7

Max Adler, the Incomplete Theoretician

In his theoretical writings Max Adler pondered a theme central to Marxism—individuality within an interdependent world. According to his interpretation, Karl Marx had inherited the problem from cultural fathers such as Kant, and Marxism was a political expression that relied on epistemological and social-psychological principles integral to Kant’s thought. In fact, the conundrum of human freedom within the laws that bind man to nature and society is as old as historical philosophy; the idea of individuality within interdependence can be traced from Plato through the whole of Western thought. Adler recognized the historical nature of the problem and thus gave himself latitude to provide an answer for his generation and the future. Had he fulfilled his promise as a philosopher he would have stood on a par with the many thinkers he celebrated in his writings. Adler’s value as a social philosopher is twofold: as a historian of social philosophy, he clarified the origins of socialism as a solution to the realization of human potential, and as an epistemologist, he laid the foundation for a study of social discourse as a setting for individual judgment.

His attachment to Austrian Social Democracy can be seen only as destructive for his thought. He had no dialogues with fellow party members on his explorations of individuality and interdependence that could make genuine contributions to a future socialist state. His only dialogues with his Social Democratic peers concerned the party program, a practical concern that elicited in him a shallow adherence to untested shibboleths. As we explore the Kantian-Marxist basis of his social thought, we will encounter the reified nature of class conflict and the dictatorship of the proletariat as championed by Adler, which cheapened the significance of his own theoretical writings. Austrian Social Democracy was an ersatz realm of action for a man who needed to pursue active research to find evidence for his ideas. His party work as a contributor to Der Kampf and in the political education of the young separated him from the accomplishment he wished to give to the world—a truer foundation for social living based on a deeper consciousness of social experience. Human energy is finite, and the heightened relevance of being a contributing party leader insulated him from dialogues with other social thinkers that might have stimulated his research. There is a laziness (Faulheit) in his thought, which he accused others of at times,¹ an indolence bred by the easy role of being accepted as a leading Marxist theoretician by a circle of party activists who saw little relevance in what he said. To accept such a position was to settle for an inauthentic role for his individualilty. Adler’s real aspiration was projected onto the thinkers he admired, such as Kant:

A strong and tortured consciousness of poverty permeates all Kant’s works. Pouring forth from his works is a moral indignation that his most intense labors still bear the stamp of failure, and that while every other science increasingly progressed, metaphysics “which would be knowledge itself, to which all men turn as if to an oracle, continually marches in place, without advancing one step.” There is a Faustian feeling of the impossibility of finding Truth in the old paths. [Kant] turned away from the philosophical heritage of the past, in the clear consciousness that the way must be sought anew:

“Shall I, perhaps, read in a thousand books

That men have everywhere been miserable,

That now and then one has been happy?”

No! Even if the dreams of metaphysics had not added to our knowledge, at least its error had borne some fruit—a conviction that one had to make a regression on the false path back to the starting point, and there find a compass to orient oneself. This compass is—The Critique of Pure Reason.²

In his curriculum vitae Adler had called Kant “the deciding factor of his whole existence,” whereas Marx was an “encounter that dominated all my later theoretical activity,” a “ground” that served to develop his social ideation. One can interpret this succinct self-definition, written in his forty-sixth year, as a realization that his real mission was to develop a new, radical approach to social judgment and not merely to contribute to finished social concepts and an established social program.

Faust was to be archetypal figure for Adler,³ Faust, who wanted to change the world, not only to know it; yet if it were to be changed, it had to be seen as no one had yet known it. Faust makes a pact with Satan and is guided through the nether world. For Adler it was necessary to traverse the frightening realm of introspection as he made a phenomenological study of social experience. As Adler stated this goal in Kausalitaet und Teleologie:

First, regressively, through reflection the concept “truth” is arrived at in its pure existence as knowledge; on this foundation all historical truth lies, in that the foundation established by reflective knowledge makes it possible for historical “truth” to be named. Through all the changing contents of history, the formative and self-establishing laws of consciousness, the thought necessity, act as the determinant of historical truth. This concept of truth established unconditionally the value of all judgments in which a historical truth is expressed. . . . Upon its basis the practical notions that make up world views are derived.⁴

At the end of his life, in his last work, Das Raetsel der Gesellschaft, he expressed the same phenomenological goal as the basis for social change: “There was and is another metaphysic possible wherein . . . the development of [society] is shown to be nothing other than the logical conditions of the individual development of consciousness; where the essence ‘behind’ the self-consciously acting intellect—whether beyond this consciousness there exists such essence or not—is exposed within the ‘grant’ of this consciousness.”⁵

