|
May 25, 2010
A central concern in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is how the process of enlightenment in modernity---what Hegel called the leap from darkness into new found clarity--has a dark side. A blog on the Frankfurt School states:
For Kant, Enlightenment liberates us from authority. Those who hold authority—have mystery. The priest has special access to the mystery of religion; it is through him where God comes towards us. The Enlightenment says that human reason is capable of answering all the questions that the previous authority had answers to. When you have a rational claim, you’ve laid a path that someone else can easily follow to the same conclusion. The light of the Enlightenment leads to knowledge in this respect. For Kant, this frees us from authoritarianism; we now understand the light of the world from our own reason.
For Horkheimer and Adorno this process contains the immanent risk of collapsing back into myth, as it embarks on a corrosive process of demythologisation. They argue that in its passion to undermine metaphysics, superstition and myth, a positivist mode of rationality not only represses alternate modes of rationality, it also erects a new mythology of the factual, of the “given”, that, ultimately, devours the critical urge of enlightenment itself.
The big fear of this dominant positivist mode of rationality (a rigid dry formalism in Hegel's terms) is that going beyond the given will entail a lapse back to myth--back to the older forms of metaphysics, theology and magic. A fall back into the darkness or irrationality.
|
