Dialectics Enlightenment

8/2/2019 Dialectics Enlightenment

1/6

Horkheimer and Adorno,Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. AdornosDialectic of Enlightenmentexemplifies an

exotic flavor of Marxism associated with the so-called Frankfurt School or Institut frSozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). The Institute originated one of the mostinfluential models of social criticism of the twentieth century and is still alive and

kicking, having produced both second and third generations of scholars (JrgenHabermas is the most important of the second generation, Axel Honneth of the third).

The model involves supplementing the economic and historical analyses of Marx with apsychoanalytic understanding of personality and the human subject, but many other

sources were put in play as well, most notably Nietzsche. The Frankfurt Schoolsapproach to aesthetics was dominated by a concern for the fate of art in mass society, by

the theme of aesthetic experience as a critical resource on the basis of which the aestheticsubject transcends ordinary social reality, and by a sense of the increasing effectiveness

of quasi-artistic techniques in what, since Marshall McLuhan, we call the media, withwhich public and private bureaucracies manipulate the masses into embracing rather

than revolutionizing oppressive social arrangements. This kind of manipulation, theythought, manifested itself in the Western liberal democracies as well as the totalitarian

states.

The counterforce to this all-embracing manipulation of consciousness, or whatHorkheimer and Adorno came to call the totally administered society, is critical theory,

which consists in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand[Unmittelbaren] (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 20). The term negation is used by

Horkheimer and Adorno in a special sense derived from Hegel. In this special sense,negation doesnt have the logical meaning of denial. In Hegels vocabulary, to

negate something means rather to transform it into something else. More precisely, itmeans to grasp the logic, structure, and functioning of a thing in such a way that you can

describe the process by which it transforms itself into something else. Negation, then, isa way of analyzing a phenomenon that goes beyond its superficial properties, penetrates

into its inner workings or logic, and understands it not as a statically given object but assomething in the process of becoming other than it is. This is why the term negation is

modified by determining. A mere abstract negation, for Hegel, is something like ourordinary logical sense of denial. An abstract negation of something merely contrasts or

compares that something with something different. A determining(ordeterminate)negation, on the other hand, arrives at the negation of something by deriving or deducing

it from the very thing being negated.

A paradigm of negation in this sense is Marx and Engelss analysis in the CommunistManifesto of how capitalism is gradually transforming itself into communism. By

understanding capitalism as a social system that manifests a process of development,Marx and Engels show how it changes the conditions under which it operates and creates

conditions such as highly efficient techniques of production, extraordinary affluence,and an extremely well-educated and self-confident workforce that make possible a


2/6

2

radically different form of society characterized by unprecedented freedom.Communism, in other words, derives from capitalism and only from capitalism.

Communism is the determinate negation of capitalism.

Horkheimer and Adorno, however, speak of their method as the determinate negation of

whatever is directly given, or immediacy [Unmittelbaren]. By immediacy, theymean anything but in particular any social phenomenon, practice, institution, belief,custom that appears to be self-evident, natural, inevitable, fixed, eternal, or merely

given, such as any variable social condition that is taken as a permanent natural limit. Itseems to be part of the nature of social life (at least until capitalism/communism) that the

institutions and beliefs of a particular society appear to its members as immediacies inthis sense.

The negation of whatever is directly at hand means two things.

First, it means performing an analysis showing that the apparently self-evident, natural,

eternal institution or belief is not self-evident but depends rather upon a complex set ofpreconditions. It means, in other words, showing that some apparently fixed aspect of

social reality has a history, that it did not always exist in its current form but rather that itemerged and developed in response to changing conditions and contingencies.

Second, it means that any institution or belief is not merely to be described and

explained, but understood and evaluated in terms of what it might become if allowed todevelop freely. Horkheimer and Adornos approach to critique not only looks backward,

in other words, to grasp how the prevailing social reality developed from very differentinitial conditions (and is therefore not a fixed eternal limit). It also looks forward to

imagine and anticipate how what is only potential at the present time might be realized inthe future and, importantly, it takes that potential future as a standard according to

which the present is to be evaluated. The potential in question is the possibility of humanfreedom, a fully emancipated society, which is also the goal of the Enlightenment and of

the kind of Marxism that attracts Horkheimer and Adorno. The goal of critical theory isthus to grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal

relationships, by which they can be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them assurface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their

social, historical, and human meaning.1

But thats not the end of the story. For it turns out that this critique itself (the determinatenegation of immediacy), which is made in the name of reason, must be negated in its turn

in order to neutralize what Horkheimer and Adorno consider to be the oppressivecharacter of a totalizing standard of free development namely, that of a thoroughly

rational society, that is, a society in which each part derives its meaning only in relationto the whole and which is driven by the need to rationalize all aspects of human

existence in the sense of making them efficient, functional, integrated, harmonious, etc.In this dialectic of enlightenment, as Horkheimer and Adorno characterize it, reason

1

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 20.


