Twenty-five years after the conclusion of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno remained faithful to its philosophical impulse and never deviated from the paradoxical structure of thinking as totalizing critique. The grandeur of this consistency is shown by a comparison with Nietzsche, whose On the Genealogy of Morals had been the great model for a second level of reflection on the Enlightenment. Nietzsche suppressed the paradoxical structure and explained the complete assimilation of reason to power in modernity with a theory of power that was remythologized out of arbitrary pieces and that, in place of the claim to truth, retains no more than the rhetorical claim proper to an aesthetic fragment. Nietzsche showed how one totalizes critique; but what comes out in the end is only that he finds the fusion of validity and power scandalous because it impedes a glorified will to power that has taken on the connotations of artistic productivity. The comparison with Nietzsche makes manifest that no direction is inscribed in totalized critique as such. Nietzsche is the one among the steadfast theoreticians of unmasking who radicalizes the counter-Enlightenment.1
The stance of Max Horkheimer and Adorno toward Nietzsche is ambivalent. On the one hand, they attest of him that he was “one of the few after Hegel who recognized the dialectic of enlightenment” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 44).2 Naturally, they accept the “merciless doctrine of the identity of domination and reason” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 119), which is to say, the approach toward a totalizing self-overcoming of ideology critique. On the other hand, they cannot overlook the fact that Hegel is also Nietzsche’s great antipode. Nietzsche gives the critique of reason such an affirmative twist that even determinate negation—which is to say, the very procedure that Horkheimer and Adorno want to retain as the sole exercise, since reason itself has become so shaky—loses its sting. Nietzsche’s critique consumes the critical impulse itself: “As a protest against civilization, the masters’ morality conversely represents the oppressed. Hatred of atrophied instincts actually denounces the true nature of the taskmasters—which comes to light only in their victims. But as a Great Power or state religion, the masters’ morality wholly subscribes to the civilizing powers that be, the compact majority, resentment, and everything that it formerly opposed. The realization of Nietzsche’s assertions both refutes them and at the same time reveals their truth, which—despite all his affirmation of life—was inimical to the spirit of reality” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 101).
This ambivalent attitude toward Nietzsche is instructive. It also suggests that Dialectic of Enlightenment owes more to Nietzsche than just the strategy of an ideology critique turned against itself. Indeed, what is unexplained throughout is their certain lack of concern in dealing with the (to put it in the form of a slogan) achievements of Occidental rationalism. How can these two men of the Enlightenment (which they both remain) be so unappreciative of the rational content of cultural modernity that all they perceive everywhere is a binding of reason and domination, of power and validity? Have they also let themselves be inspired by Nietzsche in drawing their criteria for cultural criticism from a basic experience of aesthetic modernity that has now been rendered independent?
The similarities in content are at first startling.3 Point-for-point correspondences with Nietzsche are found in the construction by which Horkheimer and Adorno underpin their “primal history of subjectivity.” As soon as humans were robbed of their detached instincts, claims Nietzsche, they had to rely on their “consciousness,” namely, on their apparatus for objectifying and manipulating external nature: “They were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures” (GM II:16).4 In the same stroke, however, the old instincts had to be tamed, and feelings and desires, no longer finding a spontaneous outler, had to be repressed. In the course of this process of reversal of conative direction and of internalization, the subjectivity of an inner nature was formed under the sign of renunciation or of “bad conscience”: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul.’ The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the name of measure as outward discharge was inhibited ” (GM 11:16). Finally, the two elements of domination over external and internal nature were bound together and fixed in the institutionalized dominion of human beings over other humans: “The curse of society and of peace” is based in all institutions, because they coerce people into renunciation: “Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong among these bulwarks—brought about that all these instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself” (GM 11:16).
