Why isn't enlightenment all it's cracked up to be?
Well, Horkheimer and Adorno have ideas . They say that
enlightenment is totalitarian.
Enlightenment aims for mastery and encourages a total
disenchantment with the world.
An enlightenment picture of the world encourages us
to learn from nature only in order to dominate it and
to dominate other people.
So you might recall that the Age of Enlightenment, in a
philosophical sense, coincides with the rise of colonialism
and the rise of capitalism.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, this is no coincidence.
Actually, endemic to the philosophy of
enlightenment, is barbarism.
Enlightenment encourages the domination of nature and
this domination of nature
eventually turns into the domination of the thinking
subject over itself.
So enlightenment encourages control and mastery over
nature and over people, including ourselves.
For enlightenment thinking, knowledge is power and
power is knowledge.
And this is not a benign association.
It's actually quite dangerous.
Now, one of the things that Horkheimer and Adorno
focus on in this text is the idea that enlightenment
thinking likes to imagine itself opposed to myth.
So think about a common narrative here.
Actually, we might return to Kant.
For Kant, enlightenment is the human exit from immaturity.
The human race was immature throughout
much of its history.
It believed in myth, it accepted the dogmas and
doctrines of religion.
And now it's finally in a position to start to be
guided by the light of reason.
This is enlightenment.
Well, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that,
actually, enlightenment thinking partakes of the
very same logic as myth.
So what is mythical thinking based on?
From the perspective of the enlightenment, mythical
thinking is based on unreason and part of its unreason
is its anthropomorphism.
Mythical thinking projects the subjective,
the human, onto nature.
Through, for instance, animism, this idea that
plants and natural resources, for instance, have souls.
The enlightenment comes along and is like, Ooh,
you imagine that plants and rocks have souls.
How unenlightened of you.
Well, Horkheimer and Adorno counter that, actually,
mythical thinking is not that different in relevant
ways from enlightenment thinking itself.
Because what happens in enlightenment thinking
is a dream of unity.
This idea that we can have a total explanation
of everything possible.
Formal logic is the paragon of this enlightenment thinking,
they describe on page 200.
The idea that we can sort of reduce everything to numerical
values, to soundness and validity, and say whether
something is true or false.
When we do that, we are anthropomorphizing
the world by reducing it to the faculties of
our own understanding.
Abstraction, Horkheimer
and Adorno suggest, is the tool of enlightenment.
Nature here is taken as what is to be
studied mathematically.
But why should we say that nature is
any more mathematical than it is animistic?
Isn't our mathematical conception of nature itself
a projection of human ways of understanding things?
Horkheimer and Adorno suggest on page 201 that enlightenment
is mythic fear turned radical.
In both the mythical mindset and the enlightenment mindset,
we have, as humans, a fear of the unknown and we seek
to master the unknown.
It's just that we seek to master it in different ways
in mythical thinking and enlightenment thinking.
For enlightenment thinking, nothing can remain outside.
The outside is what we fear.
And so we have to explain everything, to subsume
everything, in order to counter that fear.
This is one of the ways in which the Frankfurt school,
which is the school that Horkheimer and Adorno, as
well as Marcuse are coming from, draw on psychoanalysis.
So to sort of speak broadly for a moment, the Frankfurt
school is a group of thinkers based in Frankfurt, Germany,
who combined Marxism-- so, dialectical materialism--
with psychoanalysis,
the work of Freud.
And brought those together into a kind of hybrid in
order to assess political, social, and various
other philosophical issues of their day.
Now, I would love to also talk to you about the
fascinating and, in some cases, tragic history
of the Frankfurt school.
I would encourage you to read about that yourself,
but I'll just say that Frankfurt school ends up being
kind of a misnomer because many of the members of the
school had to flee Germany with the rise of National
Socialism, because the majority of them were Jews.
Going back to the text for a moment here, enlightenment
thinking in Horkheimer and Adorno's sense, involves a
dream of thinking about being as automatic, as machine-like.
Reason here is a mere instrument.
And usually it's an instrument for economic interests,
interests of capitalism.
Capitalism, and the reigning ideology of it, which gets
called positivism here,
want to make subjectivity as small as possible
because subjectivity cannot be calculated.
They want to eliminate it completely if possible, right?
Like let's study an fMRI scan and talk about dreams.
We're not going to ask people about what their dreams
are because we have no way of actually assessing the
truth of those from their subjective perspective.
But for Horkheimer and Adorno, this is an extremely reductive
way of thinking about subjectivity and thinking.
The task of thinking is not merely recording,
according to them.
If anything, thought becomes deceptive when it tries to
imagine itself as a mere recording, they describe
thought as a process of determinate negation.
This is the dialectical component of Horkheimer
and Adorno's thought.
They draw on the conception of negation that we find
in Hegel, as well as in Marx, which is basically
this idea that advancement only comes about through
the tension of opposites.
You may recall that that's a definition of dialectic.
So in thinking, we experience this tension
of opposites, and then that gets resolved through
a determinate negation.
Thinking, they describe on page 209, has a
divisive function.
But the enlightenment reduces this divisive function of
thinking and recognizes it only insofar as thinking
is able to dominate what is around it in order to then
return to the dream of unity,
allaying our fears of the unknown.
A final thing to note here is that for Horkheimer
and Adorno, there's no linear march of progress.
Progress always entails regress.
Progression involves regression.
This is what leads them to suggest that the enlightenment
leads to barbarism.
Society advances by dominating those that
it excludes, page 207.
Think about the way that working conditions
which enable a maximum of productivity end up
compelling conformism and reducing freedom.
Paradoxically, misery grows even as our capacity
to remove misery grows.
Horkheimer and Adorno are thus deeply distrustful,
not only of enlightenment, not only of capitalism, not
only of scientific modes of knowing, but also of the
very concept of progress as a linear forward march.