a man who sought to unravel the mystery of his life. No more fitting metaphor could be used than this Gordian knot wherein subject and object were in the last instance the single thread—Austrian Social Democracy. In releasing the knots to bare the thread, Friedrich Adler was careful not to cut away any of the ties to Marxist socialism in Austria. Thus Mach became a delicate instrument to separate out those theories and political tactics that did not accommodate themselves to Adler’s necessities and especially a tool to discover his own path through the tangled skein of his father’s machinations against him. With World War I, Friedrich would find in Mach a basis for an ethic that would transform him for a moment into a true existential hero, but until that time he would dwell as a censor in the written words around him, gathering the critical strength needed to assert his will in politics.
An indication of exactly in what manner Friedrich Adler would manifest his will in politics and, at the same time, a glimpse of the major obstacle in his path to a complete freedom of movement is given in a letter he sent to Karl Kautsky in 1903: “We are Social Democrats insofar as we have a harmonious view over the development of society. The various methodologies which we bring from other fields to the study of society have nothing to do with the criteria of who should be considered a party comrade. A party comrade is he who recognizes the program.”31
Adler allowed that an individual might bring new interpretations to the older Marxist dogma concerning the various spheres of culture in the natural and social sciences, but the program of tactical action arrived at every year at the Gesamtpartei meeting was too definitive. Adler stressed that a party program was imperative law and comparable to the Catholic Eucharist.32 No matter what path one chose to the fount of all belief, the party program, one must not give the impression to others, especially the class enemy, that the dogma of Social Democracy was anything but unimpeachable—the holy word. All polemics were to occur within the privacy of the party, especially in party organs such as Der Kampf, whose name fit much more closely the internal struggles of the men within themselves and with each other than the class warfare that is implied. Thus even Friedrich Adler’s moment of truth in 1917 was a private act, and all his attacks on the party during the years of World War I were within the acceptance of the party program. Adler never sought to rebel against the program, only to change it through the normal party channels. For whereas the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ, the party program was the body and blood of Friedrich Adler.
Mach’s understanding of relativity was tailored to this distinction between the absolute quality of the party program as opposed to the relative validity of the individual’s research into the social world. In the years between 1907 and 1914 Adler published a number of articles in Der Kampf and Die Neue Zeit developing his relation between Mach and Marxism.33 Four concepts were borrowed from Mach that formed the backbone of his symbiosis: accommodation (Anpassung), release (Ausloesung), function (Funktion), and unequivocality (Eindeutigkeit).34 Adler understood by the principle of accommodation that man as a dependent element in a total field of experience must adapt his understanding to his particular context.35 Adler showed the similarity of Mach and Marx in this regard: Marx’s understanding of man as a creation of an economic set of conditions that changed constantly was compared to Mach’s view of the ego as an element of the external flux of experience. The analogy was striking, but some critics wondered why Mach was necessary because his view was anticipated by Marx.36 Adler pointed out, however, that for Marx every sphere of human capacity was determined by the economic context, whereas Mach allowed that different contexts create different qualities of human capacity and that man must learn to accommodate his understanding and language of description to the proper context. Thus the orthodox Marxist language tended to obscure many facts of being human because an economic language of description was proper only to a certain context, whereas many different languages of description were necessary for an objective view of life that would allow a better accommodation to the myriad contexts of existence. Again Adler’s understanding of life appears in the analogy of the knotted threads, each knot within the major one needing a separate language of description. The second concept, that of release, designated the separating of the various contexts involved in human experience and redividing the sciences accordingly. For the Marxist, such a redivision of the spheres of societal study would allow a more accurate political and social knowledge. Moreover, the political program of Social Democracy would be allowed a greater range of application; it could comment upon and plan for all areas of human experience. Herein lay the third concept, that of function: Marxist socialism would be made up of individuals who devoted themselves to the various functions that made up experience. Gradually, as the Marxist scientists sorted out the various threads from the confusing bourgeois knot that passed for knowledge, the separate functions of being human could be studies in their particular integrity. Only then could true unequivocality, the fourth concept, be arrived at in Marxist dogma. A unified Marxist program could one day be drafted in which all areas of knowledge had been explored in their relation to man’s changing experience and all could be seen in terms of their interrelatedness, for all of the separate functions studies were dependent upon their relation to man’s ego and language. One day a language might be developed, presumably a mathematical language, that showed the functions of man’s life in their interrelatedness; for the time being, however, the best language to use in a science of man and his environment would be one that satisfied the demands of the age. Adler suggested that the party, since it was dealing with human lives in transition, should accommodate the language of Marxist theory to the latest advances in scientific research concerning man, especially the biological sciences.37
It never seemed to occur to Adler that a reinvestigation of knowledge based, presumably, upon the introspective rigor of phenomenological investigation might negate the metaphorical assumptions of class structure and class warfare. Somehow Adler was able to accommodate himself to the contradictory stance of holding the socialist belief above the relativity of all other areas of human experience. A necessary accommodation was that Adler’s freedom from the bonds of patriarchal possession could come only from his engagement within the holy circle of this unquestioned area; and from the direct contact thus permitted with his father, he then might release the manifold functions of his life from their undifferentiated torpor within the metaphors of his father’s family house, the Austrian Social Democratic party. A release of these long-imprisoned functions would allow an unequivocal sense of self for the first time in Friedrich’s life; such a release would bring with it a flow of energy that must transform completely the house where Friedrich made his home. Friedrich seemed to anticipate this possibility as a consequence of his course of development when he wrote in “Wozu brauchen wir Theorien?”: “We go in the morning to that house where our place of work is found because in terms of our past experience we find ground to make the theoretical assumption that there we can exercise our accustomed activity. Perhaps, however, our theory is false, a condition has arisen that never arose before, for example, the house burned down. But in spite of this risk we will take the same way, that is, rely on theory. For because of this unknown possibility, not to go to our place of work would be much more impractical than to test it with our theory.”38
Apprehending at the roots of this consciousness the future flame that promised freedom, Friedrich Adler prepared himself with a language with which he might secure it. It was only natural that in the following years he would find a biological language attractive for the revolutionary image of the Austrian Social Democratic man. Yet when the walls of his house did start to burn, it was a failure of language that prevented him from securing a home that allowed greater living space. In the moment of confrontation with the dissolution of his family house, Friedrich forgot the theoretical text that could have won him freedom and instead borrowed the dictionary of his fathers to defend his integrity.