HORKHEIMER AND ADORNO
The Totalitarian Face of the Dialectic of Enlightenment
WITHIN THE PARAMETERS described in the previous chapter, the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment was definitively transformed. This becomes obvious as soon as one reads Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (which they finished writing in the United States in 1944 and published three years later in Amsterdam). Here the old Hegelian Centaur was turned on its head. There were no noteworthy references to the Enlightenment as a historical period, or to the eighteenth century as its chronological and cultural context. The text revisited the classical dialectical paradigm and reformulated it, including all its dark sides, from the dawn of Western civilization onwards. It began with the adventures of Odysseus (the first Aufklärer), which exemplified the journey of the self through myth, and traveled on all the way to Hitler’s totalitarianism and the American mass consumerism in their own day. This obviously precluded any attempt at historical criticism.
The main issue under investigation was entirely philosophical in nature. It directly addressed the nature and outcomes of the Enlightenment, and consequently the question of its culpability for the catastrophe that had hit the modern world with the horror of World War II. From its very first pages the book was a relentless indictment of what it saw as the historical failure of the Enlightenment’s emancipation project, a project that had been in development over several centuries: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”1 Born with the intent of emancipating and liberating mankind from myth, that project had undergone a dialectical reversal that turned it, paradoxically, into a new form of myth, a totalitarian religion devoted single-mindedly to an instrumental rationalism whose final aim was the creation of a dehumanized society dominated by science and technology. The Enlightenment had hastened the crisis and the “collapse of bourgeois civilization” (xiv), thus catapulting the Western world into a “new kind of barbarism” (xiv) never recorded before in living memory. From this arose the urgent need to investigate the causes of the “enlightenment’s relapse into mythology” (xvi), so as to expose at last its dangerous predisposition to self-destruction, a supposition based on the authors’ thesis that a “tendency toward self-destruction [had] been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the present phase when it [was] emerging nakedly” (xix).
It should be noted straightaway that Horkheimer and Adorno’s text, rich as it is in literary elements, cannot be understood unless one takes into account the fact that, in writing about rationality and reason in connection with the Enlightenment, the authors are once again taking issue with the philosophy of the subject as described in Hegel (after all, that is the inescapable dialectical paradigm). To that effect, they appropriate both Marx’s critique of ideologies and Nietzsche’s unmasking of subjective reason as a smokescreen for the will to power. Adding a new ingredient in this explosive mixture, they also subscribed to the growing disenchantment with modern science, which by the early twentieth century was seen by large sectors of the European intelligentsia as having degenerated into the all-powerful dictatorship of so-called technoscience.2 According to Horkheimer and Adorno, “[l]ike few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment” (36). He had unveiled the close relationship of that phenomenon with domination and power. And now power had revealed itself as the evil face of technological society, where “the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and natural” (xviii).
“Enlightenment […] is the philosophy which equates truth with the scientific system” (66), with mathematical methods, and with the language of Galileo and Newton’s theoretical thinking. However, over time these had been replaced by the pursuit of technological innovation and of organizational models that saw being only “in terms of manipulation and administration” (65). Developed with the intent that it be of service to man, technology was now well on its way towards dictating mankind’s destiny. The tight dialectical process that reversed the relationship between man and technology was all already present in the initial core of the Enlightenment’s very way of thinking, which was bent on “establishing a unified, scientific order and […] deriving factual knowledge from principles, whether these principles are interpreted as arbitrarily posited axioms, innate ideas, or the highest abstractions” (63). The real spiritual father and true interpreter of this posture had been Francis Bacon, with his famous concept of knowledge as the absolute dominion of man over nature. The dialectic’s ultimate results could be seen in the Enlightenment’s proclaimed mission of vanquishing magic and myths by stressing man’s finitude and the self-sufficiency of reason, a reason that was destined to be turned upside down in the instrumental reason propounded by the positivists (“modern mythologists” of scientific rationalism) and, more recently, by supporters of early twentieth-century pragmatism and American utilitarian philosophies.3 Indeed, Horkheimer and Adorno’s real objective was precisely the denunciation of this instrumental reason, which had been dehumanized, formalized into the theorems of logical neopositivism and programmatically detached from any kind of historical, metaphysical, or religious context; a reason whose sole intent was the pursuit of technological dominion over nature, and not the pursuit of truth. Abstract reason had proved incapable of constructing a solid rationalistic morality equipped with guidelines and principles that could rein in the subject’s worst instincts and ensure peaceful coexistence on the basis of historically shared values. But the problem went further. For that reason had itself generated most of what was perverse in the modern world.
This was due to the fact that Kant’s rejection of any and all authority principles had resulted first in the death of God, as proclaimed by Nietzsche, and then in the rise of the most unbounded individualism and utilitarianism, of consumerism and the commodification of every aspect of everyday life. The final, and inevitable, outcome could be seen in totalitarian regimes. Their intoxication with the will to power and lack of regard for human life are the natural offspring of instrumental reason’s implicit totalitarianism. The Marquis de Sade and his Philosophie dans le boudoir perfectly exemplify the ultimate outcome of an Enlightenment project that had established man as absolute master of his own destiny and had, in so doing, allowed free rein to his propensity for domination and violence. The ideological nature of this dialectical reversal of the Enlightenment was also apparent in the American cultural industry, where artistic phenomena had been reduced to entertainment commodities and propaganda within the framework of a capitalistic system. This was the ultimate proof that the Enlightenment’s original emancipation project was finally regressing into a dangerous form of mass mystification. Thus nothing seemed to escape the logics of domination deployed by the Enlightenment in modern technological society, in which “progress is reverting to regression” (xviii) and even economic well being leads to the spiritual bankruptcy of mankind.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung was the work of two Aufklärer, who had been among the founders of the Frankfurt School and were now obviously disillusioned and disappointed by the crisis that the social sciences had suffered at the start of the century. They were also of course deeply affected by the tragic events of the 1930s and 40s. However, for many generations of activists and reactionaries alike, both left- and right-wing, as well as for the architects of the Vatican’s cultural project (to be visited below), this text represented a veritable “black book” of modernity, one that provided them with an arsenal of ideas and suggestions that could be deployed without too much concern for historical accuracy. The few mentions of the original libertarian and emancipatory nature of the Enlightenment within the volume were hardly adequate to counterbalance its apocalyptic tone and unsubstantiated indictments, or the authors’ unilateral pronouncements according to which “enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be” (18). Horkheimer and Adorno effectively threw away the baby with the bathwater. That is to say, they relaunched the paradigm of Hegelian dialectic within the framework of a radical and definitive condemnation of the modern world. They pronounced a crushing verdict, only partially relieved by their call for a critical rethinking of the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment, taking into account the negative effects produced by its historical action as well as its primary intent of pursuing truth rather than dominating nature. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, “the cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself” (xvi). Their book issues a peremptory warning, as it stresses “the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed” (xvii)