Dialectic of Enlightenment

Critical Theory and the Messianic Light

Klapwijk

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781498272810
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a thought-provoking introduction to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno first identified the dialectic of enlightenment when fascism was on the rampage in Europe. They warned that enlightened reason and societal freedom threaten to revert into blindness and oppression. Herbert Marcuse and the young Jurgen Habermas elaborated their Critical Theory, declaring that post-war society has not escaped this dilemma, blinded as it is by ideology, pseudo-democracy, and mass manipulation.Critical Theory aims to unmask modern reason and liberate society. But a fundamental question keeps coming back: how can this critique of modernity remain viable within a repressive societal system? Is reason in the modern world indeed doomed to self-destruct? Does rationality inevitably lead to domination and oppression? Jacob Klapwijk argues that the dialectic of enlightenment proves to be a faith, a mythical faith encouraging resignation and despair. Instead we need a wholesome reason, one inspired by a messianic faith.Dialectic of Enlightenment is an important book for students of philosophy, theology, and the social sciences. It invites them to a renewed criticism of the mythological traits and self-destructive tendencies of modern reason. It also offers a perspective of hope to all who share the author's concern about the direction of today's globalizing world.

1

What is the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”?

Probably no theme has become as characteristic of the theorists of the so-called Frankfurt School as the theme that is indicated by the words “dialectic of enlightenment.” A book with just that title—Dialektik der Aufklärung—was published by Querido in Amsterdam in 1947. At that time, however, the book was hardly noticed. Later on, it was principally students who realized its significance, and in the 1960s a few pirated editions began to circulate. The book was eventually republished in 1969 at a time when violent disturbances at the Berkeley campus in California and student revolutionary movements in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin had brought Neo-Marxism to the forefront of public attention.

The authors of Dialektik der Aufklärung, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, took the opportunity to say in the “Preface to the New Edition” that although their critique of culture and science had been developed in the grim days of Nazi terror, it had lost none of its relevance in the meantime. Fascism, they claimed, could not be viewed as something over and done with, as if it were a chance interlude in world history or a brief moment of madness. Rather it was like a gong that announced to the world that developments beyond human imagination were yet to come. Fascism was a symptom, just as today the chains that bind the Third World and the renewed rise of left and right-wing dictatorships must be seen as symptoms.

All these phenomena were, and still are, symptoms of the harsh modern world that has embarked on a journey towards a global society of power and automated control. Gigantic economic and political power-blocs are moving towards this total technological integration, driven by internal and objective necessity, and they collide with each other, leaving behind them a hideous trail of oppression, dictatorship, and inhuman suffering.1

Oppression and suffering appear not only in the Western world but also—as these Neo-Marxists, to their horror, had to recognize—in countries under communist rule (KV 8, CR ix). Fascism was not an interlude. No, it is the freedom regained after the Second World War that has to be seen as an interlude, a period of temporary relief. Since then the march towards a totally controlled world has resumed, even if it is delayed or perhaps just camouflaged by a margin of individual freedom in the West. However that may be, the “dialectic of enlightenment” is working itself out on a global scale, whether we like it or not (DA ix, DE xi–xii).

The Enchanted World (1)

What exactly does “dialectic of enlightenment” mean? As we shall see, the meaning of the words varies within the Frankfurt School. At the basis, however, is the idea of Horkheimer and Adorno, who relate the word Aufklärung or “enlightenment” to the primeval fear of primitive man. Humans must originally have trembled to the very roots of their being at the sinister powers of the cosmos that played with puny earthly mortals. Enlightenment means that the lamp of reason is lit and that humans exert their thinking to the utmost and free themselves from the clutches of this enchanted and bewitching world. We may think here, for example, of the once notorious book De betoverde weereld (1691) or The World Bewitched (1695) written by the Amsterdam Cartesian clergyman Balthasar Bekker, or, more generally, of the way in which the enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century self-confidently strove to achieve maturity. Since then, the Aufklärung program has been, in Max Weber’s famous phrase, the “disenchantment of the world” (DA 9, DE 1).

Humans have always had to cope with fear of the world around them. In the past this fear was, according to the Frankfurt School, absorbed by “mimesis,” i.e. by following and imitating macrocosmic processes in one’s own life. Mimesis was, as it were, the umbilical cord that linked people to mother nature.2 People sought to escape nature’s threat by uniting themselves to nature in mimicry. They tried to repeat the cycle of life and the rhythm of nature in the dull beat of drums and dance, in magic ritual and mythological participation. Humans abandoned themselves to nature. They threw themselves at nature, and under nature’s control they were nameless, impersonal, and collective.

But there are two possibilities for humans in confrontation with nature. Nature can master humans or humans can master nature—control or be controlled (DA 38, DE 25). The Aufklärung, according to Horkheimer and his followers, represented a choice for the second alternative. It was a choice for the desacralization of nature, the break-up of myth, the coming-of-age of the human species, a stand for individual rights and dignity, autonomous use of reason, distance between the subject and the object, control and calculations, experimental science, mathematics and logic, mechanization of labor, industrial production, and global traffic in goods and raw materials (DA 19, DE 9). From the dim beginnings of civilization, this movement of enlightenment has been quietly under way. But from the eighteenth century—not for nothing called the age of enlightenment—it suddenly revealed its emancipatory and expansionist aspirations in insolent self-assurance. Primitive terror in the face of nature has swung right around into a strategy of rational thinking about nature and rational control of nature (DA 21, 46, 189, DE 10–11, 31, 148).

