REASON AND UNDERSTANDING

As Horkheimer would repeat over and over again during his career, rationality was at the root of any progressive social theory. What he meant by reason, however, was never easy to grasp for an audience unschooled in the traditions of classical German philosophy. Implicitly. Horkheimer referred more often than not to the idealists' distinction between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason). By Verstand, Kant and Hegel had meant a lower faculty of the mind, which structured the phenomenal world according to common sense. To the understanding, the world consisted of finite entities identical only with themselves and totally opposed to other things. It thus failed to penetrate immediacy to grasp the dialectical relations beneath the surface. Vernunft, on the other hand, signified a faculty that went beyond mere appearances to this deeper reality. Although Kant differed from Hegel in rejecting the possibility of reconciling the world of phenomena with the transcendent, noumenal sphere of "things-in-thmselves," he shared Hegel's belief in the superiority of Vernunft over Verstand. (Martin Jay (1996) The Dialectical Imagination, University of California Press, p. 60)Return to Gadamer on Plato
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