Similarly, Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge and morality anticipates an idea that Horkheimer and Adorno develop in the form of the critique of instrumental reason: Behind positivism’s ideals of objectivity and claims to truth, behind universalistic morality’s ideals of asceticism and claims to rightness, lurk imperatives of self-preservation and domination. A pragmatist epistemology and a moral psychology unmask theoretical and practical reason as pure fictions in which power claims furnish themselves an effective alibi—with the help of imagination and of the “drive to metaphorize,” for which external stimuli provide only the occasion for projective responses and for a web of interpretations behind which the text disappears altogether. 5
Nietzsche brings out the perspective from which he handles modernity in a way different from that of Dialectic Enlightenment. And only this angle explains why objectified nature and morality sink to correlative forms of appearance of the same mythic force, be it of a perverted will to power or of instrumental reason.
This perspective was inaugurated with aesthetic modernity and that stubborn self-disclosure (forced by avant-garde art) of a decentered subjectivity liberated from all constraints of cognition and purposiveness and from all imperatives of labor and utility. Nietzsche, not just a contemporary and kindred spirit of Mallarmé;6 he not only imbibed the late Romantic spirit of Richard Wagner; he is the first to conceptualize the attitude of aesthetic modernity before avant-garde consciousness assumed objective shape in the literature, painting, and music of the twentieth century—and could be elaborated by Adorno into an Aesthetic Theory. In the upgrading of the transitory, in the celebration of the dynamic, in the glorification of the current and the new, there is expressed an aesthetically motivated time-consciousness and a longing for an unspoiled, inward presence. The anarchist intention of the Surrealists to explode the continuum of the story of decline is already operative in Nietzsche. The subversive force of aesthetic resistance that would later feed the reflections of Benjamin and even of Peter Weiss, already arises from the experience in Nietzsche of rebellion against everything normative. It is this same force that neutralizes both the morally good and the practically useful, which expresses itself in the dialectic of secret and scandal and in the pleasure derived from the horror of profanation. Nietzsche builds up Socrates and Christ, those advocates of belief in truth and the ascetic ideal, as his great opponents; they are the ones who negate the aesthetic values! Nietzsche trusts only in art, “in which precisely the lie is sanctified, the will to deception” (GM III:25), and in the terror of the beautiful, not to let themselves be imprisoned by the fictive world of science and morality.
Nietzsche enthrones taste, “the Yes and No of the palate” (BGE 224), as the sole organ of “knowledge” beyond truth and falsehood, beyond good and evil. He elevates the judgment of taste of the art critic into the model for value judgment, for “evaluation.” The legitimate meaning of critique is that of a value judgment that establishes an order of rank, weighs things, and measures forces. And all interpretation is evaluation. “Yes” expresses a high appraisal; “No” a low one. The “high” and the “low” indicate the dimension of yes/no positions in general.
It is interesting to see how coherently Nietzsche undermines the taking of “Yes” and “No” positions on criticizable validity claims. First, he devalues the truth of assertive statements and the rightness of normative ones, by reducing validity and invalidity to positive and negative value judgments. He reduces “p is true” and “h is right” (that is, the complex statements by which we claim validity for propositional statements or for ought statements) to simple evaluative statements by which we express value appraisals, by which we state that we prefer the true to the false and good over evil. Thus, Nietzsche reinterprets validity claims into preferences and then poses the question: “Suppose that we prefer truth (and justice): why not rather untruth (and injustice)?” (BGE 1). The responses to questions about the “value” of truth and justice are judgments of taste.
Of course, there could still be an architectonic lurking behind these fundamental value appraisals that, as in Schelling, anchors the unity of theoretical and practical reason in the faculty of aesthetic judgment. Nietzsche can carry out his complete assimilation of reason to power only by removing any cognitive status from value judgments and by demonstrating that the yes/no positions of value appraisals no longer express validity claims, but pure power claims.
