Lecture 8: The Dialectic Of Enlightenment (Cont) & Habermas and His Prdecessors

4.           In this perspective, the process of humanity’s separation from nature and the latter’s subordination as a mere object of appropriation signifies both a distortion of human cognitive interests exclusively towards domination and a repression of the natural in man. This is the paradox of the civilisatory process. In this development, the supposed goal— a fully civilised humanity—becomes a mere means and is distorted and brutalised by the instrument—reason—that is supposedly the means of liberation. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the tragic mistake is the identification of the subject with a distorted rational faculty of mere calculation and the dissolution of all phenomena into the quantitative calculus of this faculty. “Identity thinking” reduces everything alien to its own categories and thereby eliminates all otherness and difference. A qualitatively different world is transformed into one homogenous with the categories of reason. The human attempt to preserve itself through increasingly knowledge requires an ascetic suspension of appetites and the elimination of the other, of the non-identical. Latent in this idea of self –preservation is the idea of the subjectivity as a unified ratio. Increasing knowledge is identified with unified rationality in terms of increasing coherence, systematisation and logic. By this means, knowledge becomes autonomous, exclusively identified with a single faculty but increasingly detached from the interests and other needs of the corporeal, natural subject. The result is that the development of civilisation is a history not of liberation but of increasingly domination of self, nature and others.

5.           The first social expression of this inversion of ends and means is the primitive division of labour. The categories of logic arose as ideal expressions of the original social relations of domination. The order and hierarchy of concepts reflect the primitive social hierarchy. These ideal categories serve as instruments of man’s attempt to report, order and explain the surrounding environment in the interests of his own self-preservation. While these categories were only a means, they preserved and exemplified the irrational structure of domination. When thinking is understood as mere self-identification, it is reduced to emptiness and formalism. A specific mode of thought has been reified in just the same way that the bourgeois commodity form expresses the permanent quest for equivalence. All aspects of the external world outside the subject and nature within are reduced to the thinking activity and terms of the subject, which becomes blind to its own particularity and constructed character. It also marginalised the other more reflective dimension of rationality. For abstract rationality, the qualitative uniqueness of each particular phenomenon and situation is rendered imperceptible and inexpressible. Abstract rationality treats every unique historical situation as a repetition of what has already occurred. The single and unique is obliterated by subordination to the lawfulness that allows them to be subsumed by rational thought. This ideal of lawfulness is a perpetuation of the ancient myth of eternal recurrence, which naturalises the present as an eternal order.

6.           The radical meaning of this analysis is revealed in the equation of the whole civilisatory process with the concept of enlightenment. Here the concept of enlightenment is understood not as the antithesis of myth but as a perpetuation of the innermost logic of the latter. On this view, myth is originally nothing but the first version of enlightenment. It is product of the human need to subordinate nature to its own categories of regularity, order and explanation.  Myth is the first instalment a process of evolving enlightenment in which every worldview will have to submit itself to more sophisticated cultural interpretations of rationality. On this reading, myth is a form of enlightenment that cannot withstand its own ongoing enhancement. The program of enlightenment is thus the ongoing destruction of the rational pretensions of all previous forms of social explanation-magic, myth, and religion. However, this program of critical destruction of the past forms of rational explanation is ultimately nihilistic. It eventually annihilates precisely those concepts, on which the Enlightenment had based itself and for which it had struggled. These values--truth, reason, freedom and justice—also eventually succumb to the new more rigorous standards of contemporary scientific analysis. Under critical analysis these values are revealed as illusions, as myths, which can now be demoted to the level of magic. Whereas the enlightenment believed reason to be an anthropological constant and truth “correspondence” to an existing objective structure of the world, contemporary analysis empties out the idea of a “rational faculty” to reveal nothing but a variable cultural construct without substantive content, the product of a contingent and idiosyncratic historical odyssey, whereas “truth” is merely a property of sentences with no direct purchase on the world; freedom and justice are value concepts that have no legitimate place in a scientific worldview. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Each new form of enlightenment destroys its predecessor and discards it as just another myth. However, the most modern variant of enlightenment--scientific positivism-- attempts to exempt itself from the fate of all its predecessors. On its view scientific method is immune from this fate of perpetual self-critique. As the most recent philosophical reading of the method of science positivism bases itself on “facts’ but is unwilling to enquire into the ground or the basis of those facts. In methodologically excluding such questions, it ignores its own historical pre-conditions and eternalises the existing social world as the eternal or natural substratum of all experience. This invests existing social power with the same absolute status that was once claimed by the old metaphysical truths. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the desire to avoid critical examination is symptomatic of the ideological limitation and weakness of positivism. It signifies that this most scientific version of enlightenment has its own metaphysical bias. This denial of self-reflectivity is, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the perpetuation of myth. To absolutise the contemporary version of reason and to equate it with the adoption of quantitative, mathematical procedures is to convert means into ends and to lose sight of a rationality that is anything more than mere calculation.

