6

Max Adler, the Eternal Youth

Max Adler never became an active politician within the Austrian Social Democratic party, although after World War I he represented the party in the Austrian Parliament.¹ Adler did, however, represent the purity of the Marxist ideal in the sense Karl Marx lived it—except for a brief period during World War I he never compromised principle with the class enemy. As a youth of twenty-one, Adler wrote of the danger that beset the Austrian intellectual: “The chief characteristic of the . . . student proletariat [is] their goal to work themselves out of their difficulties into a good bourgeois position. . . . Thus the greatest frequency in the betrayal of youthful ideals is to be found with students. This feeling of belonging to the bourgeois class, if only as reflected in the hope of eventually bettering one’s position, separates the intellectual proletariat from the industrial proletariat.”²

Max Adler never permanently fell prey to the trap he described, but his failure to violate his youthful ideals excluded him from an active role within Austrian Social Democracy and thus isolated him from the only people who were interested in his ideas. In creating a Marxist platform of principle on which to base his existence as a man of truth, Max Adler picked a vehicle that demanded a Fischhofian willingness to mediate. But Adler, enveloped in a Kantian categorical imperative of his rational creation, demanded that the world meet him on his own ground of truth. Adler avoided the eclectic pitfalls that cost Otto Bauer his ethical and psychological freedom only to fall into the opposite abyss—a proud, self-created “objectivity” that used the personal metaphor as a bridge of concept on which he demanded that all his contemporaries walk if they were to reach the promised land with him. Adler’s contribution to theoretical Marxism was new, but it was a foundation, not a bridge; and his thought was in motion, not an encyclopedia of concepts that adherents could use for their own theoretical or practical thought. Adler expected a rigor in practical politics that matched only his own conception of events, thus making agreement difficult for others. Theory became metaphor for him as he assumed the role of defender of the faith:

If socialism is a science, then its techniques cannot be mere utterances of a political party, which would then not have universal validity. The statements of science are objective; that of a party, dictated by their interests, necessarily limited and one-sided. . . . To be sure the proletariat represent a definite interest, but not in the same sense as other political groups, who follow their interest as blind men. The proletariat, in contradistinction to such groups, act through clear, scientific knowledge of the existing situation. Thus they are more pioneers of science than members of a political party. . . . The procedure of the socialist party must be determined by scientific knowledge, not from blind obedience to class interests or subjective passions; and from such a basis Social Democracy—for it is scientific socialism—stands over all parties, as is always the case with a science.³

Little wonder Max Adler came increasingly into disfavor with his fellow Austrian Social Democrats and never soiled his hands in the swamp of the Habsburg Parliament. For Max Adler, socialism permitted the full flowering of an individual’s human potential, but it could be arrived at only if the vanguards of socialism acted and thought as archetypes of the New Man of the future in their immediate existence within the Austrian state.⁴ To be such a New Man demanded of the individual a selfless devotion to intellect and the denying of all “egoistic” passions:

Under [the concept] “individualism” one understands first the free development of every individual, in which all his potentialities are developed without contradictions, that is, harmonic for oneself and harmless for the other. Second, the word “individualism” can also mean the licentious satisfaction of the individual’s egoistic passions. . . . The distinction between these two definitions of personal development has been beautifully and grippingly investigated by a poet who plumbs the depths of the soul, Henrik Ibsen, in the two forms of Brand and Peer Gynt. Only Brand arrives at a true individualism, that is, cultivation of character; Brand’s motto “to thine own self be true” demands a self-imposed duty to society, whereas Peer Gynt, with his motto “to thine own self be enough,” recognizes no duties whatsoever, is a plaything of his moods and the accidents of circumstance; Peer Gynt, thus, never achieves a strongly defined self, and since he is worth nothing, he can only be repoured by the button molder.⁵

In this critical appreciation of Ibsen, Max Adler bares the core of his personality. Adler feels that only Brand, the man who demanded ethical consistency from himself and others, who gave the cold love of spiritual principle, the black and white of self-imposed law, can truly be called a human individual; Peer Gynt, who followed the self-imposing law of passion, who gave only that which immediately arose, no matter how base its substance, to those around him, for whom black and white were but two invisible possibilities of the rainbow’s manifest spectrum, was judged as one who had failed as a human.⁶ Adler’s critique is revealing of his own limitations, for Ibsen had written Peer Gynt immediately after Brand, as if to show his insight into the limits of ethnical consistency and the greater depths of human illusion and the human soul.

