Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present) - Softcover

Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804736332 ISBN 13: 9780804736336

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.

The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.

Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.

This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

About this title

About the Author

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were two influential members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

From the Back Cover

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."
Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.
The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.
Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.
This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

From the Inside Flap

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."
Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.
The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.
Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.
This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Philosophical Fragments

By Max Horkheimer, THEODOR W. ADORNO, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Edmund Jephcott

Stanford University Press

Copyright ©1987 S. Fishcher Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-3633-6

Contents

Preface to the New Edition (1969)..........................................
xi
Preface to the Italian Edition (1962/1966).................................
xiii
Preface (1944 and 1947)....................................................
xiv
The Concept of Enlightenment...............................................
1
Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.............................
35
Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality........................
63
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception......................
94
Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment.........................
137
Notes and Sketches.........................................................
173
Editor's Afterword.........................................................
217
The Disappearance of Class History in "Dialectic of Enlightenment": A 
Commentary on the Textual Variants (1944 and 1947), by Willem van Reijen 
and Jan Bransen............................................................
248
Notes......................................................................
253

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Concept of Enlightenment

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance ofthought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear andinstalling them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant withtriumphant calamity. Enlightenment's program was the disenchantmentof the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.Bacon, "the father of experimental philosophy," brought these motifstogether. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belieffor knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless insupplying answers. All this, he said, stood in the way of "the happy matchbetween the mind of man and the nature of things," with the result thathumanity was unable to use its knowledge for the betterment of its condition.Such inventions as had been made—Bacon cites printing, artillery,and the compass—had been arrived at more by chance than by systematicenquiry into nature. Knowledge obtained through such enquiry wouldnot only be exempt from the influence of wealth and power but wouldestablish man as the master of nature:

Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein manythings are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their forcecommand; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamenand discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions,but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention,we should command her by action.

Although not a mathematician, Bacon well understood the scientific temperwhich was to come after him. The "happy match" between humanunderstanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchalone: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchantednature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavementof creation or in its deference to worldly masters. Just as it serves allthe purposes of the bourgeois economy both in factories and on the battlefield,it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins.Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is asdemocratic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology isthe essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts norimages, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of thelabor of others, capital. The "many things" which, according to Bacon,knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio asa sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form ofartillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beingsseek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it andhuman beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenmenthas eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Onlythought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.Faced by the present triumph of the factual mentality, Bacon's nominalistcredo would have smacked of metaphysics and would have been convictedof the same vanity for which he criticized scholasticism. Power andknowledge are synonymous. For Bacon as for Luther, "knowledge thattendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, andnot for fruit or generation." Its concern is not "satisfaction, which men calltruth," but "operation," the effective procedure. The "true end, scope oroffice of knowledge" does not consist in "any plausible, delectable, reverendor admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effectingand working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before, for thebetter endowment and help of man's life." There shall be neither mysterynor any desire to reveal mystery.

The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.Xenophanes mocked the multiplicity of gods because they resembled theircreators, men, in all their idiosyncrasies and faults, and the latest logicdenounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, ascounterfeit coin that would be better replaced by neutral counters. Theworld becomes chaos, and synthesis salvation. No difference is said to existbetween the totemic animal, the dreams of the spirit-seer, and the absoluteIdea. On their way toward modern science human beings have discardedmeaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules andprobability. Causality was only the last philosophical concept on which scientificcriticism tested its strength, because it alone of the old ideas stillstood in the way of such criticism, the latest secular form of the creativeprinciple. To define substance and quality, activity and suffering, being andexistence in terms appropriate to the time has been a concern of philosophysince Bacon; but science could manage without such categories. Theywere left behind as idola theatri of the old metaphysics and even in theirtime were monuments to entities and powers from prehistory. In that distanttime life and death had been interpreted and interwoven in myths.The categories by which Western philosophy defined its timeless order ofnature marked out the positions which had once been occupied by Ocnusand Persephone, Ariadne and Nereus. The moment of transition is recordedin the pre-Socratic cosmologies. The moist, the undivided, the air andfire which they take to be the primal stuff of nature are early rationalizationsprecipitated from the mythical vision. Just as the images of generationfrom water and earth, that had come to the Greeks from the Nile, wereconverted by these cosmologies into Hylozoic principles and elements, thewhole ambiguous profusion of mythical demons was intellectualized to becomethe pure form of ontological entities. Even the patriarchal gods ofOlympus were finally assimilated by the philosophical logos as the PlatonicForms. But the Enlightenment discerned the old powers in the Platonicand Aristotelian heritage of metaphysics and suppressed the universal categories'claims to truth as superstition. In the authority of universal conceptsthe Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigieshuman beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. From now onmatter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powersor hidden properties. For enlightenment, anything which does not conformto the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by externaloppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights thenfare no better than the older universals. Any intellectual resistance it encountersmerely increases its strength. The reason is that enlightenmentalso recognizes itself in the old myths. No matter which myths are invokedagainst it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge thevery principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands accused.Enlightenment is totalitarian.

Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projectionof subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth. The supernatural,spirits and demons, are taken to be reflections of human beingswho allow themselves to be frightened by natural phenomena. Accordingto enlightened thinking, the multiplicity of mythical figures can bereduced to a single common denominator, the subject. Oedipus's answerto the riddle of the Sphinx—"That being is man"—is repeated indiscriminatelyas enlightenment's stereotyped message, whether in response to apiece of objective meaning, a schematic order, a fear of evil powers, or ahope of salvation. For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassedby unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the systemfrom which everything and anything follows. Its rationalist and empiricistversions do not differ on that point. Although the various schools mayhave interpreted its axioms differently, the structure of unitary science hasalways been the same. Despite the pluralism of the different fields ofresearch, Bacon's postulate of una scientia universalis is as hostile to anythingwhich cannot be connected as Leibniz's mathesis universalis is to discontinuity.The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement,history to fact, things to matter. For Bacon, too, there was a clearlogical connection, through degrees of generality, linking the highest principlesto propositions based on observation. De Maistre mocks him forharboring this "idolized ladder." Formal logic was the high school of unification.It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the worldcalculable. The mythologizing equation of Forms with numbers in Plato'slast writings expresses the longing of all demythologizing: number becameenlightenment's canon. The same equations govern bourgeois justice andcommodity exchange. "Is not the rule, 'Si inaequalibus aequalia addas,omnia erunt inaequalia,' [If you add like to unlike you will always end upwith unlike] an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics? And is therenot a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, andarithmetical and geometrical proportion?" Bourgeois society is ruled byequivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them toabstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot beresolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivismconsigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenidesto Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.

But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselvesits products. The scientific calculation of events annuls the accountof them which thought had once given in myth. Myth sought to report,to name, to tell of origins—but therefore also to narrate, record, explain.This tendency was reinforced by the recording and collecting of myths.From a record, they soon became a teaching. Each ritual contains a representationof how things happen and of the specific process which is to beinfluenced by magic. In the earliest popular epics this theoretical elementof ritual became autonomous. The myths which the tragic dramatists drewon were already marked by the discipline and power which Bacon celebratedas the goal. The local spirits and demons had been replaced byheaven and its hierarchy, the incantatory practices of the magician by thecarefully graduated sacrifice and the labor of enslaved men mediated bycommand. The Olympian deities are no longer directly identical with elements,but signify them. In Homer Zeus controls the daytime sky, Apolloguides the sun; Helios and Eos are already passing over into allegory. Thegods detach themselves from substances to become their quintessence.From now on, being is split between logos—which, with the advance ofphilosophy, contracts to a monad, a mere reference point—and the massof things and creatures in the external world. The single distinctionbetween man's own existence and reality swallows up all others. Withoutregard for differences, the world is made subject to man. In this the Jewishstory of creation and the Olympian religion are at one: "... and let themhave dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, andover the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing thatcreepeth upon the earth." "O Zeus, Father Zeus, yours is the dominionof the heavens; you oversee the works of men, both the wicked and thejust, and the unruly animals, you who uphold righteousness." "It is soordained that one atones at once, another later; but even should oneescape the doom threatened by the gods, it will surely come to pass oneday, and innocents shall expiate his deed, whether his children or a latergeneration." Only those who subject themselves utterly pass muster withthe gods. The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition ofpower as the principle of all relationships. In face of the unity of such reasonthe distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance, asreason has steadfastly indicated since the earliest critique of Homer. Intheir mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike.Man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordlygaze, in the command.

Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Humanbeings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from thatover which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship tothings as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent thathe can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extentthat he can make them. Their "in-itself" becomes "for him." In theirtransformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrateof domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. Neitherit nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation.The rites of the shaman were directed at the wind, the rain, the snake outsideor the demon inside the sick person, not at materials or specimens.The spirit which practiced magic was not single or identical; it changedwith the cult masks which represented the multiplicity of spirits. Magic isbloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transformingitself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves. Themagician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidatingor appeasing gestures. Although his task was impersonation he didnot claim to be made in the image of the invisible power, as does civilizedman, whose modest hunting ground then shrinks to the unified cosmos,in which nothing exists but prey. Only when made in such an image doesman attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identificationwith the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrablemask. It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity ofnature, which subdues the abundance of qualities. Nature, stripped ofqualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-powerfulself becomes a mere having, an abstract identity. Magic implies specificrepresentation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of theenemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place ofthe god. The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a steptoward discursive logic. Even though the hind which was offered up forthe daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities of itsown, it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness ofthe specimen. But the sanctity of the hic et nunc, the uniqueness of thechosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishesit radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange. Science putsan end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which isa sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universalfungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimenof matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen notas a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. Because in functionalscience the differences are so fluid that everything is submerged inone and the same matter, the scientific object is petrified, whereas the rigidritual of former times appears supple in its substitution of one thing foranother. The world of magic still retained differences whose traces havevanished even in linguistic forms. The manifold affinities between existingthings are supplanted by the single relationship between the subjectwho confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational significanceand its accidental bearer. At the magical stage dream and imagewere not regarded as mere signs of things but were linked to them byresemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but ofkinship. Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues themthrough mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object. Itcertainly is not founded on the "omnipotence of thought," which theprimitive is supposed to impute to himself like the neurotic; there can beno "over-valuation of psychical acts" in relation to reality where thoughtand reality are not radically distinguished. The "unshakable confidence inthe possibility of controlling the world" which Freud anachronisticallyattributes to magic applies only to the more realistic form of world dominationachieved by the greater astuteness of science. The autonomy ofthought in relation to objects, as manifested in the reality-adequacy of theEgo, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of themedicine man by all-embracing industrial technology.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT by Max Horkheimer. Copyright © 1987 by S. Fishcher Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804736332
• ISBN 13: 9780804736336
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Schmid Noerr Gunzelin