3/6

3

becomes a new, modern mythology, as society pursues efficiency for efficiencys sake ina manner that is divorced from substantive human interests. So critical theory turns on

reason itself and becomes an expos of reasons entanglement in domination.

In what sense is reason akin to domination? Horkheimer and Adorno quote Kant:

Reason has as its sole object the understanding and its effective application.It posits a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the

understanding, and this unity is the system [of thought organized according toits own internal logic].

2

Reason, according to Kant (who, Horkheimer and Adorno say, speaks for the

Enlightenment), is the spontaneous tendency to organize knowledge of the world bymeans of the ascent to higher and ever higher principles. The idea that each individual

bit of cognition should be subsumed under principles, they seem to feel, means thatreason (which supplies the principles) has a creepy affinity with top-down organization.

The idea that individual parts are subordinate to the larger wholes of which they aremembers is creepy because that image is eerily like the vision of a totalitarian or

authoritarian society. To put the point with somewhat greater rigor, reason for theEnlightenment is a purely formal affair:

Reason contributes nothing but the idea of systematic unity, the formal elements

of fixed conceptual relationships. Any substantial objective which might be putforward as a rational objective is, according to the Enlightenment in its strict

sense, delusion, falsehood, rationalization.3

There is a fatal complicity between reason and domination, borne of a purely formalconception of reason that restricts the latter to something like calculation, the

optimization of a system of categories and principles in which everything has a place andthere is a place for everything. Excluded from this understanding is the idea that reason

includes reflection on ends, purposes, and goals, or what Horkheimer and Adorno callsubstantial objectives. They sometimes call reason so understood instrumental

reason, meaning reasoning about the most efficient means to ends rather than reasoningabout ends themselves. Put differently, efficiency, control, organization, and

administration are taken for granted as ends in themselves, so that the implicit goalbecomes the eradication of spontaneity, difference, individuality, unpredictability in a

word, freedom.

Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the culture industry, where culture is produced inaccordance with formulae, illustrates the triumph of instrumental reason over traditional

ideas about the nature and significance of art. According to the Enlightenment, art shouldbe a realm of freedom, free to develop in accordance with its own logic (if that is the

right term) without being subordinated to the imperatives of church or state. But in fact,

2Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 63.3Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 64.


4/6

4

according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the logic of art now reflects theinstrumentalization of reason. More specifically, this is seen in the culture industry,

where aesthetic products are fabricated to satisfy the need for entertainment and whichlack the implicitly critical and utopian content that the artwork had formerly displayed

and which made art politically significant:

In every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through art into thedominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom,

what is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. Thispromise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the

socially transmitted forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. By claiming toanticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of

the existing order as absolute. To this extent the claims of art are always alsoideology. Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in

style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art bywhich it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment,

however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of formand content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which

the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving foridentity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure, in which the style of the great

work has always negated itself, the inferior work has relied on its similarity toothers, the surrogate of identity. The culture industry has finally posited this

imitation as absolute.4

There has always been an ideological dimension to art, namely the illusion it offers ofreconciliation or unity between, for example, individual and society, which is expressed

as the unity of form and content, or the works style, by means of which anindividuated viewpoint is expressed in a vocabulary that is accessible to others. But the

culture industry takes up and preserves only the ideological dimension: style becomesthe standardized production of reliable effects. Horkheimer and Adorno stress how the

greatest works of art resisted this ideological servitude by incorporating a tragicdimension that drew attention to their own insufficiency. The so-called products of the

culture industry, on the other hand, eliminate the utopian character of art by fusing it withthe everyday and reducing it to sheer entertainment.

What is there to say in response to this thesis? A refutation, I take it, would involveshowing that the culture of modernity is richer than can be characterized in terms of the

dominance of a one-sided instrumental reason that grounds a totally administeredworld and its culture industry. InDialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and

Adorno are primarily concerned with three spheres of activity and inquiry in modernity:science, morality (or justice and politics), and art. So one line of thought would be to

review reflection on the nature of science, morality, and art in the twentieth century, andit seems obvious that one could offer an argument to the effect that ideas and practices in

4Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 103.


5/6

5

these three fields are anything but purely calculative. The results might be equivocal, butI presume we can agree that a look at the philosophy of science, political and moral

theory, painting, sculpture, music, theater, the novel, and poetry (not to mention cinema)would turn up a great deal ofprima facie evidence of ideas and practices that go beyond

the merely calculative.

In another sense, though, there certainly is something to be said for the thesis about theformal character of reason in the twentieth century: I mean the achievements in formal

logic following upon Bertrand Russells demonstration, in 1902, that the most basiclogical intuitions are self-contradictory.