Adler had become acquainted with the phenomenological thought of Edmund Husserl by 1936. He began a dialogue with Husserl in Das Raetsel der Gesellschaft, pointing out the Husserlian promise of a logical exploration of the hidden realms of thought which conditioned experience:

The conception of a descriptive psychology has arisen where the life of the soul is not merely broken into its parts, and “scientifically” categorized, but is viewed in its totality and the whole context of its purposeful functioning. In this method there is, to be sure, an analysis of the parts of consciousness, but only insofar as the forms of the conscious functions are concerned. It is clear that in the direction of this descriptive discipline not only phenomenology but also epistemology can play a role. Only that epistemology here would not be concerned with the forms of the psychic [Formen des Psychischen]), rather with the psychic experience [Erfahrung] and the functions that condition it.⁶

Husserl’s approach to psychic experience seemed to promise not only an array of established concepts that might help Adler more completely discover and define the schemata of the social apriori but an introspective journey that had a safe conclusion. In Das Raetsel der Gesellschaft Adler rejects Freud and the “unconscious” as a mystification of experience.⁷ (In his first work, Kausalitaet und Teleologie, in his use of Faust as a representative of the human search for truth, Adler articulated the intellectual method of the Freudian search for health.) Freud’s insistence on the psychobiological facts of selfhood and accepting one’s mortality may have been too strong a medicine for Adler, but Husserl might have indirectly helped him to bring his thought to fruition. In his appreciation of Husserl, Adler cut out for himself a “study of psychic experience and the functions that condition it,” whereas Husserl would name the psychic forms. Adler thus was poised for a phenomenological psychology that probed experience in society.

Husserl was always available for Adler; he had written his Logische Untersuchungen (Logical investigations) in 1901, and in 1913 had finished his Ideen, which outlined the new discipline of phenomenology.⁸ Why hadn’t Adler formed an association earlier? The problem was that thinkers such as Husserl were not actively engaged in radical social change, and one did not openly exchange ideas with bourgeois thinkers. The rich source of non-Marxist, neo-Kantian thought was likewise closed to Adler during his active party years because of the emotional screen of class warfare. Thinkers such as Ernst Cassirer, whose Life of Kant and Freiheit und Form could have aided Adler in the use of Kant’s Critique of Judgement as a tool for developing the cultural studies that would uncover the facets of the social a priori, went unmentioned in Adler’s works.⁹ When he did debate other neo-Kantians, his stance was aggressive and belittling, as in his critical review of Rudolf Stammler.¹⁰ The bourgeois thinkers were at fault, abstaining from the Kantian notion of the “socializing” (vergesellschaften) nature of man and refusing to explore human reality from the perspective of interdependence.

For the liberal bourgeois thinker, social change was a product of increased knowledge about life, which would occur through the free choice of a democratic people. For the Marxists, knowledge was closely tied to political programs, and discoveries were instantly seen as the property of their party, not of humanity in general. Adler was enchanted by the syndrome Schorske defines in fin-de-siecle Austrian politics as politics in a new key. One thought for the benefit of humanity but not of those with an opposing political point of view. The aggressiveness associated with a philosophic position among Marxists before World War I curtailed the mutual interpenetration of ideas between thinkers who could have aided each other.

According to Immanuel Kant, it is the concept of antagonism between thinkers and proponents of conflicting social positions that leads to human progress. Adler used the concept of antagonism to link Kantian thought to Marxist thought. In Adler’s understanding of life in the world, the concept was fundamental. He quoted at length from Kant’s Fourth Thesis in the Idea for a Universal History to introduce the idea that was to become a justification for class conflict and a basis for his notion of the social a priori:

By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men, i.e. their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society. Man has an inclination to associate with others, because in society he feels himself to be more a person, i.e. in the developed form of his natural capacities. [Der Mensch hat eine Neigung, sich zu vergesellschaften, weil er in einem solchen Zustand sich mehr als Mensch, das ist die Entwicklung seiner naturanlagen, fuehlt.] But he also has a strong propensity to isolate himself from others, because he finds in himself at the same time the unsocial characteristic of wishing to have everything go according to his own wish. Thus he expects opposition on all sides because, in knowing himself, he knows that he, on his own part, is inclined to oppose others.¹¹

According to Kant, this contradictory disposition in man to associate with others in order fully to feel one’s human capacities, yet to withdraw in order to know one’s own mind and will, was an anthropological law. Through the conflict in oneself and among others, one reached a coherent view of life that embraced ideas and realities beyond oneself. The encounter with others tested one’s ideas, and experience enabled one to correct the restricted limits of one’s vision. Kant felt that nature has a plan in so constructing the dialectic of approach-avoidance within the human being. The plan was to drive men to develop their full capacities by means of an internal gadfly creating constant movement and change.¹²