Viewed in terms of language analysis, the next step in the argument therefore has the aims of assimilating judgments of taste to imperatives, and value appraisals to expressions of will. Nietzsche disputes Kant’s analysis of judgments of taste in order to ground the thesis that evaluations are necessarily subjective and cannot be linked with a claim to intersubjective validity (GM III:6). The illusion of disinterested pleasure and of the impersonal character and universality of aesthetic judgment arises only from the perspective of the spectator; but from the perspective of the producing artist we realize that value appraisals are induced by innovative value positings. The aesthetics of production unfolds the experience of the genial artist who creates values: From his perspective, value appraisals are dictated by his “value-positing eye” (GM I:10). Value-positing productivity prescribes the law for value appraisal. What is expressed in the validity claimed by the judgment of taste is only “the excitement of the will by the beautiful.” One will responds to another; one force takes hold of another.
This is the route by which Nietzsche arrives at the concept of the will to power from the yes/no positions of value appraisals, after he has cleansed them of all cognitive claims. The beautiful is “the stimulant of the will to power.” The aesthetic core of the will to power is the capacity of a sensibility that lets itself be affected in the greatest possible multiplicity of modes.7
However, if thinking can no longer operate in the element of truth, or of validity claims in general,8 contradiction and criticism lose their meaning. To contradict, to negate, now has only the sense of “wanting to be different.” Nietzsche cannot really be satisfied with this in his critique of culture. The latter is not supposed to be merely a form of agitation, but to demonstrate why it is false or incorrect or bad to recognize the sovereignty of the ideals of science and universalistic morality, which are inimical to life. But once all predicates concerning validity are devalued, once it is power and not validity claims that is expressed in value appraisats—by what criterion shall critique still be able to propose discrimination? It must at least be able to discriminate between a power that deserves to be esteemed and one that deserves to be devalued.
A theory of power that distinguishes between “active” and merely “reactive” forces is supposed to offer a way out of this aporia. But Nietzsche cannot admit of the theory of power as a theory that can be true or false. He himself moves about, according to his own analysis, in a world of illusion, in which lighter shadows can be distinguished from darker ones, but not reason from unreason. This is, as it were, a world fallen back into myth, in which powers influence one another and no element remains that could transcend the battle of the powers. Perhaps it is typical of the ahistorical mode of perception proper to aesthetic modernity that particular epochs lose their own profile in favor of a heroic affinity of the present with the most remote and the most primitive: The decadent strives to relate itself in a leap to the barbaric, the wild, and the primitive. In any case, Nietzsche’s renewal of the framework of the myth of origins is suited to this mentality: Authentic culture has been in decline already for a long time; the curse of remoteness from origins lays upon the present; and so Nietzsche conceives of the gathering of a still dawning culture in antiutopian terms—as a comeback and a return.
This framework does not have a merely metaphorical status; it has the systematic role of making room for the paradoxical business of a critique disburdened of the mortgages of enlightened thought. That is to say, totalized ideology critique for Nietzsche turns into what he calls “genealogical critique.” Once the critical sense of saying “No” is suspended and the procedure of negation is rendered impotent, Nietzsche goes back to the very dimension of the myth of origins that permits a distinction that affects all other dimension: What is older is earlier in the generational chain and nearer to the origin. The more primordial is considered the more worthy of honor, the preferable, the more unspoiled, the purer: It is deemed better. Derivation and descent serve as criteria of rank, in both the social and the logical senses.
