Philosophy of History of the Dialectics of Enlightenment
* Book: Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. [1947] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
URL = https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1103
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"Dialectic of Enlightenment (German: Dialektik der Aufklärung) is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The text, published in 1947, is a revised version of what the authors originally had circulated among friends and colleagues in 1944 under the title of Philosophical Fragments (German: Philosophische Fragmente).
One of the core texts of critical theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment explores the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for what the Frankfurt School considered the failure of the Age of Enlightenment. Together with Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950) and fellow Frankfurt School member Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), it has had a major effect on 20th-century philosophy, sociology, culture, and politics, especially inspiring the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment)
Contents
"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."
(https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1103)
Discussion
The Philosophy of History of the Dialectics of Enlightenment
Jonathan Bi:
"The Dialectic of Enlightenment is worth reading because and not despite the seeming absurdity of its central claim: the history of humanity is one of regress rather than progress. Furthermore, the culprit for this regress is the pride of modernity: our increased ability to control and manipulate the external world. While the conclusions of the text may be too pessimistic and extreme, the main critiques within it of mathematics, science, abstraction and knowledge in general are nonetheless relevant.
This book, notoriously difficult to parse, has no semblance of structure or systematicity. Instead, it presents chunks of different philosophical arguments (the book was originally titled Philosophical Fragments) that are all equidistant from the central thrust of the argument. This form was chosen because of the shared belief that society, as it was, was too dysfunctional, inconsistent, and chaotic for any consistent and structured truth to be presented. This summary is, therefore, an attempt to systematize the theoretical foundations of the Dialectic as found in its first chapter. I will present a philosophy of history as well as three different but compatible ways to interpret it.
The Dialectic’s philosophy of history is split into four distinct eras defined by a progression in thought. The magical era interacts with discrete entities through imitation. The mythical era interacts with elements controlled by gods who reveal their mechanisms in myth. The metaphysical era deals directly with concepts such as being, suffering, and love. Currently, the positivist era interacts with the world through the abstractions of mathematics and logic. This progression is motivated by a fear of the unknown and uncontrollable. As a reflex, we’ve expanded the reach of our knowledge and its ability to predict and control reality by making our thinking more abstract, total, utilitarian, unifying, and calculative. The final progression of this development, mathematics and logic, claim to know or at least be able to know the full extent of reality.
The first interpretation is that this history is circular. Myth is no different from positivism because it is rooted from an urge to explain and control. Positivism is no different from myth because it renders the world fated before the rigid laws of mathematics and rejects the authority of concepts. The second interpretation is that this history is ambivalent. Humanity has progressed in its ability to dominate the external world by an increasing domination of itself. This is the unspoken price of discipline. The very abstractedness which makes our thinking so powerful is also what estranges us from ourselves, society, and nature. The last interpretation is an optimistic one: the potential to actualize true freedom has increased even if our freedom has become increasingly restricted."
(https://johnathanbi.com/book-notes-summaries/the-dialectic-of-enlightenment)
Critical Theory against Auguste Comte
Marcel Stoetzler:
"There is no detailed engagement with Comte but it is clear that the principal point of attack is Comte’s rejection of metaphysics: when the eighteenth-century enlightenment was a combination, or perhaps more often an assemblage, of empiricism and rationalism, Comte aimed to boil it down to strictly positivist empiricism that observes the ‘positively’ givens (in Latin: data) and derives ‘laws’ from them that can be used to predict and adapt to, perchance slightly tweak, whatever reality has in store for us. And that is that.
The metaphysical ideas that had been useful in bringing down feudalism and the old regime – the likes of freedom, individualism, emancipation – need to be abandoned as they are the playthings of troublemakers, irritants that could endanger the consolidation of the post-revolutionary new order. Positivism in Comte’s sense is essentially the scientific basis of governance by experts, while twentieth-century ‘logical positivism’ is its epistemological complement. When Horkheimer and Adorno attack the latter, they see it as continuous with the former. They wanted to be the troublemakers…
The attack on metaphysics was a central theme of German philosophy in the 1920s, and helped weaken the defences against fascism across the political spectrum. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the cult of facts and probabilities has flushed out conceptual thinking, and as humans generally have a need to explain to themselves conceptually why they should be bothered to do anything, or resist doing something that society expects them to do, the denunciation and elimination of concepts as ‘metaphysical’ promotes a passive and fatalistic going-with-the-flow. The ‘blocking of the theoretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion’, which in the context meant fascism.
Again, many contemporaries were happy back then to argue for the reconstruction of some kind of metaphysical system – theological, neo-Platonic, neo-Aristotelian or whatever else. They had a relatively easy task of this in the context of WWII as such philosophical or theological systems are something one can hold on to: they can help one to weather the brute modernizing nihilism of the fascist barbarians, and after their defeat provide a handy identity narrative.
The easy option of a return to traditional metaphysics was not open, though, to the Frankfurt School theorists who saw themselves within the tradition of the radical strand of the Enlightenment. Their main thrust was to attack its domesticated version, the ‘positivism’ that puts itself and its expertise at the service of domination. Far from writing against the Enlightenment, they wanted to restore it to its complex form that contained traces of the transcendental that Comte – quite correctly – saw as trouble. They wanted to be the troublemakers whom Comte thought he had exorcised from the Enlightenment."