The world of egoistic passion, of Peer Gynt, was the hallmark of Austria to Max Adler. It was the sign of the times:

What is it that this generation alone can understand? In this question lies the source of all evil, the peculiar limitation of the bourgeois age, and the primordial ground of all its understanding; that is, it conceives nothing other than its own self, that individual ego of the everyday, the narrow, small, transient personality . . . the whole world is there only so this egoistic individual can be whatever will make him personally happy. What he cannot understand, and does not serve his egoistic goals, does not concern him. . . . Thus this generation sinks into the egoistic passions and complete absence of ideas [Ideenlosigkeit] or irrationality [Verunftwidrigkeit] which are only two sides of the same principle.⁷

Only through an uncompromising objectivity with oneself and complete repression of the egoistic passions that threatened to turn one into the sloppy-thinking, pleasure-loving Viennese, for whom all might be hopeless but not yet serious, could one raise himself to the status of New Man and be capable of leading others to these heights. It is not strange, then, that Max Adler was inspired by Nietzsche’s image of the Uebermensch, the transcendent man:

The “transcendent man” [Uebermensch] is . . . a struggler for self-discipline—a thing that lies apart from a hunger for power over the state or other people. And if Nietzsche praised the warlike virtues, he did not mean them to be warlike in the interest of an actual war or for actual power, rather a war that should be waged with one’s own commonness and baseness, with all the instincts and impulses [Trieben] that always tear us down from the heights of the “transcendent man” into the depths of the “subhuman” [Unter-Menschliche].⁸

Adler saw himself as one of the transcendent men, a champion of the spirit, qua intellect, that lived in an age of death as a germ of new life:

The present generation is . . . a transition period, a phase of time when all that is old is destroyed and the new is formed. All the forms of the old way of life in which reason was embodied now dissolve, but there are not yet new forms in which societal reason can find a home. . . . An empty freedom, an empty law, an empty science are the idols of this time: an empty freedom because it is only the freeing from the old law, without a creation of a new, free form of society; an empty law, because it contents itself with the formal literal view of equality before the law, instead of attempting to create equality within the laws themselves; an empty science, because it is only concerned with the categorizing of experiences, without attempting to employ in a useful manner that which it has collected.⁹

Adler states in this passage his intention to support through socialism positive policies and programs of social change. As a Social Democrat, he believed society needed not simply an “empty freedom” or an “empty science” but a definite direction and new social forms. Adler’s idea of the social a priori in human consciousness was the new insight that might guide the creation of new social forms of interaction. He based his thought on the Kantian categories of human consciousness, which create the essential structure and horizon of concept by which we organize our experience.¹⁰ Adler stressed in the social a priori the Kantian category of community, the reciprocity between agent and patient, that is, the interdependent nature of each experimental moment.¹¹ Whereas Kant had implied a field of others toward which one must relate each isolated moment, Adler gave a more definite social wholeness, in the sense of human community, to his definition. He extended this notion of community to base all human interaction in a social transaction, with even seemingly isolated human experience requiring a social communication to oneself in order to clarify its meaning. Thus to be accurate, each moment of human understanding must recover the social nature of each experience. Society had been unaware of this essential social structure of knowing and being in its historical development, and thus its social organizations had not adequately reflected the necessity of interdependence and the social nature of judgment in its hierarchies of meaning, communication, and authority. If the society began to incorporate the implications of the social a priori into its institutional arrangements, social organization would become truer to the nature of the human being, thus healthier.

