Four Ages of Thinking According to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

Discussion

Jonathan Bi:

"In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlightenment does not refer to the specific 18th-century intellectual movement but what could be “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought”. That is to say, the historical development of our conceptual schemas through which we view and interact with the world. The goal of Enlightenment was always to “[liberate] human beings from fear and [install] them as masters”. Bacon expressed the hopes for Enlightenment well when he envisioned a patriarchal future where humans, having conquered mythical superstition and in perfect control of knowledge, establish themselves as autonomous masters of the natural world:

Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and 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.

However, the belief that “the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature” proved naïve, as the now “wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”. Indeed, in each of the four historical eras — magic, myth, metaphysics, positivism — we gained more control of nature through acquiring more knowledge by advancing our thought, through Enlightenment. But we became stewards of knowledge at the price of adapting ourselves and society as to introduce new forces, no less pernicious and totalitarian, which now threaten our autonomy.

The philosophy of history presented has four distinct eras. Each era is defined by its dominant mode of thinking and the knowledge that it produces. The primary concern of this mental activity “is not ‘satisfaction, which men call truth,’ but ‘operation,’ the effective procedure”. The purpose of knowledge is neither truth nor satisfaction but rather production: helping man manipulate the external world according to his needs. History begins with magical thinking whose defining characteristic is that it sees difference within the world. It sees the world as constituted by a set of related, interacting but ontologically distinct entities. The objects manipulated by magic were specific: “The rites of the shaman were directed at the wind, the rain, the snake outside or the demon inside the sick person, not at materials or specimens”. This changes drastically in positivism where the object in science is a mere manifestation of a more fundamental matter: “the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities”.

The Magical Age

Because of this assumed difference, magic influences the world through imitation. This imitation is explicit when, for example, a shaman imitates a demon to ward it off or a hunter imitates the bear to scare it away. But imitation is not limited between subject and object but also among objects themselves. Imitation between objects is representation, the idea that certain objects have a special kinship and connection. “What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god”. This changes drastically in positivism where “representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar”. Science sees no real differences and treats objects within the world as commutable.

The magical age, the era least touched by Enlightenment, already contains within it the seeds for its burgeoning: fear. “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of Enlightenment”. Since this age is also the age where we have the least amount of knowledge of the world, it is also the age where there is the most amount of unknowns and where this fear of the unknown is most pertinent. This fear and the corresponding reactive instinct to assuage it by knowing more about the world, by subjugating as much as the world underneath the rule of thought as possible is the sole driving force of this philosophy of history.

In the magical era, the reflex to this instinct is mana — an ineffable substance containing ambivalent powers of genesis and destruction, light and dark, etc. Mana was thought to exist behind certain sites and not others, delimiting the sacred from the profane. Mana is not a solution to this fear, that is to say, it did not expand the reach of our knowledge nor provide new means of manipulating the world and thus is not part of the Enlightenment. It is a reflex to this fear. Mana and the other common metaphysical belief of animism was an admission of ignorance, a submission to the unknown, not an attempt to conquer it. They acknowledge and submit to this unknown by equating the nonliving — the calculable and masterable — with the living — the unpredictable and untamable — while positivism attempts to conquer this unknown by equating the living with the nonliving. This reflex of mana which “springs from human fear” is still significant because it represents the first attempt of “the doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force”. This doubling is the predecessor of abstraction, of the urge to look beyond distinct objects to find a common substance, which is paramount to the development of Enlightenment.

The Mythical Age

If the magical era was the starting point of history and Mana but a meager reflex to fear, then the mythical era represents the beginning of the Enlightenment and its dominant mode of thinking, myth, the first solution to fear. Myth is Enlightenment because it advanced the sphere of knowledge, limited the realm of the unknown, and thus provided new ways to manipulate reality. Myth, like science, “sought to report, to name, to tell of origins — but therefore also to narrate, record, explain”. It is founded upon a desire to explain the world, to reduce it, to make it more manageable and tamable by thought. The manipulation of the external world became more unified and centralized: “The local spirits and demons had been replaced by heaven and its hierarchy, the incantatory practices of the magician by the carefully graduated sacrifice and the labor of enslaved men mediated by command”. This represented an advancement in two ways. First, more of reality was made intelligible and known, albeit through the unpredictable tempers of deities. Second, reality was controllable through the centralized mediator of worship instead of interacting directly with each independent object. This hierarchical view of knowledge was made possible as the social world itself shifted from an egalitarian nomadism to a hierarchical society with fixed property. Material reality progresses symbiotically with knowledge: the former inspiring new structures for the latter, while the latter accelerates the development of the former.

