[FRA:] Dialectic of Enlightenment rehashed

[Ralph Dumain]

Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment
by Alfredo Lucero-Montano
2006
http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_126.html

This effort at popularizing DofE highlights once 
again its fatal demerits.  Noteworthy is the 
self-enclosed metaphysical reasoning, the 
complete lack of empirical referents for these metaphysical assertions.

>What does this radicalization of the critique of 
>Enlightenment mean? The authors of the DE 
>extended and radicalized Luckacs' concept of 
>reification and, with it, Weber's concept of 
>rationalization, beyond the mode of capitalist 
>production, to the whole history of Western 
>civilization. The radicalization that the 
>critique of Enlightenment experiences here is 
>paradoxical: the criticism turns so radical that 
>it undermines its own basis, its own condition 
>of possibility. In fact, if the history of 
>Western rationality is at the same time a 
>process of collapse and returning to myth, then 
>the ideology critique loses its utopian 
>dimension: 'the rational potential of bourgeois 
>culture,' [10] with which it faced up to reality 
>and criticized it, demands and makes possible 
>its realization. This radical critique, then, 
>excluded the possibility to enlighten the 
>Enlightenment about itself, that is, the possibility to realize it as such.

The problem, however, is that this 'history of 
western rationality' is itself only a 
metaphysical construct, so naturally DofE would be self-undermining.

>In fact, the process of demythologization, which 
>is suspended between myth and Enlightenment, 
>leads man a confusion between nature and 
>culture, where the external world is 
>differentiated into the objective world of 
>entities and the social world of norms, and they 
>both stand in contrast to the subject's internal 
>world of experience. This is the place where the 
>procedure of ideology critique can be examined. 
>When contexts of meaning and reality, that is, 
>when internal and external relationships have 
>been unmixed and differentiated only then can 
>the suspicion of ideology arises. The process of 
>Enlightenment shows that the autonomy of 
>validity claimed by a theory, when it follows 
>its specific logic and is cleansed of all 
>mythological dross, is an illusion because 
>secret interests and power are hidden.
>
>Horkheimer and Adorno's critique, which is 
>inspired by such suspicion, becomes ideology 
>critique when it attempts to show that the 
>validity of a theory has not been adequately 
>dissociated from the context in which it emerged 
>(reality) and the context of justification 
>(meaning). Precisely, the ideology critique 
>wants to show that these internal and external 
>relationships are confused and that they are 
>confused because validity claims are determined by relationships of power.
>
>Enlightenment, through this critique, becomes 
>reflective and it is performed to its own 
>products. But when ideology critique 'itself' 
>comes under suspicion, then, the doubt reaches 
>out to include reason. Habermas claims that the 
>DE takes precisely this step: 'So what 
>enlightenment has perpetrated on myth, they 
>apply to the process of enlightenment as a 
>whole. Inasmuch as it turns against reason as 
>the foundation of its own validity, critique 
>becomes total.' 
>[<http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_126.html#footnote>11] 
>Thus, the radicalization of ideology critique 
>does not have anything in reserve to which it 
>might appeal. Did the paradox with which 
>Horkheimer and Adorno confronted themselves leave no way out?

These unfortunate accusations of secret interests 
and relations of power are not accompanied by 
specification of what they are and why they 
exist.  The pretense to "reason" that reached its 
height in the French Enlightenment culminating in 
the French Revolution, demands some specific 
criticism of the whats and whys of the repression 
of awareness of unreason.  Of course, once you 
imprison yourself in metaphysical reasoning 
without empirical referents, there is no way out.

>Something was wrong in the initial plan, 
>something happened between the project and what 
>has really taken place. What went wrong? It 
>seems that our time lost the path of its horizon 
>of meaning. Western rationality is dying of 
>success, but it is already finding itself in 
>rigor mortis. Western rationality is construing 
>the cage for a new servitude. What resumes 
>modern rationality is its 'reification' which is 
>the virus incubated in its first moments.

This is just silly stuff, and rather obsolete in 
the 21st century.  In the 1940s-60s there was 
some excuse for this way of thinking, but it's as 
dead as the reality it addressed.


>The consequences of this split are of two types: 
>[<http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_126.html#footnote>14] 
>a) When each particular rationality separates 
>from the common horizon which pretends to give a 
>total meaning to action, the outcome is a 
>deficit of rationality. Despite the 
>extraordinary developing of science, it advances 
>without direction. Science investigates by 
>investigating, it does not know why it 
>investigates, and it is indifferent to the 
>meaning of its own research. Finally, nothing 
>prevents science that even man would be the 
>object of its research, that is, to subject the 
>whole man to a process of objectification. b) 
>Concomitantly, the outcome is also an excess of 
>rationality. Without a common horizon that 
>regulates the limits of each specific logic, 
>each particular rationality would have a 
>tendency to colonize the rest. Science ­ the 
>analogy of the rationality of choice ­ binds all 
>the spheres of knowledge to conform to its particular methodology.
>
>In sum, the enlightened reason had disenchanted 
>the world by throwing off the myths and the 
>gods, but now they are rising from their graves 
>and coming back. They are coming back because 
>man subjectively needs them to set the ends and 
>values that instrumental reason cannot objectively define.

Platitudes.

Perhaps the assembly line production of grad students should be halted.