The implications of the social a priori were enormous, and so was the work to be done if society was to be restructured. Among the implications was the need for new sciences of social structure and a new pedagogy that would help individuals see and use cooperative forms of living. Such fields as group dynamics and the phenomenological study of social systems may be said to be presaged in Adler’s notion of the social a priori.¹² Adler realized that a lifetime would be required to transform the entire culture to his still somewhat inchoate vision, but he felt that one’s life was of value only if spent in the pursuit of such purposes:

What does the “historical personality” mean? It is the vehicle with which the spirit can go its way, it is only a stamp which the spirit employs to impress its image upon the material of history. The personality is necessary because the consciousness of man can only survive in this torpid, divisive, relating constantly only to itself, form of the ego. . . . But like a mold that falls away from a bell, after the pouring of the bell itself has been completed, so in the greatest works of the historical personality, after it has performed the necessary service as historical carriers of the kernel of the idea that will create new societal forms, it falls to the earth and passes away leaving behind its true work. To be sure, there is no great creative work possible without a personality behind it; but this limitation is only a spatial and temporal one, in which the becoming of spiritual effect completes itself, but which in itself belongs to no individual personality, rather is the immediate spiritual possession of all thinking beings.¹³

As might be expected from Max Adler’s view of the historical personality, he gave little moment to the everyday affairs of his own life, and the chatty autobiography such as Renner wrote was inconceivable to him. Adler served the higher ends of a new societal creation that permitted him little extra attention for the mundane passions and anecdotal affairs of life. It is perhaps this syndrome that led one of his biographers to remark in 1959, “Even a sketchy biography of Max Adler does not exist today.”¹⁴

The curriculum vitae that Adler completed in 1919 on assuming a teaching position in the law faculty at the University of Vienna provides perhaps the most complete statement of his personal history:

I . . . Dr. Max Adler was born on the 15th of January 1873 in Vienna, and has lived there ever since. After the normal completion of the Volksschule and Mittelschule, I passed my Matura in the year 1892, and enrolled in the fall of 1892 in the law faculty of the University of Vienna. At the university I followed the usual course of study of a law student, and concerned myself at the same time, from the very beginning, with philosophical and sociological studies, as well as with disciplines that touched on the border of these areas, namely national economy and natural science. In the summer of 1896 I acquired the doctor of law degree. I had to concern myself immediately after my graduation with practical life, for I was compelled to earn my own living. After completion of my apprentice years in court service, I began in 1897 the activity of a law clerk until I established myself as a lawyer in the winter of 1904, which has been to the present date my occupation. Nevertheless, this practical professional activity absorbed only a part of my interest, for the major current of my interest was and is devoted to science. My involvement with philosophy (as early as my last years within the Gymnasium I came under the influence of the philosophy of Kant) has been the deciding factor of my whole existence [welche zum betimmende Moment meiner ganzen Dasein wurde]. From that point of departure, during my university years, I made the acquaintance of the writings of Karl Marx, an encounter that dominated all my later theoretical activity; on the ground of Marxism I have since that time not only sought in my studies to penetrate the theory and history of socialism, but also to establish the intellectual-historical relation of socialism with the classical German philosophy, specifically with the legal and societal aspects of this philosophy, that is, the so-called practical philosophical elements. By this path I arrived at my preoccupation with the epistemological foundations of any study of society, especially in connection with the materialistic conception of history given to us by Karl Marx.¹⁵

Few other facts about Adler’s activity during the Habsburg era are known. He was born of Jewish parents and thus experienced the bourgeois milieu of the Viennese Jewish intellectual with its stress on the essence of the German language as a cultural island.¹⁶ The autobiography of Karl Renner and comments by his compatriots tell us that Adler was a leading force in the establishment of the Freie Vereinigung Sozialistischer Studente, an organization which he headed for more than a decade.¹⁷ One also reads that Adler participated in the foundation of the Zukunft Verein, a group of intellectuals who established in 1903 a workers’ school and engaged in other pedagogical activities.¹⁸ He had a wife, who was a physician, and two children.¹⁹