Adler saw the antagonism that necessarily kept individuals linked yet at odds as the heart of what Marx saw in the class struggle of society in every period of history.¹³ Kant had added in the Fourth Thesis that “one cannot tolerate his fellows, yet one cannot withdraw from them.”¹⁴ Adler saw the structures of the social-economic world as a proof of the interrelatedness of people at odds who were inextricably brought together to earn their livelihoods. Both Kant and Marx saw history as a progression toward more equitable, broadly shared benefits within society, a progress won as the majority of people within a society saw a more rational, efficient solution for their mutual plight. The antagonism and conflict taught hard lessons, one of which in the modern age was the necessity of increased self-consciousness in social planning. Instead of the conflict of blind wills that gradually brought improvement through trial and error, a conflict of social theories would more quickly bring human beings closer to a system of living that promised to nurture their capacities. Kant and Marx saw history as a gradual realization of a society that was genuinely healthy in the sense that it furthered the natural competencies of each of its members.¹⁵

Marx’s dialectical materialism, according to Adler, was to be understood as the movement of social institutions through the antagonistic encounter with others in work and dialogue and the redirection of one’s energies as a result of these encounters.¹⁶ The interchange of thought and action in culture broadened one’s position so that he could see opposing ideas and resolve differences within a new perspective. There was no magic force beyond humans that moved history. History was the dialectical action of men in antagonistic force and counterforce, creating, then recreating, social organizations to embrace their varied visions.

The dialectic itself was the process of thought that could be exercised by the scientific thinker. Not all men could clearly see the opposing forces in the antagonistic social world. Dialectical thinking would identify the ideas and things of the social world and find a logic to relate them in an organization that brought progress rather than conflict, progress being a healthier state of affairs for all who shared that social world. But one could not simply apply schoolbook logic; the real experience of the world had to be approached with a phenomenological insight: “The dialectic is the methodological attempt to transcend the boundaries of merely logical thought by means of a regression to the lived experience of total consciousness. It strives to reorder, more or less by force [mehr oder weniger gewaltsam], the fragmentary expressions of isolated logical thought into the original flow of undivided experience, which to be sure is never fully expressed in practical thought, but nevertheless lives in each consciousness, and can be shown there in its presence.”¹⁷

The reordering of experience in phenomenological reflection was equivalent to the Freudian effort to bring a patient to a recovery of what actually occurred in a particular situation. The new view was initiated by a logical understanding of the components of the experience in a deeper, more authentic manner than in the original living of it. By redefining the protagonists and the meaning of the actions, one could see “the original flow of undivided experience, which to be sure is never fully expressed in practical thought, but nevertheless lives in each consciousness, and can be shown there in its presence.” In other words, just as Freud helps the person to see what he “knew to be the case” but “repressed,” Adler’s dialectical vision brings one to a reconstruction of actual experience.¹⁸ Adler, however, did not allow this unconscious element to suggest the subjective abysses of Freud; rather, he saw it as a reservoir of the concrete world. Adler’s understanding of a regression to the original flow of undivided experience was guided by his own educated inference into the sketchy statements of Karl Marx then available on the role of consciousness in social experience.¹⁹ Consciousness would contain only what was encountered in external life.

The regression to what had actually occurred was accomplished by a search within the remembered events for the logic of their occurrence. Ordinarily, one’s vision of external events was distorted by one’s inherited cultural concepts so that one saw only the delineaments emphasized by the values and norms of the time. Seeing correctly was a complicated process, but it could be achieved. First, one must find the word that most accurately defined what had occurred. This process involved the individual in a review of the experience in question—a “phenomenological” review—for one sought to recover the full set of elements that made up the event and determine the logic of their interaction. An antagonism was created by the insertion of a new concept that reordered the significance and order of events because one’s understanding of an event was part of a world view that ordered all events. The searching dialogue initiated in the analysis of one event would lead inevitably to a change in the point of view one brought to all past and present events.

