SOCIOLOGICAL THINKERS-2 (SEMESTER-6) ADORNO

CHAPTER 1- THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTMENT

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.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno contest Kant and the positivity of Enlightenment. For Horkheimer and Adorno, there is a continuity of the age of myth within Enlightenment and modernity in general. Modernity fulfils what myth always wanted to. 

Here Horkheimer and Adorno try to account for why the world is the way it is. The irrationality that lies within a non-rational observation leaves us not with a question of truth, but of effect which in and of itself constitutes a new construction of truth. There is a loss of animism in modernity, leaving us with the knowledge that there is no soul or spirit in every object.

Enlightenment started out as a project aimed at disenchantment, trying to free thought from a reliance on mysterious rumours and powers. It featured a growth of cognitive techniques, designed to understand, and thus master nature as a result, which eventually led to things like computation and the pursuit of utility. In turn, these techniques were extended and universalised to produce a universal science and a  universal outlook. As a result, power relations are the key  now to understanding, especially power over nature.

What once characterised God, now characterises men .  What once belonged to myth now features as a theme of science. No opposition to this mode of thought is possible it is simply that the terms now belong to different themes, as it were. All values have been banished. Nature has become a matter of mere objectivity, an object for control. It has been 'disqualified', losing its distinctness, uniqueness or particularity, and thus rendered open to limitless control: objects found in nature are seen as mere examples or specimens, which have significance only if human subjects bestow it upon them.

Science and Enlightenment degenerates into myth.  Enlightenment comes to attack values, ideas, and any emphasis on subjectivity, invoking a principle of 'fatal necessity', irrespective of beliefs.  That includes a belief in Enlightenment, or truth. Thought becomes a matter of developing closed systems, natural laws, which work just like myths. Qualities are dissolved, human beings are brought to order too. The notion of individuality appears and is immediately mediated, in social mechanisms such as markets, to produce a repressive equality: In markets, Men were given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other'. The social collectivities that appear in modern societies have the same effect, 'negating' the individual, and offering 'the parity of the right to injustice'.  Fascism can be seen as one product of this tendency, developing long ago.

Mythical residues remain in modernity, including an irrational belief in positivism and science, as a way of staving off the fear of the unknown outside its framework. Similarly, the subject and the law of equivalence have become fetishized. Formal logic demythologises the world, especially in its insistence that an object is only allowed to be something simple, identical with itself. However, objects are also conceived as being merely examples of something else too. Thinking becomes a mechanical instrumental activity. Any discussion of ultimate purposes is dismissed as meaningless prattle. Thought itself is no confined to immediate purposes, although some irrational residues remain, including the need for a highly limited subjectivity. Cognition is restricted to what is given and the performance of calculations upon these givens: the old role of reason to critically negate what is given immediately to experience is made redundant. 'Factuality wins the day; cognition is restricted to its repetition; and thought becomes mere tautology'.  In accepting these severe limits to itself, science has become no better than myth, with no interest to do anything other than reproduce the given.

Myth pursues much the same themes, but in the form of deception  it absorbs factuality, takes empirical repetitions and lends some symbolic significance to them, pretending that regular repetitions are pre-determined. In the Enlightenment, we are no longer deceived about the mechanisms, but still under the power of factual reality: scientific laws are rendered as every bit as natural or inevitable, this time for scientific reasons. Fatalism was once blind, and is now comprehensible but it is still fatalism. The terrors of the unknown are still dealt with by a severe restriction of the formal framework, and an emphasis on central predictability or repeatability, both banish the whole issue of values, impulse and human life itself, especially its ambiguities.  Such ambiguities are banished by formal logic (instead of dialectical logic) with its insistence on the principle of non-contradiction. The real social mechanisms that produce real contradictions are thus simply misunderstood.

Fear of the unknown can also lead to periodic witch-hunts, regressions to earlier non formal eras. They can lead to a fear of excess and to the enshrinement of the notion of a 'virtuous mean’ as a principle to integrate social life. There is a long legacy which encourages us to combine our pleasures with self- contempt. Human beings are left with unpleasant choices, between subjection to nature or subjection to oneself. Even this choice is guided not by values, but becomes a matter of calculation.

These themes appear in the Odyssey. Following their encounter with the Sirens, Odysseus's crew face two choices. Odysseus told his men to plug their ears and divert themselves in labour a practical solution, but one which involves oppression. Odysseus allowed himself to listen to the Sirens' song, but tied himself to the mast binding himself to his social role as an oppressor, and again choosing to be practical by binding himself to reality, and allowing himself to contemplate the alternative offered by the Sirens only as art. This is also the position of the master in Hegel's master-slave dialectic: the slave mediates between the master and nature, and this is the basis for the development of their mutual obligations. However, both suffer, since the servant remains enslaved, but the master also 'regresses', reverting to a stage even before participation in labour. Apart from thing else, 'Imagination atrophies'.

Thus if civilisation progresses by developing a technical domination of nature, it also regresses in cultural terms, and both thought and experience become impoverished. The 'pliable proletarians' have stopped up their ears, but their master remains equally ‘immobile’.  The limits placed upon thought by this process are not total, however even the pursuit of objectivity implies some critical faculty, while a drive towards universality implies some tension between social and individual needs.  In this way, domination can never be fully immune from attack by human thought 'The rulers themselves do not believe in any objective necessity, even though they sometimes described their concoctions thus'. No one really benefits from sustained economic development and administration even 'the boss in his turn has to tremble at the thought of his own liquidation'. In this way, everyone can see that a system of domination like this must be irrational.

The rational philosophy which began the Enlightenment project can still penetrate this truth about domination even if it has become 'forgotten' as philosophy itself becomes another mechanism of compulsion. Philosophical impulses have been seen largely in instrumental terms. Yet even that limited philosophical insight can perceive the contradiction between subject and object that cannot be resolved by  increasing forms of domination.  There are few illusions about modern society leading to freedom, and the notion of a non-reconciled nature is still alive. Enlightenment thought and thus sought to dominate the world by splitting and compartmentalising it, but this has left the whole 'uncomprehended' and thus uncontrolled -- there is no choice but to label this residue as something that is irrational and unthinkable -- even socialism has problems in trying to abandon this notion and submits its programmes to ‘necessity’ again. 

We  need to revive the original impulse as of the Enlightenment and to break out of these limitations. Nature has been dominated; to that extent, Enlightenment is realised. Knowledge must now aim at ‘the dissolution of domination’. However, against this tendency are all the forces of Enlightenment and its tendencies towards ‘deception’.