The presence of a family that he cultivated is important in our analysis of Adler because the one problem that prevented him from completing his philosophical projects and turned idea into metaphor was what Jung has termed the “eternal youth” (puer aeternus) syndrome, in which the individual refuses to accept his mortality.²⁰ As a family man Max Adler knew mortality—birth, aging, and all the changes a person undergoes in the social world, but as a thinker he refused to accept the finitude of ideas, and as a Marxist, the necessity of translating thought into policy. From his role as a family man, Adler undoubtedly gained the strength that allowed him to maintain a normal balance in thought and action through such difficult periods as World War I, but as a public contributor to thought he evidenced an unwillingness to complete the necessary research his constant prolegomenas promised and thus to offer a finished body of work to be judged. If.he remained an “eternal youth,” his work could always show promise, and he could point out limitations and errors of thought in others; only as a finite thinker with a finished thought could he be judged in the light of historical contributions in his field. It was not cowardice to produce that made him a puer aeternus; it was the force and newness of the idea that was his charge, coupled with the introversion of his natural attitude and the norms and pressures of mixing ideas with political timeliness that produced his neurotic relationship to philosophy and politics.²¹

Thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kafka had struggled with the awesome task of articulating new ideas that were somewhat akin to Adler’s notion of the social a priori;²² whereas their lives were shattered in their agon, Adler preserved his in his refusal to bring the social a priori to its mature diversity of expression. Adler was, after all, a self-identified protagonist in the effort to educate a new type of person and build a new society. He could have been expected to provide ideas thorough enough in their development to stimulate new realms of research, social planning, and pedagogy. The foundation of such a new beginning for social thought was established by Adler in his first major work, Kausalitaet und Teleologie im Streite um die Wissenschaft (causality and teleology contend over science), published in 1904; after this work; which contained all the ideas he was to consider over his lifetime, he did little but refine his terms.²³

The directions of thought he might have taken required planned cultural study and a rigorous schedule of introspection, modes of research that would have involved him in historical artifacts of social thought and creativity and a deep concentration on his own thinking and valuing in the midst of social interaction. The neurosis of the puer aeternus prevented him from undertaking either an open study of historical statements, which would place him in history with certain limitations, or a thorough analysis of his own mode of operating as a social being. The neurosis of the puer aeternus causes a hesitation to live fully in history, offering instead the allure of a timelessness of authority and value created by the psychic energy that feeds the syndrome. Positively, the Jungian idea of the puer aeternus connotes the emergence in the person of a new idea of individuality, an idea whose implications are not only personal but collective, in that the entire culture could benefit from the conception of individuality. Jung calls an idea with such universal potential an archetype.²⁴ Neurosis results if the individual who harbors this idea identifies himself with it, rather than learning from it or using it to understand others. The person who feels that he has a special ownership of the idea will experience an inflation or deflation of ego, similar to that which Otto Bauer experienced when he projected his internal reality onto the cultural environment. The inflation or deflation of the puer aeternus is in the face of an idea, a psychic force, that has collective, public meaning, but the person must separate his own learning and ego from that collective potential. If his ego becomes too closely identified with the idea, he will experience the megalomania Nietzsche knew in his identification with his cultural idea of Zarathustra. If the ego is deflated, the idea has proven so powerful that the individual becomes enchanted by it and serves it selflessly. Either pole leads to impotence in one’s thought, and the idea itself suffers. The idea ceases to be individuated into a thought that is part of the world; it remains only a notion. Similarly, the individual ceases to individuate, for only by grappling with the idea and making it into a variegated reality in the history of thought and its established formats can he become the many-sided thinker and active person the idea promises.

As Adler stated in the speech honoring Kant in 1904, he viewed one’s historical personality as only a “mold that falls away from the bell, after the pouring of the bell itself has been completed”; the bell is one’s contributions to culture. In 1936 in his last work, Das Raetsel der Gesellschaft (The riddle of society), the same thought on the secondary importance of the historical personality is voiced and this time called the “dross” of life: “The person was and is only a historical form—dross [Schlacke] of the past—in which an impersonal, enduring spiritual content appears, which often does not show its full importance, until it is freed from that element that is called the historical personality.” But when one belittles one’s historical person, the vehicle of the tensions and decisions of life, one’s own ideation suffers, and unrealized potentialities of one’s mind and spirit intrude in conscious work, as we have seen with Renner and Bauer. Adler refers to Goethe’s praise of the historical personality and turns the thought into an attempt to justify its disparagement:

Usually the value of the personality is not questioned, and seen from the perspective of Goethe’s words: “The greatest happiness of being human is only the personality.” Even with Goethe this was not without question, and it can be turned into its opposite when one sees the personality also as a limitation. And this is true not only in the sense of its incomplete or problematic character, as expressed by the comforting saying “Where there is much light, there are many shadows,” but rather in principle, as the individual bound by the greatest personality must perceive himself as a single, one-sided, and incomplete person.²⁵

These words show Adler’s puer aeternus yearnings to be free of the historical limitations of a definite self with its moral character and fallible incompleteness. The irony is that only through accepting the reality of one’s personality can a narrow outlook and individuality be expanded. Adler correctly intuits that any definite self will have a shadow side of unrealized potential. Carl Jung in discussing the puer aeternus in its positive meaning as an archetypal idea of growth and a symbol for a new integration of more elements of one’s person points to the “shadow” symbolism that accompanies the process of individuating one’s personality.²⁶ Shadow symbolism followed Adler his entire life. In the fall of 1901 he had reviewed a play, The Shadow, by M.E. Della Grazie, presented at the Burg Theater. The play dealt with a poet who became possessed by the appearance of a shadow side of himself because he neglected his work. Adler said that a man possessed by such a shadow must have been very weak in his conscious life, lacking the strength and courage to realize his ideas, or such a state of possession would not have occurred. Max Adler had perceived what was to be his problem—the failure to realize his ideas fully. In his review, one of the two chief reasons for his failure was made evident as he discussed the role of introspection in a life:

The hours of contemplation of oneself are seldom; yet they provide wonderful moments of the most profound inner possession, in which all those things that otherwise filled our lives and seemed to be our only interest suddenly appear to be inconsequential, lying outside us, only the most incomplete of means by which we could help our real value, our subjectivity, our true being to express itself. At such moments the soul, in comparison to its usual activity in daily existence, seems to have returned to its home from a foreign land. . . . At such times the mind seems to ask itself, “Is the many colored manifold of my external life in which all the powers of the intellect, all the feelings of the emotions, all the impulses of the internal by which the soul expresses itself, the sole extent of my life?” That is the anxious question that every genuine return to oneself produces.

But the real condition of the soul is not comprehended by this question that attacks the mind of man. Where thought and action flow from a strong, secure character, where the entire being of the man is as consistent as a single substance, then this question is not one of despair. It is only a play of the intellect, in which the intellect tests its own strength. When the quiet hours of thought come, one is often tempted to paint a picture of oneself that portrays one’s character as a different possibility . . . dream wishes emerge and longings, in a self-deceptive fantasy, or one is seized by subjective possibilities that open vistas outside of real life; but the hours of dreaming pass away; the images of longing flow by, the nightmares of imagined horrors disappear before the clear conscious knowledge of oneself, and certainity of one’s actual inner being, a knowledge . . . that knows what and why every longing is. . . . But it is quite different with people who lack this inner certainty, who exist in a conflict of thought and action from the very beginning. . . . Such a person would stand in the center point of the “shadow.”²⁷

In this passage, Adler expresses an ambivalence toward introspective thought. On the one hand, it is a return to certainty to feel and reflect on the stable values and purposes of one’s person, but at that moment “the anxious question that every genuine return to oneself produces” occurs, which is, “Is the many colored manifold of my external life in which all the powers of the intellect, all the feelings of the emotions, all the impulses of the internal by which the soul expresses itself, the sole extent of my life?” That anxiety and question blocked Adler from the phenomenological reflection that would have been necessary for disciplined thought upon the possible categories of social interaction that made up the social a priori in cultural life. Phenomenological reflection is the turning over in one’s mind of the perceived transactions or objects of life in order to see them more fully in reflection and to develop a logic of their meaning.²⁸ Late in his life Adler admired Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, and saw the structured introspection of his thought as the key for understanding the meaning of social transactions.²⁹ But he was never able to practice the extended inquiry of reflection because of the intruding anxiety that overcame the contemplative moment. He found it necessary to challenge the possibility of inquiry with what he knew, a diverting of attention to his certainties, instead of the agony of an open search for specific meanings in the morass of facts derived from close observation of human interaction. The puer aeternus cannot probe the facts of his consciousness, for such control of attention and logic toward his own person will secure the specificity of his personality. The neurosis diverts the possibility of such a dwelling in personal thought to ward off self-knowledge.