One’s own logic might be wrong, however. The rationalizations of an individual tend to falsify facts in order to preserve coherence. To arrive at a true judgment, one must use two measures to balance one’s own phenomenological reflections. First, one must engage in discussions with others about the reality one is attempting to define; the antagonism of their viewpoints will help one avoid a solipsistic position. Second, as the result of a formally defined phenomenological psychology, one could be informed by a causal interpretation of what should have occurred in an event, given the psychic forms that govern perception and reaction. In these measures of truth, Adler proposed a form of personal analysis that would have had similar methods and outcomes as psychoanalysis.²⁰

Adler’s concept of social therapy developed over the course of his life, although the best example appeared in Kausalitaet und Teleologie. He depicted Faust in his cell deliberating upon the Gospel of John, about to begin a translation of the original Greek into German.²¹ The translation was a focus for decisions Faust must make about his own life. Faust felt that simply reading about life in the world provided an insufficient understanding and an incomplete basis for his own action: “Shall I, perhaps, read in a thousand books / That men have everywhere been miserable, That now and then one has been happy?” Faust enters a dialogue with himself that creates the inner antagonisms Adler believed were critical for recapturing the “undivided flow” of facts truly experienced. The passage begins as Faust arrives at a mental impasse when considering the first line in the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the word”; Faust states that if he is to be enlightened by the passage, he must translate it differently. His insight is that the passage should read, “In the beginning was the intelligence [Sinn].” “Intelligence” causes the word to occur; it initiates activity. Faust seeks a more active life, and intelligence seems a more powerful agent in a history that the passive word. But then Faust sees that it is power he is seeking. “In the beginning was the force [Kraft],” thus displacing the still but potent presence of the intelligence with the vital, animal energy of human presence. Faust is on his way to an existential view of creative experience. He arrives at a point of view that gives him peace of mind when he finally translates the line as “In the beginning was the act [Tat].”²² Adler stresses Faust’s deliberation in making these changes, seeking the expression that was in concord with reality as he knew it. Adler’s assumption that Faust arrives at the truth is a weakness in the example. Adler ends Kausalitaet und Teleologie with the quote from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”²³

Adler strongly identified with Faust’s position. In the process of recovering true judgments of social experience, Faust need not be right in this first stage of reflection. He could enrich his understanding in conversations with Wagner and Mephistopheles (given that the latter would exhibit goodwill in his answers).²⁴ A further check would be the application of a phenomenological psychology to Faust’s deliberations to see if they corresponded to anthropological fact.

This first stage of reflection was a reconstruction of experience by Faust that had the certainty of a balanced viewpoint considering the history of his understanding. His deepening of comprehension as to how things “began” was the product of a healthy deliberation in its tensions of thought and counterthought, with judgment satisfied only with as thorough a view as possible. Was it a Freudian model of healthy deliberation? It was in the antagonism of one view against another until all the opposing meanings were seen. There is also an interesting parallel between Freudian word association and the dialectic of word selection used by Faust to expand his understanding of the actual cause of the beginnings of things.²⁵ But Faust’s reflections lacked an essential Freudian basis of health, the anthropological standard of what indeed gives rise to origins. Freud based truth on the structures of human nature and weighed judgments on their proximity to these facts. Adler, too, sought a firmer basis for truth in a judgment than its thoroughness. As much as he admired Faust for his efforts, he indicated that there was a model for truth in the laws of consciousness that condition how we know and shape experience. He interjects an analogy into the discussion of Faust that opens this deeper insight into judgment. He speaks of an engineer who is called upon to help repair a fault in a construction. While walking through the site, he points out where a pillar must be placed. His judgment in the visual moment is based on his translation of what he sees into a broader, more scientific understanding, informed by his knowledge of the plan of the building and of engineering. He sees the invisible but present truth of the situation through his reflection on the immediate facts.²⁶ Adler used the Faust example and the analogy of the engineer to debate the neo-Kantian teleologists, such as Rudolf Stammler, who insisted that value judgments and ethics, as well as goal statements, were arrived at in the freedom of a practical judgment that was stimulated rather than conditioned by facts. Adler, on the other hand, felt that every value, ethic, or goal statement is caused in a twofold manner: it is conditioned by the logical network of one’s existing point of view, as exemplified in the Faust example, and it is caused at a deeper level of consciousness by schemata of consciousness that organize perspectives and actions in the social world.²⁷

Adler based his thought on Kant’s critique of teleological judgment in which Kant points out the teleological thought is connected to the determinative judgments of the categories of understandings at some supersensible level of mind.²⁸ The connection assures that value judgments, ethics, and goal formations are not arbitrary but are connected to structures of understanding that condition how we shape and interpret the factual world. Kausalitaet und Teologie contains this argument: if one’s values and goals are rooted in a transcendental structure of the mind which also provides the categories of understanding whereby we identify and use facts, then a science of society is possible which identifies the best values and goals in the light of these structures of understanding that guide human development. Existing judgments and social organization would be measured against ideal but real possibilities. Adler was debating the neoKantian teleologists who claimed an exact social science was impossible because society was the result of the value decisions and goal formations that were not directly linked to any physical cause but made in the freedom of reflection. Adler pointed out that Kant saw reflection not as an isolated free act but as inextricably linked to the forms of causal understanding.²⁹