In this manner, Nietzsche bases his critique of morality on genealogy. He traces the moral appraisal of value, which assigns a person or a mode of action a place within a rank ordering based on criteria of validity, back to the descent and hence to the social rank of the one making the moral judgment: “The signpost to the right road was for me the question: what was the real etymological significance of the designations for ‘good’ coined in the various languages? I found they all led back to the same conceptual transformation—that everywhere ‘noble,’ ‘aristocratic’ in the social [standlisch] sense, is the basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with the soul of a higher order,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ necessarily developed: a development which always runs parallel to that other in which ‘common,’ ‘plebeian,’ ‘low’ are finally transformed into the concept ‘bad’” (GM I:4). So the genealogical localization of powers takes on a critical sense: Those forces with an earlier, more noble descent are the active, creative ones, whereas a perverted will to power is expressed in the forces of later, lower, and reactive descent.9
With this, Nietzsche has in hand the conceptual means by which he can denounce the prevalence of the belief in reason and of the ascetic ideal, of science and morality, as a merely factual victory (though of course decisive for the fate of modernity) of lower and reactionary forces. As is well known, they are supposed to have arisen from the resentment of the weaker and “the protective and healing instinct of a degenerating life” (GM III:13).10
We have pursued totalizing critique applied to itself in two variants. Horkheimer and Adorno find themselves in the same embarrassment as Nietzsche: If they do not want to renounce the effect of a final unmasking and still want to continue with critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria. In the face of this paradox, self-referential critique loses its orientation. It has two options.
Nietzsche seeks refuge in a theory of power, which is consistent, since the fusion of reason and power revealed by critique abandons the world to the irreconcilable struggle between powers, as if it were the mythic world. It is fitting that Nietzsche, mediated by Gilles Deleuze, has become influential in structuralist France as a theoretician of power. Foucault, too, in his later work, replaces the model of domination based on repression (developed in the tradition of enlightenment by Marx and Freud) by a plurality of power strategies. These power strategies intersect one another, succeed one another; they are distinguished according to the type of their discourse formation and the degree of their intensity; but they cannot be judged under the aspect of their validity, as was the case with consciously working through conflicts in contrast to unconsciously doing so.11
The doctrine of active and merely reactive forces also fails to provide a way out of the embarrassment of a critique that attacks the presuppositions of its own validity. At best, it paves the way for breaking out of the horizon of modernity. It is without basis as a theory, if the categorial distinction between power claims and truth claims is the ground upon which any theoretical approach has to be enacted. The effect of unmasking is also transformed as a result: It is not the lightning flash of insight into some confusion threatening identity that causes shock, the way understanding the point of a joke causes liberating laughter; what produces shock is affirmative de-differentiation, an affirmative overthrow of the very categories that can make an act of mistaking, of forgetting, or of misspeaking into a category mistake threatening to identity—or art into illusion. This regressive turn still places the forces of emancipation at the service of counterenlightenment.
Horkheimer and Adorno adopt another option by stirring up, holding open, and no longer wanting to overcome theoretically the performative contradiction inherent in an ideology critique that outstrips itself. Any attempt to develop a theory at this level of reflection would have to slide off into the groundless; they therefore eschew theory and practice determinate negation on an ad hoc basis, thus standing firm against that fusion of reason and power that plugs all crevices: “Determinate negation rejects the defective ideas of the absolute, the idols, differently than does rigorism, which confronts them with the idea they cannot match up to. Dialectic, on the contrary, interprets every image as writing. It shows how the admission of its falsity is to be read in the lines of its features—a confession that deprives it of its power and appropriates it for truth. Thus language becomes more than just a sign system. With the notion of determinate negativity, Hegel revealed an element that distinguishes the Enlightenment from the positivist degeneracy to which he attributes it” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 24). A practiced spirit of contradiction is all that remains of the “spirit of ... unrelenting theory.” And this practice is like an incantation seeking “to turn ... to its end” the negative spirit of relentless progress (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 42).
Anyone who abides in a paradox on the very spot once occupied by philosophy with its ultimate groundings is not just taking up an uncomfortable position, one can only hold that place if one makes it at least minimally plausible that there is no way out. Even the retreat from an aporetic situation has to be barred, for otherwise there is a way—the way back. But I believe this is precisely the case.