The second reason for Adler’s failure to develop his ideas lay in his resistance to securing evidence for his thought from careful study of cultural artifacts or behavior patterns that might reflect the social a priori in operation.

The laws of consciousness are known only in their empirical appearance in human performance. Then one can either reflect on one’s own experience, abstracting the rule of consciousness from it, as in phenomenological reflection; or one can find in the products of human performance, through inference and deduction, the laws of social interaction inherent in human thought. Adler recognized the necessity of finding thought’s laws within their historical expression: “An action of thought is not an empty abstraction, as it manifests itself directly in empirical action. For only because the person in his historical presence thinks with passion, need, and haltingly with a search for understanding, does one’s pure will become the teleological and ethical striving of empirical life (Kant calls this thought’s pathological associations).”³⁰

Adler tells us that one can see the social a priori only as it is interpreted through a specific reality of a time and place, through the “pathological” lack of understanding and vulnerability of one’s consciousness seeking to solve a life moment through decision and action. Any analysis of what the social a priori might be in its various delineaments would have to interpret it through its historical incompleteness and skewness of expression. Here he stopped short of the clear tasks before him. Georg Simmel studied not only artistic expression in cultural periods in order to ferret out the laws of consciousness that were incompletely expressed, such as his study of Dante’s psychology, but also lifestyles of his own culture, such as those of the adventurer, the stranger in a community, or the miser and the spendthrift.³¹ Simmel showed how human action and expression were given peculiar shape within the social interactions of the person with the norms and social institutions of his environment. Simmel did not link his insights to a historical epistemology, such as that of Kant or any other philosopher or psychologist. At the time of Simmel’s death Adler praised the ingenuity of his insights into social interaction but condemned him as a shallow thinker.³²

Adler could have improved upon Simmel by founding his own cultural analyses upon the Kantian base of the detailed schemata³³ of the social a priori, but he failed to carry out such a project because of his puer aeternus condition. He could not study artifacts with an empirical thoroughness that identified definite cultural norms for such an identification would have rooted him in history and recognized his own mortality as a thinker and activist. As a creative social thinker, he would have had to define his own generation’s limits and “pathology,” in the sense Kant meant the term, when he saw how the social a priori was being realized by his associates. The limited social interaction and patterns of communication would have forced him to account for his manner of operation. The closest that he came to such study was in the early 1920s in his Staatsauffassung der Marxismus (conception of the state in Marxism), in which he discussed the correct Marxist interpretation of democratic forms of political structure, including the organization of a party, the state, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.³⁴ His analysis in this work, written in the heat of the possibility of a socialist state in Austria, fails to relate to his pre–World I reflections on the necessity of founding new social organizations upon a deeper knowledge of the social a priori of human consciousness. All his arguments are derived from the reification of class conflict, without an analysis of how social communication and interaction are limited or furthered by particular forms of social-political organization. To develop the nuances of social communications and interaction as they would be guided by an increased knowledge of the social a priori, he would have had to make thorough models (schemata) of social discourse so as to demonstrate the social appearance and the rule of each form of human interaction. He would have had to explore how the limited understanding of the particular social culture set norms of interaction and communication that were more or less adequate in their accord with the timeless guides of the schemata.³⁵

Instead of undertaking these studies, he complained of thinkers who did them. His objection was either that they did not go deep enough, that is, to the laws behind the cultural artifact,³⁶ or that men who made such studies were interested in practical matters, whereas he was a theoretician. In the first argument, he expressed his own guilt at not making a better study; in the second, where he objected to an overly practical orientation, he expressed his own fear at mixing his study with a body of evidence that would determine who he was and how he should be acting in order fully to meet his cultural obligations. His attack on a fellow neoKantian, Rudolf Stammler, for his study of legal norms used both arguments—that he was too shallow and too practical:

An original way to look at a thinker is to realize that the thinker’s will is not the only thing that sets the course of investigation, but the thinker’s limits, which cannot be overcome. The will to thought of Stammler is essentially practical . . . . He does not raise the genuine theoretical question in relation to social problems: What is it? What is happening there and why does it happen in that manner? rather [he raises] the practical question: Is that which occurs right? [Ist das, was da ist oder geschieht, in Ordnung?] How can I make it right? [Wie mache ich alles recht?].³⁷