Again, Adler approached a Freudian understanding in his consideration of the “boundness” of individual judgment by deeper levels of causality within consciousness. As in his dissection of dialectical thought, wherein the original vision was reconstructed to show its true delineaments, corresponding to the Freudian recovery of the actuality of memory, in his discussion of teleogical judgment Adler replicated Freud’s view of the “rationalization.” Freud shows how a logical argument of goals and values can always be traced to a causal understanding that creates the field within which the person perceives meanings. The “perfect” logic that justifies choices may be traced to the vision of reality which constitutes the person’s pathological “world.”³⁰ Adler quoted Spinoza on the “perfection” of reason in making a seamless argument to justify its judgments.³¹ He used this example to caution the teleologists to find a firmer ground for their values, ethics, and goals than their individual judgment. No individual can escape the delusion of reason. Only a science that identifies the constituting structures of the person’s entire field of meaning can bring objectivity to judgment.

Perhaps it is more than chance that Max Adler and Sigmund Freud had parallel views of the delusive nature of teleological judgment, unless it is traced back to more fundamental causal structures in consciousness. Immanuel Kant clearly links the “wishes” of the teleological judgment—the goals one strives for, the preferred states of affairs one seeks—to the faculty of desire in man. Kant states in the Critique of Judgement that when the individual feels incapable of realizing a task, or undoing an unpleasant past, or annihilating a delay that keeps him from the wished-for moment, he will represent objects in his thought that substitute for the desired goal. These wishes, Kant says, can be traced back to their causality, which is not the object one appears to desire but the faculty of desire itself: “But why our nature should be furnished with a propensity to consciously vain desires is a teleological problem of anthropology. It would seem that were we not to be determined to the exertion of our power before we had assured ourselves of the efficiency of our faculty for producing an Object, our power would remain to a large extent unused. For as a rule we only first learn to know our powers by making trial of them. This deceit of vain desires is therefore only the result of a beneficient disposition in our nature.”³²

We may reasonably infer that Freud was stimulated by this passage. He had read Kant, though his only reference is negative, pointing out the ethical categorical imperative as typical of a repressive, domineering superego.³³ Yet Kant, in discussing teleological judgment, which is the faculty of ethical formation, shows that desire is the force with which ethics struggles. Kant does not claim that ethics is capable of taming desire; on the contrary, he sees the faculty of desire as an anthropological force that impels man to develop all his powers. Freud is less positive about desire, which he sees as a force bent only on pleasure, pain, reproduction, or extinction. Nevertheless, Freud and Adler clearly following Kant, both seek a casual mechanism in human nature, articulated through the laws of consciousness, that initiates and shapes the teleological judgment.

Adler felt that a phenomenological psychology which identified the “forms of psychic experience” and the “functions which condition it” could be the means of arriving at true judgments about cultural goals, values, and ethics. For a Marxist this meant that social policy and planning might have a basis that more quickly arrived at the anthropological health toward which Kant implied our desires prodded us. Instead of a blind groping, through individual and collective goals prompted by frustrations, impatience, and pathologies of personality and culture, individuals and communities could probe their policies for abnormalities that deviated from a standard of healthy interactions based upon the ideal models discovered among those psychic forms. The implication of the social a priori and its constitutive schemata, that is, forms of psychic experience, was that there were classic forms of healthy interaction as human process. For example, one might say that Marx’s identification of the human need to exchange the products of one’s labor was the discovery of a schematism of the social a priori and that a society that protected this need by guaranteeing its opportunity and equity established a cultural norm that was healthy in its accord with the schematism. Marx used a Hegelian language, but his intention was the same enduring standard of health as Kant, Freud, and Adler desired:

What causes me to alienate my private property to another man? Political economy replies correctly: necessity, need. The other man is also a property owner, but he is the owner of another thing, which I lack and cannot and will not do without, which seems to me a necessity for the completion of my existence and the realisation of my nature. The bond which connects the two property owners with each other is the specific kind of object that constitutes the substance of their private property. The desire for these two objects, i.e., the need for them, shows each of the property owners, and makes them conscious of it, that he has yet another essential relation to objects besides that of private ownership, that he is not the particular being that he considers himself to be, but a total being whose needs stand in the relationship of inner ownership to all products, including those of another’s labour. For the need of a thing is the most evident, irrefutable proof that the thing belongs to my essence, that its being is for me, that its property is the property, the peculiarity of my essence. Thus both property owners are impelled to give up their private property, but to do so in such a way that at the same time they confirm private ownership, or to give up the private property within the relationship of private ownership. Each therefore alienates a part of his private property to the other.³⁴

