Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, published 1947) is an account of the endogenous failures of modernity as rooted in the core presuppositions of enlightenment rationality. “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.” Not a romantic call for a return to myth then; rather an attempt to diagnose the pathologies of the whole complex arising from this abstract opposition and a dialectical progression rooted in fear and a correlative desire for mastery.
In fact what would need to change is the structure of society itself. This is a philosophical analysis of a series of problems that philosophy cannot solve. It calls for the abolition of the principle of exchange and the division of labor predicated on class antagonism.
They articulate four distinct stages in a speculative history from the earliest stages of recorded humanity to the present. All are organized around fear of the unknown and the attempt to master it. Myth as magic is imitative (unity of the sorcerer and the world); as religion is representative (sacrificial substitution); as metaphysics is discursive (subject-object split). Today enlightenment takes on the form of logical positivism/positivist science/non-speculative scientism.
Domination takes on three forms throughout this progression: over external nature, over our own nature, and over other human beings. Increasing abstraction makes possible only further domination over self and others, and this is predicated on the divlab and the distance of rulers from the ruled, itself based on sedentary fixed private property, contra earlier nomadic social forms.
Enlightenment yields not mastery but increasingly abstract domination and alienation; its late modern fruits are fascism and Stalinism, consumer capitalism, and the culture industry.
Reason reverts to nature as enlightenment reverts to myth: its inability to master itself entails the necessary failure of its attempt to master nature, and vice versa. In fact the problem lies in reason’s effort, precisely, to master nature: the progress of knowledge is only ever possible immediately as regression when it assumes this aim. Knowledge for and as mastery, knowledge as power, immediately kickstarts the dialectical reversals of enlightenment and myth in which both become forms of domination.
The critique of this dialectic of enlightenment is precisely meant to open onto the possibility of the elaboration of a positive concept of enlightenment, as they announce in the preface.
What is enlightenment? Kant once asked. His answer was: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, or tutelage (Unmündigkeit).” It is the ability to use one’s own reason without the guidance of another—the ability to reason autonomously, to use Kant’s terms, to give oneself the law without being externally determined in any way.
But why do people find themselves in a condition of heteronomy, where they need the guidance of others? Kant cannot say that this is due to a lack of reason, because then the definition of enlightenment would not make sense; you must already possess the capacity for reason if we are going to chastise you for failing to use it without the guidance of others. So, he says that what people lack is courage.
Adorno and Horkheimer would agree with certain aspects of this characterization. For them the positive concept of enlightenment would indeed be something like humanity’s becoming free, emancipating itself. But there is no moralizing about any lack of some supposed virtue like courage. The constraints are objective and social. And on their analysis, such emancipation cannot take place through the domination of nature.
That is the strident myth of masculinist enlightenment: Eurocentric, we might add, and imperial. Freedom consists in the domination of another: the human domination of nature, consequently too humanity’s domination by nature, and the domination of human beings by themselves and others.
The logic here is sacrificial: enlightened reason sacrifices another for the sake of its own freedom. But this is precisely the logic of myth. Mythical sacrifice is, in a sense, always an attempt to cheat: an exchange is made, but in which the exchanged items are non-equivalent—at least not to me. I sacrifice a lamb for the sake of saving my child: these are not of identical value, or else I would not gain by their exchange. And yet they must also be equivalent somehow, or else they could not be exchanged. By means of this sacrificial exchange, then, am I getting one over on God?
This is the paradox of surplus-value that Marx unpacks in chapters 4 and 5 of Capital, volume 1: how are profits possible, if everything is bought and sold at its real value, or if market exchanges are exchanges of things of equivalent value? I bring a product to market and sell it for a set price. One of two things is possible: either I sell it for exactly the amount it is worth, and then no surplus-value has been generated and there is no profit. Or else I sell it for more or less than it is worth; but here no surplus-value is generated either, but rather just a redistribution—to my benefit or yours—of the total value that already existed between us. Where do profits come from, then? Marx’s answer is that surplus cannot at all be generated in the sphere of exchange; rather, it is generated in the sphere of production, and in particular he argues that surplus-value is generated by the exploitation of wage labor.
A society predicated upon exchange such as ours must always express this duplicitous character: exchanges must be of equivalents or else they would be swindles, not exchanges; but they must be of non-equivalents or else they would be pointless.
In fact the condition for the possibility of such exchanges, of things that are both equivalent and non-equivalents, is the social division of labor. The division of labor precedes the emergence of capitalism, of course, but in capitalism its endless intensification and extension becomes a key principle in the organization of society and its progressive development.
Already in the Odyssey, Adorno and Horkheimer show, the division of labor is mythologized and rationalized all at once (25-7), and yet its consequences are disastrous for both the properties and the propertyless. Odysseus, a member of the propertied class, stands at a distance from the laborers and property he commands.
“The fear of losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment. The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power” (26).
The siren song calls out: something must be done to avoid the loss of self to the forces of mythical nature. Enlightened reason would dominate the sirens if it could, but it cannot. So humanity must instead dominate itself.
Thus the workers’ ears are plugged up: they must row constantly, not allowed even to look to the side; they are stripped even of the possibility of hearing and seeing. In this way, Adorno and Horkheimer note, they are made practical.
For Odysseus himself, he is allowed to keep his senses, but the price he pays is being literally bound to the ship’s mast.