7.           What is the real purpose of this critique of civilisation as a process of constant critical enlightenments? On one level, this was ideology critique. The authors critique the modern faith in progress and especially its failure to relativise its own claim to rationality. But, on another level, it does not stop at mere ideology critique. Here is the attempt to diagnose what the authors consider to be a new modern form of domination, characterised by new degrees of alienation, depersonalisation and administrative repression. Here the authors offer a crucial departure from the critical theory formulated by Horkheimer in the 1930’s. They depict a society no longer in crisis and no longer generating its own immanent forces of resistance. This society had overcome the threatened economic collapse by political, administrative cultural means. The “totally administered society”, a society where economic, political and cultural power and authority have been fused into a unified system, had been able to expunge all historical subjectivity surplus to the requirements of maintaining profitable, capitalist reproduction. Here again we have the paradoxical inversion of means and ends. Historical subjectivity, supposedly the highest achievement of the process of civilisation, is negated in favour of the functional requirements of the totally administered society.

9.         With the control and manipulation of even the major social bearer of resistance to bourgeois society, with the pacification of the working class through incremental improvements in living standards and a stupefying mass culture, all critical momentum is lost and critique survives only in the exceptional isolated individual who have not surrendered their critical faculties to the illusion of a integrated, rational organization. This gloomy picture of a totally administered society typified by an underlying conformity and absence of social resistance has often led to the authors being accused of cultural aristocratism and pessimism. Certainly Dialectic of Enlightenment does almost invite misinterpretation. While Horkheimer and Adorno censure all philosophy of history, they simultaneously seem to construct one of their own, only theirs’ is in reverse.  Rather than viewing history as a progressive process, they construct a grand narrative of disasters, from “the sling shot to the atom bomb” as Adorno was to characterise it later, with the contemporary victory of an especially sophisticated instrumental rationality and overly refined domination of containment. But this is not the simple inconsistency it might at first appear. At various points, the authors do speak about missed historical opportunities for emancipation. However, these opportunities were bungled and the fully administered society seems devised to kill subjective resistance before it can even emerge. The ambiguity in Horkheimer and Adorno’s position make it hard to divine just where they stand. They consciously employ extreme formulations and striking contradictory images to redouble critical energies and to illuminate what they perceive to be the real truth behind the appearance of progress. Deprived of a concrete social bearer of critique, these authors make a strategic withdrawal to philosophy and even art. Horkheimer withdraws from running the Institute after its return to Germany and becomes more politically conservative.  The later Adorno will resort to a more aesthetic mode of argumentation and relying less on the categories and coherence of philosophical theory, which, according to him, has now become contaminated by instrumental reason and the logic of domination. While the later Adorno as Head of the Institute was heavily engaged in a range of projects, overseeing empirical studies and becoming a major public intellectual, he did not fundamentally re-evaluate his essentially negative view of modernity even while he realised that the liberal democracy being created in Germany was not identical to the other totalitarian forms. 

Habermas (1929- ) and his Predecessors.

1.  Today Habermas is Germany’s most internationally recognised philosopher. He was born with a cleft pallet and this left him with a speech impediment that, on his own account, made him especially sensitive to the predicament of the marginalised and outsider. He was born in Dusseldorf and came from a politically conformist, middle class family; his father was a minor bureaucrat. He grew up in the period of National Socialism and reckoning with this past has also been a decisive determinant of his theoretical and public life. Much of his work has concerned the question of democratisation and the establishment of a liberal democratic society in Germany. After the war he had a typical education in a largely unreconstructed Germany university system at Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn. His first publication was a critique of Heidegger after he republished his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953 without retracting the passage where he spoke of “the inner truth and greatness of the Nazis movement” other than to note that this “greatness” had denoted “the encounter between global technology and modern man”. Up to this point Habermas said he had been living in Heidegger’s philosophy so this insight into Heidegger’s Nazis commitments was a great shock. His critique came to the attention of Adorno who offered a position as his assistant in 1956.