5This led mathematicians and logicians to

develop formulas of transformation whose validity does not depend on content. Theprocedure was to establish a set of simple formulas (axioms) from which could be

derived, by the application of rules of proof, mathematical theorems such as those forarithmetic or geometry. The salient features of such a system are consistency (the axioms

and rules must be such that contradictory theorems cannot be derived) and completeness(all true statement expressible within the system must be derivable from the axioms).

The transformation rules that apply to the axioms are purely syntactical that is, theymanipulate the theorems without relying on any semantic content whatsoever. For Frege,

for example, a number is simply the answer to the question: How many? This definitionis all that is required to give a formal account of arithmetic, but, of course, it doesnt say

anything about what (if anything) these mathematical entities refer to.

The establishment of this kind of model-making as the dominant paradigm of scientificachievement may be the main cultural event of the twentieth century.6 Henceforth, the

hallmarks of scientific sophistication are form, proof, and syntax, while content, truth,and semantics fall by the wayside. It isnt difficult to see the attraction of this model at

work in formalist painting and sculpture, the involuted or self-reflexive novel, modernlinguistics, and methodological approaches in the humanities such as structuralism and

semiotics.

5 From Aristotle on, it seemed self-evident that any given property determined the class

or set of things that have that property. Thus, the property of redness determines the classof all things that are red, the property of extension determines the class of all things that

are extended, and so on. But Russell discovered that the concept of class itself does notstraightforwardly determine the class of all things that are classes. First, he distinguished

between classes that are members of themselves and classes that are not. The class ofhorses, for example, being not a horse but a concept, is not a member of itself. He then

asked: Is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, a member ofitself? This question, it seems, is undecidable: if it is a member of itself, then it is not,

but if it is not a member of itself, then it is. This result violates the basic principle ofAristotelian logic known as the Law of the Excluded Middle: for any givenx,x either is

or is notx. But ifx is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves, then itboth is and is not a member of itself.6 Formalism was refuted at more or less the same time that it was invented, by KurtGdels Incompleteness Theorem, which showed that no purely formal system can be

both complete and consistent. But that didnt diminish the attractiveness of formalism.


6/6

6

On the other hand, its not at all clear that this is attributable to a dialectic of

enlightenment (it seems, rather, to have been an accident of intellectual history) or thatthere is any necessary connection between formalization in this sense, and authoritarian

or totalitarian social tendencies.

Ifthe thesis of the dominance of instrumental reason is so extreme as to render almostunrecognizable the career of Western modernity, why did Horkheimer and Adorno adopt

it?

One reason, I think, is their commitment to the Marxist idea that societies are to beunderstood in terms of a single principle that determines every aspect of the larger social

whole. In a Weberian rather than a Marxist understanding of modernity, what we shouldexpect is increasing specialization of various spheres of society, each of which develops

its own logic, its own decision-making procedures, its own way of making judgments.From Horkheimer and Adornos perspective inDialectic of Enlightenment, this

specialization is what destroys the substantive reason that is required for authentic,thorough-going critique. Reason is reduced from the attempt to interpret a given activity

or institution from the perspective of the widest and deepest possible conception ofhuman potential, to a mere instrument for ordering and classifying material in ways that

make it easier to manipulate. From a Weberian point of view, almost the opposite isactually taking place: with increasing specialization come distinctive and differentiated

ways of doing things, so that, for example, it is no longer considered appropriate that artand morality should conform to the same overarching imperatives, as was the case in pre-

modern civilizations. Weberian modernity gives us a picture of how reason works in themodern world that is pluralistic and decentered.

The question then arises as to whether there is a place for the kind of all-encompassing,

total critique of society that went along with the idea of society as a unified sphere.Horkheimer and Adorno had advocated a critique of ideology whose purpose was to

unmask domination. Although their point of departure included Marx, they saw Marxismas an aspect of the Enlightenment, in other words, as a higher-order reason that unmasked

the institutions of bourgeois society as still mythological, not yet fully enlightened. Theproblem emerges when this critical rationality is no longer able to expose domination.

That happens because reason itself emerges as a force for domination, which Horkheimerand Adorno then, inDialectic of Enlightenment, trace back to the basic entanglement of

reason with self-preservation. Unmasking now means unmasking the very process ofcriticism that had devoted itself to unmasking, showing even itto be complicit in

domination. But this new project of unmasking has no foundation on which to rely thepicture of a fully- and freely-developing humanity on which it relied before having now

been exposed as fatally tainted with the will to domination in the form of the will to self-preservation. Instead, critique has to proceed as an enterprise of endless negation that

celebrates its own powerlessness that all its assertions are made only to be negated asan aspect of its critical stance.

Documents

Dialectics Enlightenment