1. Dialectics of the Enlightenment

2. Lecture Aims
NOT a detailed survey of Dialectic of Enlightenment as an individual text.
Instead- aims to help you think about the issues raised, both philosophically and historically.
-help you get to grips with the history of intellectual culture.

3. Structure What is the enlightenment?
Brief historical context of the Frankfurt school, and in particular Horkheimer and Adorno, (and Jurgen Habermas)
Dialectic of Enlightenment- some key issues
Are they right?
How we should think about intellectual culture, and some questions about the enlightenment today.

4. Ideas associated with Enlightenment I
Individual reason / skepticism
Nature’s laws / empiricism
The public good, public interest/ private interests, private vices
Religious tolerance, deism/ attack on religious orders
Progress: scientific, historical, social/barbarism and the past
Dis-enchantment of the universe, superstition, enthusiasm, romance/instrumentalisation of both social and object relations
The modern/ the past

5. Thinking about the Enlightenment II
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.”
Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment,’ 1784.

6. What do you think? What is/was the Enlightenment?
A single thing vs multiple things – what makes it a single thing?
Intellectual, social, cultural, political?
Something they explicitly share; that they implicitly share; that provides an underlying coherence to the multiple dimensions of their difference?
Anno 1790: religion, political power, science, the natural and rational
A weltanschauung? An ideology? A Discourse?
When was the enlightenment invented? Late 19th C – crystalized in Cassirer; but then attack from left and by liberals – eg Berlin

7. What is ‘Enlightenment’ for Horkheimer and Adorno?
“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.” (Dialectic of Enlightenment)
it goes on:
‘Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant’

8. Seminar Questions
What was the Frankfurt School's critique of the Enlightenment?
Why, in the view of Adorno and Horkheimer, was the Enlightenment dialectical?
Do you agree with them?
Is the modern notion of reason itself subject to a 'kind of disease'? Of hybris? Of ‘dis-ease’? What kind of mistake does it make?

9. Max Horkheimer
Theodor W. Adorno

10. Max Horkheimer His family were Orthodox Jews.
When Hitler was named Chancellor (1933), his Institute for Social Research, formerly based at Frankfurt, was forced to close due to its political stance.
In 1934 the Institute was relocated to Colombia University (US), and Horkheimer remained director until 1953.

11. Theodor W. Adorno
Not a member of Horkheimer’s institute in Frankfurt, but published through its journal (on music).
Expelled from academia then Germany by the Nazi’s in 1932/3 due to his Jewish heritage.
Highly critical of what he terms “the culture industry”

12. What were the Frankfurt school responding to, through the 1930s and 40s?
Failure of Marxian revolution AND
Collapse of liberal democracy as a viable option in many European states
Uncertainties associated with the rise of Russia and Stalinism
Why had the leading nation in Western Europe (Germany), despite the rise of the power of the State (a good thing), technological and material advancement, etc., turned to Fascism rather than experiencing a workers revolution?
The School had two main aims:
To explain domination and its persistence.
To influence the future and the transition towards a more rational, free society.

13. And how did they think about it?
Dialectics: interaction and binary opposition.
Hegel’s view that history itself is about the resolution of the intellectual contradictions inherent in oppositional forces – through a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis
Each resolution retains in some form the moments of the contradiction that it overcomes.
Marx turns this upside down, saying its about social/material opposition.
Frankfurt school applies this oppositional reasoning to pretty much everything it touches – the labour of the negative – making the absent present .
In 1930s and 40s saw the only two political alternatives as a totalitarianism of the right vs a liberating collectivism of the left – liberalism seen as aligned with fascism in its stress on the individual, property rights, and dominance of the middle class – that it takes liberalism to its logical conclusions.

14. Frankfurt School
Intensely philosophical and what we would now call inter-disciplinary, drawing on a wide range of previous and contemporary thinkers (Marx, Weber, Freud, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche).
Focusing on their own projects- certainly not always acting as a collective.
Initial studies in the USA on the authoritarian personality

15. Associates
Associates and other members include: Herbert Marcuse, Dialectics of Liberation, Eros and Civilisation, One Dimensional Man;
Erich Fromm, Fear of Freedom; Man for Himself

16. Leo Lowenthal, Literature, Popular Culture, and Society; Literature and Mass Culture

17. And – also linked Walter Benjamin, One Way Street,
And, Bertholt Brecht,
Mother Courage,
Caucasian Chalk Circle,
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

18. Dialectic of Enlightenment- summary
Part One: Man, through Enlightenment, became the master of the universe (from sunk in nature, to master over it) but paid the price of estrangement from the objects (nature) that he now lorded over – seeing nature as wholly instrumental to human purposes it has no way of understanding or realizing human nature
Part Two: The myth of Enlightenment logic, the knowledge that gave birth to the subject as a powerful orderer, also estranged man from himself
Part Three: Once the Enlightenment is shown to be a dialectic of Myth/Power that obliterates all diversity vis-à-vis non-contradiction and the principle of identity, its terrific grip can be challenged (maybe!)

19. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)- domination
Ambivalence regarding the foundation of social domination.
Previously predicted (by Marx among others) end of domination when the state took control of the economy due to economic crisis, then became the site for political struggle, and is then overthrown by the proletariat - in Germany it didn’t happen- instead we got totalitarianism.
“What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and other human beings”
So what is the alternative?

20. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)- myth
Myth is what the enlightenment contests. It receives all its matter from myths, in order to destroy them….it wishes to extricate itself from the process of fate and retribution… Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for their increase in power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment acts towards things as a dictator toward men. He knows then (only) in so far as he can manipulate them – or make them
Belief in human perfectibility and progress is naïve and dangerous
‘Pure reason became unreason’

21. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)- culture industry
Note the target is the “culture industry” expressed through “mass culture”
ie: Subject to the interests of money and power.
‘…doing and getting have become identical in this society. The mechanisms which govern man in his leisure time are absolutely the same as those which govern him when he works. I would go as far as to say that still today the key for the understanding of the behaviour patterns in the sphere of consumption is the situation of man in industry, his schedule in the factory, the organisation of office and working place…eating, drinking, looking, loving, sleeping become ‘consumption’, for consumption already means that man has become a machine outside as well as inside of the workshop.’
Turns people into passive and subordinated subjects, unable to fully take critical responsibility for their own action or to act expressively in collective forms.
Lowenthal: ‘Mass culture is a total conspiracy against love as well as sex.’

22. So what is the Dialectic of Enlightenment actually responding to?
Not enlightenment itself (if there is such a thing). Nor ‘The Enlightenment’ (period) which you’ve studied on this module. Though in both cases it raises several problems which are worth considering.
But it is responding to the consequences of the “philosophy of enlightenment” in the society of the early-mid 20th century, and to the idea that western philosophy and science have mastered the natural world
Does see the 19th C as an expression in its most powerful form of certain aspects of enlightenment thinking – instrumentalising of rationality, and the ‘creation of equivalence.’

23. Dialectic of the Enlightenment
Enlightenment dissolves the injustice of the old inequality – unmediated lordship and mastery – but at the same time perpetuates it in the relation of any one existent to any other…it excises the incommensurable. Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought into actual conformity – Men are 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…Abstraction, the tool of the enlightenment, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them. Pp

24. ‘Progress has a tendency to destroy the very ideas it is supposed to realise and unfold. Endangered by the process of technical civilisation is the ability of independent thinking itself. Reason today seems to suffer from a kind of disease. This is true in the life of the individual as well as of society. The individual pays for the tremendous achievements of modern industry, for his increased technical skill and access to goods and services, with a deepening impotence against the concentrated power of the society which he is supposed to control’.
Freedom as self-discovery and self-expression through labour, becomes subordination to a legal-rational bureaucratic system of domination
Repressive tolerance (Marcuse)
Fear of Freedom (Fromm)

25. ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ (Georg Lukács)
Description of where the Frankfurt school leads intellectual thought..
"a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered."

26. Are they right?
How would we decide? Paradox of reflection on subordination in subordination. Marcuse problem of alienation
Authoritarian personality studies and conservatism of the working class
Increasing conservatism of critical theory – and splits
Critical theory and its methods – historicist, situated, but critical
Habermas – instrumental vs cognitive rationality and the emergence of the public sphere.
New generation of Critical Theorists – eg Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

27. Max Horheimer and Theodor W
Max Horheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote in May 1944 in the Introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment
“The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenomenon for investigation: the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. ...The fallen nature of modern man cannot be separated from social progress. On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights. Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which he serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before. ...

28. ……
“...In an unjust state of life, the impotence and pliability of the masses grow with the quantitative increase in commodities allowed them. The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standards of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its true concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind.
The point is …that the Enlightenment must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed” (Horkhiemer and Adorno, 1986/44, p.xiii-xv)

29. Return of philosophy to practice
Adorno 1955:
Intelligence is a moral category. The separation of feeling from understanding, which makes it possible for the moron to speak freely and blissfully, hypostatizes the historically created separation of men according to function. (Philosophy must therefore return to its original intention: ) ‘the teaching of the correct life.’
hypostatize/hypostasize = to treat an abstract concept or distinction as if it is a reality

30. Thinking about the Enlightenment II
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.
Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me.”
Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment,’ 1784.

31. Issues to ponder
Technology- does our communication technology now allow a broader and more interactive public sphere than the radio which Horkheimer/Adorno thought was used to manipulate people into passivity? [i.e. “mass culture” or “culture industry”]
Is rationality the core modern myth?
Does culture entertain, liberate, or teach conformity
Phil Badger:
The postmodernist charge, originating in Nietzsche’s critique of Kant, was that the Enlightenment’s criticism of all assumptions was unfinished and self-excepting. For Nietzsche, and later, his postmodernist disciples, the failure of the Enlightenment was a failure of philosophical courage. Once it had undermined the pretensions of earlier dogmatic beliefs, the field should have been open for a liberation of thought and morality from the notion of certainty itself. However, philosophers such as Kant failed to go the extra mile, instead constructing systems which would replace old repressive certainties with new ones, this time sanctified by reason rather than faith or the authority of the ancients. In time, these new systems of thought themselves became ossified myths (in postmodernist terms, ‘metanarratives’) acting to restrict the capacities of human beings to define their own identities and realities.