The Metaphysical Age

Just as how the shift from nomadism to fixed property engendered the mythical age, an even more accelerated form of commerce and production brought about the metaphysical age and its dominant mode of thinking — concepts. The most representative of concepts, the Platonic forms with their claim to universal validity and hierarchical structure, originated “in the marketplace of Athens; they reflected with the same fidelity the laws of physics, the equality of freeborn citizens, and the inferiority of women, children, and slaves” (Adorno 16). The metaphysical age is where philosophy came to be. Concepts span a wide range of domains, from the metaphysical — being, form, substance — to the humanistic — joy, suffering, love — to the social — norms, signs, values. They are an even more direct, universal, and predictable method of interpreting and controlling the world. “Greeks from the Nile, were converted by these cosmologies into Hylozoic principles and elements, the whole ambiguous profusion of mythical demons was intellectualized to become the pure form of ontological entities. Even the patriarchal gods of Olympus were finally assimilated by the philosophical logos as the Platonic Forms”. No longer is reality mediated by these unpredictable deities; it can be understood through conceptual understanding. Concepts are an advancement in thought over myth as myth was to magic.

The Positivist Age

The final step in this philosophy of history is the age of positivism and its mode of thinking: science. This era only accepts the verifiable data of experience and the conclusions drawn out of it through logic and mathematics as legitimate knowledge. It rejects any a priori speculation of metaphysics and “suppressed the universal categories’ claims to truth as superstition … From now on matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties”. Not only was a priori speculation renounced but any subjective interpretations were rejected. Things could only be grasped objectively in “their abstract spatial-temporal relationships” and not subjectively “as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning — this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned”. In fact, all humanistic thinking about “quality, activity and suffering, being and existence” were denounced, “science could manage without such categories”. With the expulsion of a priori speculation, subjective accounts, and humanistic thinking, concepts themselves were effectively killed off by positivism: “Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics behind”. Of course, the appearance of positivism was made possible by an accelerated a new form of production relations. “The deductive form of science mirrors hierarchy and compulsion … The entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor”.

The arrow to which thought advances in this philosophy of history has the following characteristics. Thought becomes more calculating to help it exert more control over the world: “For Enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion”. Thought becomes more unifying as to find a higher leverage point to encompass and influence the world. “For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows” (Adorno 3). Thought becomes more utilitarian, reducing the world into what can be of use for it. “Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them”. Thought becomes more abstract such that similarities can be found between more disparate objects, such that a wider variety of objects can be subjected to calculation. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities”. The thinking subject becomes more distant to the objects which he controls to allow for abstraction: “The distance of subject from object, the presupposition of abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by means of the ruled”.

These trends changed our thinking in general, and language in particular, by emphasizing signs over images. Signs are abstract representations which reference objects through meaning, while images are imitative representations which reference objects through their formal likeness. Language began as having both of these characteristics; “in them sign and image coincided. As the hieroglyphs attest, the word originally also had a pictorial function”. But, through a division of labor, science took upon the role of sign while art took upon the role of image. The primacy of the former over the latter in our society merely exposes what we already observed in the move away from mimesis in the mythical era: “Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work” bolstered by abstract thinking. Under the light of the aforementioned direction to which thought advances, it is clear why sign won over image. If, to gain power, thought needs to calculate, unify, utilize, abstract, and distance itself from the object, then it cannot afford to splinter into increasingly specific imitative images. Only by distancing itself from objects and unifying their common elements through the abstraction of signs can it calculate and utilize them effectively.

It is unsurprising then that thought as sign pushed to the abstracted extreme — math and logic — are the epistemic arbiters of positivism. “It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable”. Finally, thought found a tool which any and every phenomenon could be reduced into and calculated by. For the first time, it had a grasp on the entirety of reality.

But this grasp is a suffocating one. “Enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be”. Enlightenment is totalitarian because it gets to choose what counts as valid knowledge. “Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is prejudged. When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long-familiar before any value has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems”. We are forced to interpret the world through math, logic, and data filtered through the existing concepts of the world which positivism alone allows to be discussed. But of course, mathematics has no resources of which to critique and better these concepts. Mathematics may be able to forecast or even increase GDP, but it has no method to criticize having GDP as the primary metric to be optimized. Because positivism does not permit any concepts other than the existing ones through which data is interpreted, math and logic must contend themselves with merely making more efficient the existing systems, “to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle”.

Another issue is that since all of math and logic operates under laws, “thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process,” and the thinking subject becomes a mere vessel, a substratum for such thought. By removing any humanistic element from thinking, positivism also removed any agency in man.

The corollary to this fatalism of man is the determinism of the world under the grasp of positivism, for the same reason that the world seems to operate under similarly immutable laws. “Nature itself is idealized on the model of the new mathematics. In modern terms, it becomes a mathematical manifold”.

The total grasp of mathematics limits thought to only be able to think about the immediate: “mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it”. Through these three ways just discussed — denunciation of new concepts, fatalism of man, and determinism of the world — thought confines the modern man to perpetuating what already exists as if it were inevitable.

This philosophy of history starts with an urge to be liberated from a fear of the unknown through broadening the scope of knowledge. It ends with an, at least perceived, total conquest of this unknown by subjugating all of reality under thought. This reality, however, is completely determined with, as we will soon explore, an equally frightening cause for fear of its own."

(https://johnathanbi.com/book-notes-summaries/the-dialectic-of-enlightenment)