Marx’s notion of alienation would also classify as a schematism for he develops it within his writings as both a social-psychological consequence of human transactions and an ontological condition of human creativity.³⁵ The schematism provides a logical form of human operation with a universality that allows it to be found in any culture; it reflects the processes of human consciousness in their interaction with reality. The goal of social scientists or natural scientists who accept the possibility of identifying the schemata of human operation in the world is to arrive at laws that are anthropologically definite, not relative to the conditions and forces of a specific culture. Kant, Marx, and Max Adler shared a belief that the individual found his full capacities, thus health, within the social milieu. Marx defined the individual as “not the particular being that he considers himself to be, but a total being whose needs stand in the relationship . . . to another.” Kant said the same thing when he described how one must associate with others as a condition of his full capacities. Adler’s potential phenomenological psychology would have been identification of the schemata that constitute the necessary interaction between the individual and his milieu and identification of abnormal forms of that interaction within any given culture.

Adler’s brief published flirtation with artistic criticism might have been an avenue whereby he could have solved the relationship between the teleological judgment of the individual against the background of the causal forms of understanding. The arts, according to Kant, contain perhaps the truest expression, in symbolic form, of the union of the teleological judgment and the causal forms of the understanding, arrived at in the free play of the artistic imagination.³⁶ The artistic judgment seems to capture a vision of temporal-spatial organization that is true for its age and perhaps for every age. The sensous elements of the medium allow a concrete, individual relationship yet carry an idea that may be applied in countless individual judgments to different times and places. The schemata of an a priori would have to have both the timeless quality of idea and the temporal-spatial sensuousness in its articulation that allowed individuals to find their particular relation to things with its guidance. Adler could appreciate the timeless quality of an art work, but for him that quality was found not in the material senuousness of its form, but rather in its idea. The idea of the artist linked him to all active minds, not the colorful vision by which that idea was expressed. As Adler exclaimed: “It is the thought, the idea itself, which forces its way to appearance”.³⁷

Art, then, is for Adler a means of selection and orientation that saves man from the colorful manifold of life. To strengthen this aesthetic criterion Adler brought some of his German fathers into the lists with him: he quoted Schiller and Grillparzer in an attempt to give added value to the notion that the idea is the prime moment of art, but as will often happen when one resorts to a great mind for support, Adler exposed the narrowness of his own position. Schiller is quoted as saying: “Everyone who is capable of translating his emotional condition into an object, so that this object compels me to introject myself into it, and feel the life that is called forth, I call truly a poet, a creator.” Grillparzer is quoted as saying: “Ideas do not make the true attraction of poetry; the philosopher has perhaps a higher task; but the cold thought-provoking qualities of the ideas in poetry contain a reality that transports one. The corporeality [Koerperlichkeit] of the poem makes [the idea] an effective force.” Adler overlooked Schiller’s stress on “feeling into” the object and Grillparzer’s emphasis that the “true attraction” of poetry is the body, that is, the senuous quality of the poem. Only the cold idea, the universal thought, was important to Adler, and even the hint of this in the memory of his Bildung was employed as a buffer against the spontaneity of the actual. Why? Adler states: “An ideal . . . preserves reality for man . . . it provides a force to stop him from skidding into the void [ein Nichts].”³⁸

Adler would not have experienced a void had he relaxed his one-sided view of art as solely idea. He would have felt the corporeality of the work, knowing his own emotion as well as that of the artist. With the tangible evidence of the medium’s earthly qualities, he could have realized how ideas are symbolized through mass, line, shape, sound, rhythm, the colorful manifold that harbored the view of how the individual personality expresses itself when in touch with causal understanding. Only by honoring the historical personality of himself and the artist could he truly see the interplay of teleological freedom and causal ground. Personality is extremely important in the act of creation because the interplay between the givens of a conceptual field in which the ego is situated and the struggle of the artist or thinker to make a statement in that field require a coherence of personal vision, a personal identity, a memory of purposes, and a sense of what is distinctive in one’s acts. The object of art is the creation of an antagonism between the fallible human subject, who, one step at a time, reacts against the boundness of the laws of perspective, composition, and human motility. The product is a vision of eternal organizing principles as experienced by an individual who has made his own statement in and through those laws. Thus the law expresses itself in a particular individual, and the individual shows his freedom in the use of the law. Here the social a priori as it is known in an individual life might have become apparent.

