January 15, 2005
A comment on Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment by Jeffrey Herf, from his Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. It puts a finger on a notable silence in early Critical Theory. Herf says:
"Let us recall its first sentence: 'The fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant.'
Adorno and Horkheimer went on to argue that implicit in the beginnings of the Enlightenment, in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, was the synthesis of reason, domination, and myth that was revealed in all its truth in de Sade's orgies and Nietzsche's aphorisms, and then put into practice in Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the Enlightenment's truth: reason as total domination.
What is striking in rereading this now-classic work is how little, if any, space is allotted to the Enlightenment as a contributor to the liberal political tradition---political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state---and how much the book focuses on scientific reason undermining universal normative claims to the good life.
The book is also striking in how little it has to say about the fate of the Enlightenment in Germany, discussing it instead as if it were a uniform development throughout Europe and America. Its authors' clear intention was to suggest that Auschwitz presented the possible fate of the modern world as a whole. Modernity in general, not only German modernity, combined myth and reason. Enchantment and disenchantment exist side by side. Auschwitz, not the proletariat, is the specter that haunts the modern world."(London: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Herf comments that it was not the "fully enlightened world" that radiated disaster. Hitler's Germany was never more than partly and woefully inadequately enlightened. Auschwitz remains a monument to the deficit and not the excess of reason in Hitler's Reich.
That absence of the political and the liberal political tradition--political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state---in this text has always puzzled me too. In fact there is a suprising silence about that political dimension in the early Critical Theorists.
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Could it have something to do with the pan-Atlantic authority of Heidegger mid-century and the influence of German phenomenology upon the development of modernist criticism?