Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present) By Max Horkheimer

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Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

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Horkheimer and Adorno cite the Latin adage, "If you add like to unlike you will always end up with unlike." This sentiment finds its modern articulation in the expression, “You can’t add apples and oranges.” All arithmetical operations rely on a concept of equivalence to enforce the identity of units that makes meaningful sums possible. While equivalence poses as an empirical, value-neutral characteristic of objects, Horkheimer and Adorno show us that postulated equivalence is in fact ideological.I will provide my own example. In order to sum her columns, an accountant must assume all dollars she adds are equivalent, regardless of their origin and use. The dollar of a beggar buying bread is equivalent to the dollar of a billionaire buying another mansion. Qualities like justice and virtue attaching to individual uses of individual dollars must be ignored in order to permit meaningful sums to be made. In order to create the universe of bourgeois calculation, Horkheimer and Adorno explain, “All gods and qualities must be destroyed.”Hume famously demanded that all books containing no mathematical reasoning and experimental data be burned. This exemplifies Horkheimer and Adorno's claim that "For the enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion."“The one,” of course, is money.If you ask an accountant how she can add dollars with unlike origin and purpose, she will laugh. I know this from personal experience. For her the question is meaningless. Knowledge for the enlightenment is defined by utility. Utility, in turn, is defined by serviceability to power. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, "Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters." The fact that the worldly masters lack qualities like benevolence and justice, which philosophers have known at least since Plato, has been forgotten by the Enlightenment. When Bacon talks about putting knowledge into operation, he doesn't mean putting knowledge in operation in service to the true and the just. He means putting knowledge in operation in service to King James.The so-called rationality of the technological universe has subservience to power as an unquestioned premise. To the bourgeois, the edicts of the ruling class are as palpably real as any scientific fact, perhaps more so. “Power confronts the individual as the universal,” Horkheimer and Adorno explain, “as the reason which informs reality.” The “enlightened” bourgeois has overcome all metaphysical superstitions, including Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality. Whatever reality is actually created by the ruling class is, for the bourgeois, the only reality.The enlightened bourgeois makes no attempt to grasp the thing in itself, to get behind appearances and understand the social, historical and human meaning of things. These forms of metaphysical knowledge have been discarded by the Enlightenment.For Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus’s response to the Sirens is paradigmatic of the strategy Enlightenment uses to prevent forms of knowledge Enlightenment has banished from tempting us to return to them. Odysseus adopts a twofold strategy. For his workers, Odysseus plugs their ears with wax so they can’t hear the Sirens. Analogously, the working class is kept fully employed with mindless occupations and philistine diversions so that transformative literature and art that would inform them of the possibilities of happiness closed off by their servitude to the bourgeoisie remains unknown to them.For Odysseus himself, however, the strategy for dealing with the Siren song is different. Odysseus ties himself to the mast, so he can hear the Sirens, but can’t act in response to their temptations. Analogously, the managerial class allows itself to enjoy literature and art that inform it of the possibilities closed off by bourgeois enlightenment. But it keeps these Siren songs meticulously compartmentalized from real world existence. It never allows art or literature to alter its actual form of life."No one ever acts honestly in the administration of states," says Plato (Republic 496d). Genocide. Slavery. Imperialism. Torture. Nuclear war. The list could go on. The rulers of this world are immoral and corrupt. They act only to enhance their power. They are indifferent to all considerations of morality and humanity.In 1620, Francis Bacon complained that knowledge was too theoretical and abstract. He wanted to put knowledge into operation. But what does that mean? Put knowledge into operation. Who will decide which operations?For centuries, philosophers had known that the rulers of this world are immoral and corrupt. But after the Enlightenment, it becomes impossible to even fathom the idea that the rulers of this world might be immoral and corrupt. Why? Because we are busy putting knowledge into operation, and in order to competently perform the operations we are assigned, we must believe with our whole minds and hearts that these operations are unambiguously good. In order to be irreproachable Baconian philosophers, we are compelled to believe the rulers of this world are good.Bacon never challenges the evidence piling up over the centuries that the rulers of this world are immoral and corrupt. He compels us to repress the fact.To repress a fact we know is true is a clear violation of intellectual conscience. It requires the invention of a modern form of consciousness that is very good at repressing uncomfortable truths.We see the consequences today. Universities have wholeheartedly adopted the Baconian model of science. They are eager to put knowledge into operation in service to the rulers of this world. Thinkers who point out that the rulers of this world are, and always have been, immoral and corrupt, are marginalized and ignored.Engineers build weapons to sell to both sides of armed conflicts. Engineers build weapons capable of annihilating entire cities. Engineers build machines for extracting more fossil fuels from the ground. We are eager to put knowledge into operation, without even bothering to ask whether those operations are moral, wise, or even sane."The wise man," says Aristotle, "must not be ordered but must order." Aristotle never expected the rulers of this world to listen to the orders of wise men. He never expected anyone other than a small number of worthy disciples of philosophy to listen.The Enlightenment turns the wisdom of philosophy on its head. Now wise men and women allow themselves to be ordered. They put their wisdom in service to unwise, immoral, even insane rulers. If we don't reevaluate this decision very soon, the human race will annihilate itself as wise and efficient means are employed for insanely destructive ends.As Paul says, "The rulers of this world are coming to nothing" (1 Cor 2:6). They will take the rest of us with them if we continue to put wisdom in their service.

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