2. So from his earliest work Habermas has always been a very engaged leftist intellectual. He has always been willing to enter public debates in Germany over contemporary political and cultural issues like educational reform in the fifties, the political role of student protest in the sixties, the historians dispute in the eighties and the resurgence of anti-foreign neo-Fascism in the wake of German reunification, the Iraq War and the resulting Euro-American Foreign policy disputes and more recently, the fate of the EU where he has been a major critic of Merkel’s austerity policy in relation to Greece and the other debtor nations. Much of his participation in public discussion was concerned with efforts to ensure the embedding of a post war healthy liberal democratic society and its further democratisation. This stance as an engaged public intellectual is very much in conformity with his understanding of critical theory as a practically motivated cultural self-reflection. He believed that the earlier generation of the Frankfurt School after their return to Germany had retreated too far into a traditional philosophical mode of speculation and detached themselves from a practical engagement with the contradictions of post-war German society. Ironically, he was promoted to Horkheimer's chair at Frankfurt in the early sixties despite the fact that Horkheimer has considered him too radical. From this time, he became the most prominent of the second generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. Towards the end of the sixties at the height of the Student Movement he moved from the University of Frankfurt to head the Max Planck Research Institute at Starnberg before returning to Frankfurt in the early eighties as the Professor of Sociology and Philosophy. He remained there until retirement in the mid 90’s but has continued to write and teach in the United States. Amongst his many awards, in 2004 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for his lifetime contribution to scholarship and public debate.

3. Habermas’ version of critical theory emerges from a careful critique of what he takes to be the shortcomings of his theoretical predecessors. But most characteristic of his thinking is the effort to preserve what he thinks is valuable in the tradition from which he emerged and a boundless capacity to reach beyond it to other sources/traditions for theoretical inspiration. We can see clear examples of both of these tendencies when we consider the fundamental theoretical resources that go into his critical theory. In this respect I will briefly look at his critique of Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno and his appropriation of the public sphere from the liberal democratic tradition.

4. Habermas’ critique of Marx permeates the early and middle phase of his work from Theory and Praxis (1963), Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1976) (in English) Communication and the Evolution of Society and Theory of Communicative Interaction Vol 1(1981). Habermas critiques the Marxian understanding of history and its underlying paradigm of work. As we have seen, Marx had conceived history as an emancipatory process of human self-constitution through labour. Social labour acts as a constant revolutionising force enhancing productive forces and creating an accumulating reservoir of new capacities, needs, skills and aspirations; it therefore functions as the decisive learning process whereby human subjects simultaneously renew and transform their material conditions in such a way as to open up ever-new possibilities. Work served Marx as a model for conceiving the self-constitution of the species and as the fundamental dimension in which human progress accrues.

5. Habermas raises a whole range of empirical objections to Marx's optimistic historical scenario. Chief amongst these are flaws in his account the dynamics of 19th century capitalism. Marx views the laws of motion of capitalist society as a closed system in which the superstructures were always dependent upon the immanent movement of the economy. But this inherent tendency was eventually nullified by the political struggle of the workers and the increasing intervention of the state. In the 20th century the balance turned from economics to politics. At the same time, science begins to play the role of the leading productive force. The development of large-scale industry that welds together research, science and technology into an interlocking system rendered inoperative the conditions, which had underpinned the Marxian labour theory of value. Science and research become an independent source of value overshadowing the labour power of the immediate producers. The spectacular explosion in the productivity of labour allowed capital to accommodate rising wages and increase the rate of surplus value. As a result, they were able to both ward of political challenge and decreasing profitability. Furthermore, Marx had believed that the advanced industrial organization of workers would bring about an aggressive form of class consciousness. However, massive structural changes also brought with it persuasive disqualification and deskilling. Higher living standards were offset by workers polarisation and the expected evolution of the working class as a unified conscious, historical subject never eventuated.

6. Habermas also points to basic theoretical problems in Marx's emancipatory account of history. Marx had simply equated the development of the productive forces with the workers cause of social emancipation. Habermas argued that this simple identification involved a confusion of two historical dialectics or rationalising processes, each of which had its own tempo, trajectory and logic. The first was the rationalisation of purposive-rational action. This concerned all those learning processes concerned with the growing mastery of nature and instrumental control. These need to be distinguished from another form of rationalisation at the level of communicative interaction. Habermas views this later form of rationalisation as another form of learning process that takes place on the level of social interaction, consensual regulation and moral insight. Rationalisation in the domain of communication removes restrictions on self-reflection and domination free communication and enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Marx's mistake had been to identify the progress in this domain most clearly manifest in the revolutionary bourgeois political institutions with the expansion of the productive forces.