The comparison with Nietzsche is instructive inasmuch as it draws our attention to the aesthetic horizon of experience that guides and motivates the gaze of contemporary diagnosis. I have shown how Nietzsche detaches that moment of reason, which comes into its own in the logic proper to the aesthetic-expressive sphere of value, and especially in avant-garde art and art criticism, from its connection with theoretical and practical reason; and how he stylizes aesthetic judgment, on the model of a “value appraisal” exiled to irrationality, into a capacity for discrimination beyond good and evil, truth and falsehood. In this way, Nietzsche gains criteria for a critique of culture that unmasks science and morality as being in similar ways ideological expressions of a perverted will to power, just as Dialectic of Enlightenment denounces these structures as embodiments of instrumental reason.
In one respect, ideology critique had in fact continued the undialectical enlightenment proper to ontological thinking. It remained caught up in the purist notion that the devil needing exorcism was hiding in the internal relationships between genesis and validity, so that theory, purified of all empirical connotations, could operate in its own element. Totalized critique did not discharge this legacy. The intention of a “final unmasking,” which was supposed to draw away with one fell swoop the veil covering the confusion between power and reason, reveals a purist intent—simitar to the intent of ontology to separate being and illusion categorically (that is, with one stroke). However, just as in a communication community the researcher, the context of discovery, and the context of justification are so entwined with one another that they have to be separated procedurally, by a mediating kind of thinking—which is to say, continuously—the same holds for the two spheres of being and illusion. In argumentation, critique is constantly entwined with theory, enlightenment with grounding, even though discourse participants always have to suppose that only the unforced force of the better argument comes into play under the unavoidable communication presuppositions of argumentative discourse. But they know, or they can know, that even this idealization is only necessary because convictions are formed and confirmed in a medium that is not “pure” and not removed from the world of appearances in the style of Platonic “pure” and not removed from the world of appearances in the style of Platonic Ideas. Only a discourse that admits this might break the spell of mythic thinking without incurring a loss of the light radiating from the semantic potentials also preserved in myth.
Like his “new-conservative” successors, he too behaves like an “anti-sociologist.” Cf. H. Baier, “Die GeseHschaft—ein langer Schatten des toten Gottes,” in Nietzsche-Studien 10/ 11 (1982): 6ff.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). English translation Dialectic of Enlightenment [trans. by John Cumming] (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
See also Peter Pütz, “Nietzsche and Critical Theory,” in Telos 50 (Winter 1981–1982): 103–14.
Ed. Note: Translations of Nietzsche are Walter Kaufmann’s and R. J. Hollingdale’s.
J. Habermas, “Nachwort” to F. Nietzsche, Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), 237ff.
Pointed out by Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 32ff.
The mediating function of the judgment of taste in the reduction of yes/no positions on criticizable validity claims to the “Yes” and “No” in relation to imperative expressions of will can also be seen in the manner in which Nietzsche, along with the concept of propositional truth, revises the concept of world built into our grammar: “Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different ‘values’ to use the language of painters? Why couldn’t the world that concerns us be a fiction? And if somebody asks: ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’—couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this ’belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction, too? By now is one not permitted to be a bit ironic about the subject no less than about the predicate and object? Shouldn’t the philosopher be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?” (BGE 34)
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 103ff.
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 112.
Here I am interested in the structure of the argument. Once he has destroyed the foundations of the critique of ideology by a self-referential use of this critique, Nietzsche saves his own position as an unmasking critic only by recourse to a figure of thought associated with the myth of origins. The ideological content of On the Genealogy of Morals and Nietzsche battle against modern ideas in general—in which the more cultivated among the despisers of democracy, now as ever, show a conspicuous interest—is another matter altogether. See R. Maurer, “Nietzsche und die Kritische Theorie,” and G. Rohrmoser, “Nietzsches Kritik der Moral,” Nietzsche-Studien 10/11 (1982): 34ff and 328ff.
H. Fink-Eitel, “Michel Foucaults Analytik der Macht,” in F. A. Kittler, ed., Austreibung des Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980), 38ff; Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Soziales Handeln und menschliche Natur (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1980), 123ff.