Adler’s inability to see a more nuanced context behind the literal meaning of words in a poem was an indication of his tendency to overemphasize literal meanings. A metaphorical abuse of idea resulted from his reification of words: “War is hereby declared upon the words, the old hackneyed concepts that heretofore mobilized thoughts are under attack: but only so that one can better arrive at things themselves, so that they are viewed uncovered in their true . . . essential reality.”³⁹

The war was to capture the organizing principles of understanding behind the words, to expose the schemata that gave rise to them, and to coin new words that better expressed the true state of things in the environment and in consciousness, or to preserve those words that really articulated the state of things. Had his inquiry been carried out through research into cultural practices and mental forms, he would have concentrated on vocabulary as the final step in preparing social policy for his party. In this case, however, the beginning was not in the word but in the act of research. When Adler confronted the tendency of his party to engage in bourgeois forms of political expression, such as a revision of the party program in 1901 to soften the harsh specter of class conflict and allow for moderate forms within the existing system of society, he defended the words that secured the reality of the class conflict but ignored the only statistical evidence on the question of improving the condition of workers. He took a scholasticist position that held that the definition of the thing was sufficient to prove its reality. Even if class conflict was not immediately evident, it must exist as an illness that temporarily has no symptoms but works its destruction unseen.⁴⁰ The Parteitag of 1901 was to revise the Hainfeld program of 1889 in order to make the wording of its Marxist format more compatible with the growing respectability of the Social Democratic party within Austria.⁴¹ The planned revision was to extend the basic principles of the party to cover new areas of concern and rephrase what it had previously written. Two changes were particularly evident to Max Adler: the removal of the so-called “pauperization theory” (Verelendungstheorie) and the failure to emphasize a need to save the “will and consciousness of men from its ‘degradation’ by economic necessity.”⁴² The Hainfeld program had stated the “pauperization” theory in strong Marxian didactic terms: “Those who possess the working power within the society, the working class, become slaves [Sklaven] to the possessors of the means of production, the capitalist class, whose political and economic rule is expressed in the present state. The individual possession of the means of production, as it means also politically the class state, means economically the increasing poverty [steigende Massenarmut] and the growing pauperization [wachsenda Verelendung] of broader areas of the people.⁴³

The revision of 1901 omitted the emotive words “slave,” “poverty,” and “pauperization.”⁴⁴ It also omitted something even more important in Max Adler’s eyes: whereas the Hainfeld program had stressed the role of the revolutionary workers’ party in helping the individual proletarian to realize his individual will and thus in himself combat the growing misery of his condition, Adler felt the revision of 1901 ignored the theoretical importance of individual will, within either the Austrian Social Democratic party or the masses, in combating the evils of the capitalist order. Adler stated that the omission of the “pauperization” clause was evidence of the greater sin of the planned revision of 1901, for these pejorative words had underlined the principles that forever isolated the individual worker from a bourgeois consciousness and designated the position the Austrian Social Democratic party must take in matters of policy and action. Adler argued that the proposed revision failed to stress the essence that justified the very existence of the vanguard of the proletariat in its form as Austrian Social Democracy; that is, the rigor of its intellectual task as pedagogical molder of wills. The language of the revision of 1901 was called a concession to the “popular” understanding of Marxism, a phrasing that had lost the “precision” and “purity” of the Marxist message. In pandering to the goodwill of the general public and the comprehension of the non-Marxist, the party oligarchs had sacrificed the spirit that made them a living force in the environment: “One should not forget for whom the program of the party is drawn, that is, for Marxists. [A party program] must not concern itself in the least with those who are not Marxists; it must only concern itself that its own teachings are clearly expressed. Most particularly, the Marxist should realize that in such a program he need not contradict the false views of Marxism, for even in an indirect involvement, his language will be influenced by the false conception.”⁴⁵

The purpose of an authentic education is to aid the student to make the truest judgment. Indoctrination was not the real spirit of Adler’s intention, yet his insistence on the shibboleth distorted his aims. The worker as an individual must discover if in fact there was an unbridgeable gulf between his interests in society and a bourgeois life, or whether there were points in common between himself and his “masters” that might allow cooperation. Even more significant is the thralldom of will Adler would impose by insisting that in areas of practical judgment a limited vocabulary be accepted without testing. In his philosophical deliberations, Marxism became a fluid set of concepts that pointed to new directions of thought, but in his practical involvements it became a rigid text.