The workers know the song only as danger, not as beauty; Odysseus knows its beauty, but cannot enjoy it, he is kept at a safe distance from it. Neither Odysseus nor the workers actually get to have a genuine aesthetic experience. Everyone who has experienced the real power of a great work of art knows that this cannot take place ‘at a safe distance’. Aesthetic experience has to be able actually to affect you, to change you: you risk a dissolution, a loss of self, but it is in and through such loss that the possibility of becoming something other than what you are opens up. There is no safe way to be open to the possibility of transformative change.
Odysseus and his rowers are denied aesthetic experience, and so they are both locked into what they are. “The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses. No system of domination has so far been able to escape this price, and the circularity of history in its progress is explained in part by this debilitation, which is the concomitant of power.” (27) Fear of loss of self is ultimately what steers the ship: enlightenment reason dominates itself instead of an external nature that exceeds its grasp.
We find here another way in which enlightenment reason regresses to myth: the world of myth was a closed world, a fated world in which, as Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘nothing is new under the sun’; and in binding itself out of fear of self-loss, humanity ensures the closure of itself. Where reason is reduced to a desperate effort to administrate, control, and dominate, humanity dooms itself to stasis and repetition. Fate was once mythically imposed, and now in the enlightened world it is self-imposed.
The positive concept of enlightenment would involve the reversal of all of these necessarily frustrated desires.
First, concerning the self. There is no escaping self-loss; we become ourselves only by becoming other than what we are. The attempt to save ourselves from change, from openness, is doomed to fail; or paradoxically we can also say that it succeeds, but only on condition of its failure. If I can only become myself in and through my openness to my loss of self, then by fearfully shutting myself up—binding myself to the mast, plugging up my ears—I save a self that is static and alienated, that is, a self that is precisely not human. Humanity is its openness and dynamism. Fear of self-loss guarantees the failure of self-realization: this is why enlightenment has so far always reverted to myth. The Odysseus story is meant here also to show us that reason severed from the authentic possibility of aesthetic experience can only mutilate itself. A positive enlightenment rationality would open itself up to aesthetic experience, unafraid of losing itself, knowing instead that it is through such transformation that one’s humanity is realizable.
Next, there is the division of labor. There is no question of its abolition; we cannot all do the same job, obviously. Social reproduction requires its continuance. But the current organization of the division of labor is oriented toward the imperative of endless capital accumulation, and like the fear of self-loss creates increasing alienation rather than establishing the conditions for the possibility of human self-realization. In fact the division of labor, as we’ve known since Adam Smith, radically increases labor productivity; its deepening under the aegis of capital is why we now have before us the material possibility of the abolition, not of the division of labor, but of unmet needs.
This is why the positive concept of enlightenment involves the perfection of the division of labor, where the total social product is no longer divided up according to the domination of the class relation, in which instead it would be freely enjoyed by all. This would also involve, I believe, the abolition of exchange as the guiding principle of society: if the perfection of the division of labor would mean free enjoyment, this would also mean there would no longer be any need to perform the duplicitous exchange of nonequivalent goods. And so the positive concept of enlightenment would no longer need to “amputate the incommensurable”.
The siren story also gives us another hint here: the class relation between Odysseus and his employees, propertied master and propertyless servants, is reproduced as a division between intellectual and manual labor (incipit Sohn-Rethel). Odysseus’ body is rendered useless, but he remains master of the situation (paradoxically, of course, by dominating and binding himself); the rowers are reduced to pure physical force guided by another. The division of intellectual and manual labor leads to the alienation of each from their own physical and mental capacities. Such alienation might in fact be unavoidable under conditions where the division of labor is built on top of and replicates the already existing division between an owning and a propertyless class.
The class relation is itself, of course, a relation of domination: the propertied class dominates the propertyless who work for them. It is a relation of power, and as we know for mythical enlightenment, motivated desperately by fear, knowledge is good only insofar as it is power too. This form of knowledge/power Adorno and Horkheimer call technology, or the progress of understanding as pure technical means for the sake of increasing control. Understanding can deepen its scientific remit, but for what purpose? In a class society, every step forward in technoscientific understanding leads not to an increase in free time or the satisfaction of needs but instead to new methods of subjugation and subjection for a humanity that continues to bind itself. This is the mirror image of enlightenment’s fearful desire to dominate external nature.
“Today, when Bacon’s utopia, in which ‘we should command nature in action,’ has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself” (33-4). The positive concept of enlightenment would renounce this equation of knowledge and power. Here again, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, it is the very desire for control and the elevation of power in the form of domination that prevents the self-realization of an emancipated humanity.
Every attempt to free oneself by dominating nature only succeeds in reverting to the blind external determinism of nature. Sacrificial enlightenment always lands us back in mythical fate. So the positive concept of enlightenment would understand that the liberation of the self, the liberation of humanity, can proceed only through the liberation of nature: this would be to put an end to the alienation of humanity and nature, and would instead open onto their reconciliation, and also the reconciliation of humanity with itself.
These reversals are, for Adorno and Horkheimer, still possible. But neither they nor I think they are realizable through philosophy, although perhaps they believe it is a necessary condition for such reversals to take place that philosophy articulates their possibility and necessity. They write at one point: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (28). The key is contained there: irresistible progress, not free progress. We’ve come so far, but we’ve also regressed precisely to that degree, because the form of enlightenment progress is necessity born of fear. But a different form of progress, one that would be free and liberating, and no longer regressive, is possible. Paradoxically the sheer negativity of negative dialectics is also its speculative creativity: a demand for the abolition of the social reality it constructively articulates.
gil morejón 