The slovenly expression in which the practical questions are phrased in the German deliberately obscures Adler’s understanding that recognizing the social a priori required study of how things were done in real situations and that such a recognition not only gave the possibility of theoretical understanding but created the entry to a program of cultural change based on the adequacy or inadequacy of what exists, given the rule contained in its expression. Stammler sought to show how the legal norms of a given culture were based upon adequate or inadequate understanding of the imperatives of ethical consciousness, seen from a Kantian perspective. Stammler saw his own work as akin to Karl Renner’s study of legal norms, relating the legal expression to the social consciousness of its formulation.³⁸ Adler expressed his own limitations that could not be overcome, not Stammler’s, who was both theoretical and practical.

Consciousness became a shibboleth for Adler, an island that kept one safe from the shadows of uncertainty. Being certain was rooted in ideas that became fetishes, and research became a practical falling away from theoretical purity. Adler made consciousness into an object with powers that guaranteed one a “companionship” with a force that had godlike qualities—omnipresence, omniscience, and possibly even immortality. On consciousness’ omniscience and ubiquitous presence, Adler wrote:

We can only think of an end to consciousness by means of consciousness itself, and therefore the thought that there could be no consciousness is a logical impossibility in view of consciousness itself. The condition of sleep, for example, is known only in those cases where dream life initiates consciousness, and the condition of deepest loss of consciousness such as a dreamless sleep must remain as foreign to us and the internal condition of a lifeless body. Thus for man there exists really no state wherein consciousness is not present, uninterrupted, and no end to consciousness can be thought of.³⁹

Adler’s casuistry takes on the aspect of a lawyer pleading his case for the innocence of consciousness in the face of a nameless crime against existence. His overemphasis on consciousness’ constant presence in the phenomenon called man seems to be a compulsive need rather than merely an excursion of logic; behind his insistence seems to lurk a fear of the state in which his consciousness might be at an end. The concept of death, which Otto Bauer asserted haunted Adler,⁴⁰ was indeed a specter behind his preoccupation with consciousness: “Whether we believe it or nor at some time we will cease to be. As Socrates stated when he found that he did not fear death: As long as I am, death is not, and when death comes, I am no more. This ‘ceasing to be,’ however, is a mere word to consciousness, and, therefore, genuine thoughts of death never occur to man when he is in physical and mental health, no matter how much his thought dwells upon the idea when in a depressed or confused state. To the strong mind the dying organism, itself, appears as but a physical illness.”⁴¹

Adler’s insistence that the dark thoughts of the melancholic and despondent nature are not signs of a true condition and that even if a true condition of dying were present, the strong intellect would be able to sublimate them into a nonfatal condition gives us a clue to the crime of consciousness he defended. His conscious grasp on the logic that protected him from deeper involvement in research, and a concomitant social policy, refused to die. He resisted accepting his mortality and working to complete his finite tasks. Thus he was poised always at the edge of a specter of death, for to cease to become puer aeternus of intellect, he would have to die the philosopher’s death every day, as Socrates states, in order to know through experience and inquiry his mortal limits.⁴² He would have to turn his eyes from a worship of intellect and use it as a tool for the tasks to which he professed to be dedicated—the transformation of individuals into more knowing persons and the reconstruction of society into a social ground with greater opportunities for developing human potential.

By 1910 it was evident to the party fathers and Max Adler’s Austro-Marxist peers that he overemphasized an approach to theory that avoided exploration of the cultural facts of the present. Otto Bauer, in a criticism that sums up the party oligarchy’s attitude to Max Adler, called his wooing of the young intellectuals “an optimistic attempt to create a mystical sect of those who long for the future” and recommended that Adler dwell more on the economic conditions of class than on the realm of pure idea.⁴³ Adler had a brighter vision because he did intuit the idea that could provide a genuine basis for new forms of social judgment and social institutions. As we explore his writings, we will see the promise of that idea of the social a priori which was metaphorically abused by him but which had substance.