Dialectics (2)

Here we turn to what is called the “dialectic” of the Aufklärung. Over the centuries the enlightenment has failed to deliver what it promised. It has changed into its opposite. Enlightened reason is in the process of eliminating its ideals of reasonableness, freedom, justice, and dignity. It is in danger of losing its grip on nature. It is on the point of destroying itself (DA 3, DE xvi).

How has all of this come about? The craving for knowledge and control in Western science and technology has proved to be totalitarian. The craving for power did not stop short at human nature. Domination of nature involves domination of human beings, says Horkheimer.3 Humans and society become rationally dominated, and within these power-structures human beings can no longer be human. They lose their individual significance, their unique value. The meaning of being human is now reduced to the function that human beings fulfil within industrialized society.

Who is to be held responsible for this development? Not a single dictator, not some particular class of oppressors. Humans have trapped themselves in the spiral of guilt and tragedy. Humans are both oppressed and oppressor, not only victims but also instruments of oppression, taking their share of guilt and paying their share of tribute in the social system. Humanity is deformed by the social structures but mutilates itself as well. For the greater glory of technical ingenuity all other functions of the human self are discredited (KV 153, ER 162). Humans have degraded themselves into instruments or objects. Worker and industrialist alike have degenerated into extensions of the established order.

In this light it is fair to speak of a dialectic, a reversal in world history. Having emerged from a harsh and pitiless nature, human beings sink back into harsh and inhuman forms of existence. The expansive urge of Westerners to grasp and regulate the entirety of physical and human nature has become the independent principle of blind power (DA 48, DE 33), later succinctly termed the Prinzip Herrschaft by Adorno. It is as if blind nature, now working under the fancy name of social order, is once more playing with humans.

The consequences are serious, especially for humans themselves. The Aufklärung has made an about-turn into mythology and mimesis. Mythical faith in the cycle of seasons returns as mythical veneration for the laws of nature discovered by science. To control nature, humans must and do adapt themselves to nature and nature’s laws. Free thought destroys itself as the instrument of adaptation and repetition (DA 48, 18, DE 33, 8). With all of this comes a new mythicization of reality. The language of positive facts has become sacrosanct (DA x, DE xii).

Thus the mimetic impulse, primitive adaptation to lifeless nature—despite the taboo on it—is far from conquered in the modern world.4 It has seized our economic existence; it has been rationalized in the automated instruction of mental processes. The dull thudding of the factory, the drill of disciplined labor, and the restless routine of hard work and clocking on and off are the heartbeat of modern life. It is a ritual, conditioned identification of countless, nameless, interchangeable workers with the production system.5

We could speak here of a fundamental alienation. People are alienated from themselves. They are also alienated from the world around them, a world that is equally misused. People no longer know where they fit in, and they let themselves be handled as tools without a will of their own. Sooner or later they can therefore become mere instruments in the hands of unscrupulous dictators who have managed to get to the control panels of the social system. In retrospect, the Aufklärung turns out to be not universal enlightenment but universal blindness (DA 48, DE 33). In this way it plays into the hands of totalitarian movements. Fascism was indeed not exceptional but symptomatic (DA 175–76, DE 134–36).

The Aufklärung and Hegel and Marx (3)

The concept of the dialectic of enlightenment is thematically complex. The first element in it is the spirit of the Aufklärung, i.e. the Westerner’s axiomatic belief in reason as the foundation of freedom and the source of culture (DA 3, DE xvi), a faith whose formulation goes back to philosophers like Kant. In this thematic structure, the voice of Hegel can also be heard, inasmuch as the uncomplicated eighteenth century belief in progress (in the sense of a linear development towards freedom and light) had to make room for the dialectic principle, i.e. Hegel’s idea that it is only through oppositions that historical development can reach glorious freedom. Further, the thematic structure also contains a good dose of crisis-philosophy, for faith in progress is abandoned and dialectical reversal is explained as dialectical decline. Progression is interpreted as regression. It is on this issue that the Frankfurt scholars can tie in with Schopenhauer’s pessimism (Horkheimer), Nietzsche’s nihilism (Adorno) or Freud’s or Heidegger’s critique of culture (Marcuse). Finally, it is above all dialectical materialism that has been assimilated into the composition of the dialectic of enlightenment. Here I am thinking of Marx’s analysis of Western capitalism as a system in which humans wanted, by means of labor, to free themselves from nature, but in which they have nevertheless ended up alienated from themselves by their enslavement to the world of so-...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface to the English Edition
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: What is the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”?
• Chapter 2: The “Critical Theory” of Horkheimer and Adorno
• Chapter 3: Marcuse and the “Eroticization” of Culture
• Chapter 4: The Political Marcuse
• Chapter 5: Adorno and the Negative Dialectic
• Chapter 6: Habermas and Technocratic Ideology
• Chapter 7: Criticism and Liberation in Habermas
• Chapter 8: Horkheimer and Religious Yearning
• Chapter 9: The Myth and the Messianic Light
• Bibliography