Enlightenment and Repression: A Comparison of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (original) (raw)
Related papers
Horkheimer and Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Available at SSRN 2008943, 2012
1. Enlightenment bursts into history raising the flag of disenchantment and demythologization. All could and must be submitted in the court of reason, all could and must be arranged according to reason: politics and ethics, aesthetics and science. But something seems to have gone wrong with the initial plan. The proof? The re-enchantment of the world. The myths and the gods, that enlightened reason let for dead and buried, are rising from their graves and coming back. They are coming back because man needs them subjectively to set the ends and values that reason cannot objectively define. Enlightened reason has specialized in wining battles, but it does not know anything about the war. The development of Enlightenment has failed with reason's universal vocation: there is no common reason as a practical horizon for the diversity of human activities. The extraordinary developing and differentiation of the cultural spheres (science and technology, economics and politics, etc.) has exhausted and collapsed a substantive reason.
Marxism 21, 2019
This article proposes a novel reading of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's emblematic book Dialectic of Enlightenment(1947). Horkheimer and Adorno took as their starting point the observation that modern liberal, human and social progress has tipped over into a new form of barbarism but explicitly refused to develop it into a rejection of the enlightenment and its values as such. Instead, the dialectical view seeks even in the darkest moment of the failure of civilization, which is here epitomized in the Holocaust, reasons to defend a self-reflective, more enlightened form of human civilization. The dialectical theory does not reject but rearticulates the idea of progress that remains central to most forms of liberal and socialist theory. One of the central questions is, under what conditions do the instruments of enlightenment and civilization, including scientific and technological rationality, social organisation and general productivity, serve either emancipation or barbarism. Warding off the positivistic attack on any form of metaphysics and utopian thinking, Horkheimer and Adorno emphasised the need for enlightenment to be based on non-empiricist, reality-transcending, critical thinking in order to be in the service of emancipation rather than domination. The human mind atrophies when deprived of its freedom of movement. The more abstract, philosophical argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment is developed through several more historically specific materials, one of which is the interpretation of modern antisemitism. Horkheimer and Adorno combine in this context a Marxist analysis of aspects of continuity between liberal and fascist governance, based on the concepts of the commodity-form and the wage-form of modern social relations, with an
Theodor Adorno’s Concept of Enlightenment
In this short paper, I will attempt to elucidate Adorno’s understanding and employment of the concept of ‘enlightenment’ in his analysis of modern capitalist society as it is laid out in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972). To do this I will focus on what I have come to recognize are some key points of his argument, which are the following: 1) his treatment of the two distinct terms, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘enlightenment’; 2) his contrast between mythology and enlightenment; and 3) his critique of the primary aim of the enlightenment. As well, I will briefly discuss what Adorno does for Marxism within this context, i.e., what was lacking in Marxist theory that Adorno’s discussion of enlightenment sought to address. Over this last point I will use Georg Lukács specifically as an interlocutor, since we have recently considered his work.
The Critique of the Enlightenment
A Companion to Adorno, 2020
This chapter examines the traditional understanding of Horkheimer and Adorno's dialectic of enlightenment (exemplified by Jürgen Habermas and others), arguing that the traditional reading – with its stress on instrumental rationalization and a regressive or self‐destructive history – misses Horkheimer and Adorno's deepest aspirations, which are to offer an argument against a particular conceptualization of human agency (as apperceptive). Stressing instead, that Kant is the central interlocutor, the chapter shows how understanding this Kantian inheritance allows us to bring into focus the radical nature of Horkheimer and Adorno's argument: that it is meant to bring into focus the problematic nature of conceiving human agency as dependent on apperception. In presenting this problem, the chapter shows how the ontogenetic origin of self‐consciousness becomes a crucial issue, and the thought of Sigmund Freud is marshaled both to make this clear and to show how Horkheimer and Adorno's account can benefit from making explicit its potential debt to Freud.
Max Horkheimer ve Theodor Adorno'ın aydınlanma dönemi eleştirisi ve felsefe ve metod anlayışları
2006
The strong part of Horkheimer and Adorno’s philosophy is their critique of the Enlightenment. They argue that the consequent of the Enlightenment has been the destruction of the Enlightenment itself. There are two main reasons in the background of this destruction. First of them is the destruction of individual because of the understanding of reason in the Enlightenment. Individuals cannot define their existence beyond the determined roles of society any more. The second reason is the certain distinction between the human beings and nature. The epistemology of the Enlightenment makes nature an object of knowledge and views the world as a summation of facts. This understanding makes subjects passive in providing the objectivity of knowledge. Accordingly, the subject is alienated from his or her knowledge. Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical thinking provides possibility for the human autonomy. It tries to understand human beings and society in a dialectical process. It considers the rel...
2012
Fifty is an awkward age, for books no less than people. While it is not quite time to think of it as inhabiting a different age, there are difficulties in viewing a work of social criticism written in 1947 as a commentary on our world. To reread the Dialectic of Enlightenment is to be tossed between moments of recognition (a world in which people willingly wear clothing that sports the logo of its manufacturer makes the chapter on the "The Culture Industry" look terribly prescient) and of bewilderment (it is hard, at a time when little serious music is found on the radio, to appreciate why Toscanini's broadcasts could move Adorno to such disgust). At fifty, the Dialectic of Enlightenment has become one of those books that can neither be regarded simply as a piece of history nor taken unproblematically as addressing our concerns. Perhaps because so much in the Dialectic of Enlightenment nevertheless remains current, it is worth resisting the temptation to enlist it in current debates in the humanities and social sciences. It might be worthwhile to subject it to the same sort of historical distancing that historians of political thought have urged us to bring to other texts. If there is something to be gained by recognizing that, whatever he was doing, John Locke was not fighting our battles, it might not be too soon to suggest-if only for a moment-that we shouldn't expect Horkheimer and Adorno do our work for us. Separating the Dialectic of Enlightenment from our concerns might allow us to get a better handle on what these two German-Jewish exiles were attempting, half a century ago, when they settled into the hills just outside Hollywood to begin work on this most peculiar of books.