Adler’s rigidity grew as he experienced the antagonism inherent in developing his thought with his peers and party fathers within Austrian Social Democracy. At thirty-one years of age, in 1904, he was a bright star on the horizon. He had an array of ideas to bring to Social Democracy. In 1901 his critique of the proposed changes of the party platform had won him the respect of the party fathers. Victor Adler had exclaimed in a letter to Karl Kautsky: “I will print most of your article, but even that won’t completely answer Max Adler. He’s quite a fellow! isn’t he?” Kautsky answered: “I wanted to write to you chiefly in order to ask who Max Adler is. A splendid fellow! If I had been aware of his critique, I probably would not have written mine. He said . . . essentially all there was to say. So, there is a Marxist Nachwuchs! A good feeling, when one can say that there are people who will continue our work. We must win him for us. Hopefully, I will get to meet him in Vienna.”⁴⁶

But by 1910 Max Adler was openly criticized in Der Kampf by Otto Bauer as a “metaphysician.” In April 1918 Victor Adler dismissed the idea of having Max Adler speak on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in the name of Austrian Social Democracy with these words: “Many do not like Max, above all me: I detest the court chaplain of Marxism. From his oily overflow all of us will go home spotted with grease.”⁴⁷

In 1904 Adler might be compared to the figure of Faust sitting in his narrow cell about to begin the translation of the Gospel of John. He saw himself giving a new translation to social thought that would begin to expand his knowledge of the world in order to develop all his thought and person, but as Faust he risked his historical personality in the hubris that misused idea for personal immortality. By accepting Faust’s change of “In the beginning was the word” to “In the beginning was the act,” Adler sacrificed the careful progress of his thought for the fruitless debates and the alienating party identification of Social Democracy. The “word” should have preceded action in his life. The social norms of Austrian culture did not legislate toward patient progress. Had Adler separated himself from party involvement, with its ready but empty support for personal identity, and pursued his research in dialogues with his true community of peers, the neo-Kantians who were interested in a more equitable society but who did not identify themselves as vanguards of the proletariat, he might have completed his thought. Thinkers such as Karl Vorlaender, Paul Natorp, Franz Staudinger, and Rudolf Stammler could have benefitted from his view of the social a priori and its implications for social development.⁴⁸

He conducted an arid denunciation of Stammler for several years before World War I, but there was no actual dialogue between the two men. His polemics with Stammler had just and unjust bases. Justly, he demanded of Stammler social scientific certainty. Stammler was content to speak of trends in cultural norms without referring them to an epistemological or psychological set of constants that would permit causes and effects to be isolated and thereby permit social planning. Stammler’s relativity reflected a movement in social science shared by peers such as Max Weber. Adler represented in his criticism the insistence for anthropological certainty that motivated the work of Kant, Marx, and contemporaries such as Freud. Stammler justified his position by interpreting Kant’s critique of teleological judgment as a document that said no knowledge is possible of how goal formation and ethics are affected by the categories of pure understanding, even though one might surmise that they are; therefore, phenomenological introspection upon one’s experience was not likely to expose this mystery. Instead, Stammler turned to the artifacts of his culture, such as constitutions and legislation, seeking, as Kant had in his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, the evidence of thinking that reflected ethical autonomy or thinking that violated it.⁴⁹ Stammler measured the cultural law against Kant’s categorical imperative—that each man should be treated as an end, not a means.⁵⁰ He rightly understood this activity to be a genuine discovery technique of the legislator’s social consciousness. He was wrong, as Adler pointed out, in believing that such a discovery was sufficient to show an adequate law for the development of human potential. Even Kant saw human planning through laws as only the expression of a hypothetical imperative that might create conditions for the best anthropological development of man. One might find the categorical imperative in oneself or in the intention of another, but to formulate principles that actually elicited human freedom was a practical precept, not a law.⁵¹ Max Adler, however, felt that deeper investigation of the human mind in its processes might reveal those a priori laws of consciousness, the schemata, by which the individual articulated his here and now understanding of culture. With the deeper insight into human knowing in the moment, one could determine those human perspectives which more or less adequately expressed a healthy anthropological standard. With this new phenomenological psychology, Kant’s intuition that man was a socializing creature, as well as an autonomous one, would be developed through research so that new categorical imperatives could be formulated that expressed the law of man as a cooperative being.

Max Adler’s thought remains as challenge. Can exploration of the human mind through its artifacts and attention to its processes arrive at certainty as to its nature? Is a major dimension of its nature inherently social? Discovery of the social forms of human knowing will found the possibility of an education that ends the self-alienating norms in which Adler began his thought.