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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Adorno: dialectic of enlightenment « Previous | |Next »
November 23, 2010

In 'Negative Dialectic as Fate Adorno and Hegel' in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno J. M Bernstein says that the:

Dialectic of Enlightenment is the attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of how it was possible that the rational process of enlightenment which was intended to secure freedom from fear and human sovereignty could turn into forms of political, social, and cultural domination in which humans are deprived of their individuality and society is generally emptied of human meaning. Horkheimer and Adorno’s goal is thus to elaborate an account of the conceptual underpinnings of the process of societal rationalization (as originally delineated by Max Weber), a process of which capital class domination and reification (as theorized by Marx) constitute the disastrous apotheosis.

As we know:
Horkheimer and Adorno’s official answer is that instrumental or subjective reasoning, in which items are understood and explained by being subsumed under general theories, is only a part of reason, that part whose job is to enable our coping with and mastering of threatening nature. When this part of reason is taken to be the whole of reason, theoretically and practically, then we end up in the apparently ever-moving but, in reality, static iron cage of modernity.

Bernstein argues, plausibly in view, that the dialectic of Enlightenment is modelled on Hegel's The Enlightenment” chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit-----Horkheimer and Adorno simply extend the basic structure so as to enable it to form the underpinning for societal rationalization generally rather than being the logic of only a certain moment in history.

Bernstein's claim is that:

we understand the dialectic of enlightenment, as taken over from Hegel, as one fundamental expression of the dialectic of desired independence from nature and disavowed dependence: Reason or enlightenment seeks through knowing and labor to master nature and become independent of it without acknowledging its pervasive dependence. The critique of myth is fundamental in this process, as mythic thought represents, however in- adequately, the moment in cognition in which dependence on nature is acknowledged.

In Horkheimer and Adorno’s story, the struggle is between humans and nature, which is why the language of independence (of reason and the concept) and dependence is more appropriate.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:38 PM |