My remarks today are oriented around reading the first chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Concept of Enlightenment."
As with the introduction, the opening of the chapter resonates with Rousseau in it's articulation of a paradox: the aim of Enlightenment is the elimination of fear and the establishment of sovereignty (men's sovereignty). Enlightenment overcomes superstition and nature becomes disenchanted. And yet "the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant" (3). Why? This is the puzzle of the chapter.
The version of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno investigate comes from Francis Bacon. For them, he is exemplary of the scientific attitude that replaces enchanted nature with usable nature, a nature that men can dominate (along with dominating other men). Man's knowledge is the ground of his power and power is associated with technology: "Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, by the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of other's work, and capital" (4). Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this kind of technological or instrumental thinking is "ultimately self-destructive": it eliminates "any trace of its own self-consciousness." Mystery and the "wish to reveal mystery" are extinguished.
It's worth pointing out that this is an odd claim. One need but recall the Freemasons who brought together both instrumental reason and cultic mode of association based in ritual and mystery. But this is not their concern. Rather, they are occupied with the separating out of science from philosophy, the emergence of a science that doesn't inquire into meaning but substitutes "formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive" (5). "For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect" (6).
Now even though they associate the scientific attitude with "bourgeois economy in the factory" and with "the exploitation of other's work and capital," Horkheimer and Adorno project the separation of science from philosophy, that is, the process of the disenchantment of the world, much further back, back to Greeks and the replacement of animism by logos. Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics absorbed mythic versions of primal matter, just as the myths had absorbed "the primal matter of nature" into personified deities. Enlightenment continues the process, conceiving Greek thought, too, as superstitious in its association of truth with universals.
What's the problem with universals or why does Enlightenment think that universals are just forms of superstition? Horkheimer and Adorno explain that Enlightenment sees "in the authority of universal concepts" "discernible fear of the demonic spirits which men sought to portray in magic rituals, hoping thus to influence nature" (6). Universals are, from the perspective of Enlightenment reason, illusory. Universals try to bring matter under concepts. Enlightenment, though, approaches mastery over matter differently. Mastery involves measurement and use, calculability and commensurability.
The path of disenchantment, or the process of Enlightenment, proceeds via confrontations with myth, encounters with resistance. As each resistance is overcome, Enlightenment gets stronger. Its ideal, then, is the unity of thought, the great unitary system that makes everything numerable, calculable.
Weirdly, or dialectically, Enlightenment depends on and even produces the myth that it is always overcoming. This makes it totalitarian insofar as even that which is ostensibly opposed to it reproduces and strengthens it. For example, myths were narrated, recorded, and collected. This means that they are also accounts that present, confirm, and explain -- tendencies that drive Enlightenment. Rituals, too, are activities that try to influence events in the world. These instrumental dimensions continue and intensify as Greek thought divides logos from the "mass of all things and creatures." In this dividing, "the world becomes subject to man" (8).
Horkheimer and Adorno write:
Myth turns into enlightenment and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator toward men, He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them (9).
The world becomes just a bunch of things for men to use, for men to have power over, "the unity of nature" rather than a wondrous world in all its mystery, diversity, and unknownness. But notice who is doing the making here: the man of science. We don't see any kind of craftsmen or farmers or people who work with their hands who might have another relation to the things that they make. This is not accidental: correlative to the unity of nature is a certain kind of self-identity, the unified self of abstract identity. So nature as a mass of all things and creatures corresponds to a particular sort of abstract self. It's like: rabbits are the same no matter who is engaging with them.
Of course, this is different from the perspective of magic. The magician is one with a special power to alter nature: he can pull rabbits out of hats, turning an empty space into a space that can spontaneously manifest life, and this with just a few magic words. We can contrast this with the laboratory: rabbits are just elements in experiments that any scientist can reproduce. Neither the rabbit nor the scientist is unique.
So myth goes over into Enlightenment. It has already elements of Enlightenment within it. And the reverse holds, Enlightenment itself becomes engulfed in myth. Horkheimer and Adorno develop this idea in a discussion of the principle of immanence, "the explanation of every event as a repetition" (12). As I understand it, what they are saying is that instead of their being the space for something new, whether that something is miraculous or accidental or a product of human agency, the principle of immanence sees events always as products of causes, causes that can be understood in terms of uniform laws and tendencies that are knowable and predictable. For them, this reproduces the basic structure of myth in so far as in myth what happens to the hero is a matter of fate and, in fact, as the myth will show, he deserves his fate; he will commit some sort of act for which retribution is justified. Hubris, for example, leads the hero to step outside his place, think himself a god, and create his own doom -- as an oracle no doubt warned him. The structure of myth precludes something new, something outside its structure. And the same is true for Enlightenment: "all possible discoveries can be construed in advance. and all men are decided on adaptation as the means to self-preservation" (12).
There is a political dimension to this claim. Prior to Enlightenment (they don't say when), there was "unmediated lordship and mastery," that is, the injustice of inequality. With Enlightenment this injustice is both dissolved and preserved in the form of the excision of the incommensurable. Horkheimer and Adorno write:
"Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought to actual conformity. The blessing that the market does not enquire after one's birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of the commodities that can be bought in the market. Men are given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other" (12 -13).
So it's not just that bourgeois law says all citizens are equal. And it's not just that, say, population models treat each person as an interchangeable composite of demographic characteristics. It's that in a society characterized by commodity production individuality itself resembles the commodity form. The uniqueness of each is a characteristic of all. Everyone is an individual so individuality is a characteristic of everyone. It's what they have in common. The Enlightenment subject is the abstract individual.
For Horkheimer and Adorno abstraction exerts a "leveling domination." It makes everything in nature repeatable. And via industry it ordains repetition. As the social level, this manifests in collectivity, a herd or horde that negates the actual individual. Their example is the Hitler Youth as a triumph of repressive equality. So we can see how Enlightenment is totalitarian -- it results in a form of abstraction that manifests in the repetition of the same.
The gap between subject and object is not simply conceptual. It has a material basis in actual domination, expressing "the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free" (14), that is, those who have others working for them, looking after them, securing their basic needs, in other words, an upper class. They learn ideas of "order and subordination in the subjection of the world" (14). Their thought reproduces this order as it equates truth with fixed distinctions and regulative order and dismisses magic, mimesis, the image, and knowledge of the object.
In contrast, for people at earlier stages, "primitives," the world is quite different. There isn't such a strong division between subject and object. The "Natural" is intricate. It brings with it the element of surprise; the transcendent is the unknown, "whatever in things is more than their previously known reality" (15). The basic concept here is mana as the name for this primary undifferentiated unknown. This unknown is viewed as sacred. Now Enlightenment thought says that primitives projected their terror of the unknown onto things out of fear. Horkheimer and Adorno say this isn't a projection at all "but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men" (15). They write:
"When the tree is no longer approached merely as tree, but as evidence for an Other, as the location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at one and the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical." (15)
The concept or name of a thing is thus separate from the thing; there is a difference between concept and object such that the concept is not the object -- they are separate. This simultaneity of identity and non-identity is dialectical thought and it's present in Homeric myth as well as modern science. But it is impotent, Horkheimer and Adorno say, because it preserves the fear that it attempts to overcome. Man thinks that knowledge will make him free from fear. Everything has to be known, brought inside, because "outsideness is the very source of fear" (16). In myth, there is the balance of life and death, fortune and misfortune, fate and retribution, the closure of the cycle of nature. In Enlightenment there is a similar principle of equivalence that effects a similar closure -- "equivalence itself has become a fetish" (17).
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