Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 1987), originally published 1947, Edmund Jephcott translation.
When one is young, one often aims to know everything all at once, and therefore to have read everything all at once; and since that proves impossible in such a compressed timeframe, one resorts to certain expedients. For instance, one starts to thin the list of books that one accepts as counting toward the real knowledge one wishes to acquire.
For my college-age self, the application of this particular strategy meant tossing out anything that smacked—however faintly—of Critical Theory, postmodernism, and continental philosophy. Life is short, I declared, and I had seen enough early enough to believe that everything in the above-mentioned categories was just so many shades of mumbo-jumbo. (And I'm not saying I was entirely mistaken either, but hey—I remain more than happy to be proven wrong on further reading.)
As time goes on, however, we discover that we actually may have more time on our hands than we originally thought; our reading and intellectual life does not end abruptly at the midpoint of our twenties; and so, perhaps, we need not have been so parsimonious. Still more liberating is the discovery that, with age, we can read things with which we mildly disagree without it impinging upon our sense of personal identity.
The young person's urge to adhere to a school and thus to compile their own private indices of prohibited books—applying the ban wholesale to authors they have never read, due to the simple impression that they are in some way ideologically suspect—is in large part the effort to define a self. By the time one crosses into the thirties, however, one has one's self relatively in order, and one still has years of living and reading to do, so one decides it may not be so perilous to lift the fatwa after all.
Adorno and Horkheimer's 1947 classic of Critical Theory was—due to the various proscriptions and anathemas listed above—for years one of the books I planned never to read. I had acquired a copy somehow in college, but it had slumbered on my shelves unopened; and I eyed it with a kind of embarrassment.
I'm fortunate now that I did not actually give the copy away, since—by whatever strange psychic turning of the seasons—the moment for me to read this book finally came around; and I was glad to have it ready at arm's reach.
I felt earnestly in the mood to look back into the classics of humanistic Marxism, not because I was contemplating a return to the ideology myself, but precisely because it had become so alien to my adult views. I wanted to see if there was anything in it that I might have missed in my youthful, more literal-minded adherence to the doctrine; and whether I could mine these books for insights as an adult that would have been inaccessible to me if I had actually managed to read them as a younger adherent.
And the book is very far from a waste of time; it need be placed on no one's Index Librorum Prohibitorum—not even that of the most uncompromising logical positivist. But I was also not entirely wrong to raise an eyebrow upon first inspecting it.
Like many another fundamentally polemical work, the book is vastly more effective in its work of destruction that it is in building up any conceivable alternative. It may just be me and my own failures of comprehension, but the authors' prose seems to seesaw between fundamentally clear invective, and downright impenetrable maunderings—and it is striking that the accessible parts of the book are those that make a case against, whereas the case for often vanishes in a cloud of the numinous.
After all, the authors are fairly persuasive in taking on the tensions within post-Enlightenment thought itself. Their account of the way in which the tools of Enlightenment-era analysis and criticism were first used in the service of a bourgeois liberal revolution against church and crown, before ultimately being turned against the core moral ideas of that same liberalism (in the hands of Nietzsche, e.g.) rings true; as does their analysis of the fundamental error plaguing many of the would-be attempts to escape from this seemingly all-consuming, all-destroying process through an irrationalist or anti-modern turn.
The attempt to evade critical reason by the leap of faith, for instance—the authors point out—contains within itself already a crucial acknowledgement of and concession to the logic of enlightened reason. To say that one has faith on arbitrary grounds, that one's belief is a willed choice in defiance or at least absence of evidence, is already to admit that one does not really hold that belief to be true on universally-valid grounds. The authors refer to it as "the objective admission that any who only believes for that reason no longer believes."
It has always been the strength of dialectical thought to recognize the way in which a given ideology will often contain the seeds of its opposite—and even that the great adversarial poles that define our modern intellectual life—faith and reason, liberalism and conservatism, reaction and modernity, etc.—are really frères ennemis.
Horkheimer and Adorno apply this method with skill to convince us that critical reason is a self-defeating spiral with a tendency toward endless involution (When the errors have been used up/ As our last companion, facing us/ Sits nothingness, as Brecht once wrote (Hamburger trans.)), and also that the available anti-modern reactions to it offer no way out. Both thesis and antithesis, in dialectical terms, are plainly inadequate.
But when it comes time to describe what kind of synthesis might emerge from this dialectic, our authors fall strangely silent. Or else they become all at once metaphysical and mysterious. It may be that I am simply unable to follow their argument on this point, such as it is. It may be that their ideas are too recondite, or that we are simply facing yet again the notorious difficulty of translating highly-abstract philosophical German into English sentences.
Or it may be—and I think there is some textual warrant to suspect as much—our authors simply haven't come up with a solution yet. (Neither have the rest of us, if it makes them feel any better.) The authors seem to be more than a little self-conscious on this point, and thus one notes that the book's final chapter includes several passages that read as attempts to preempt the criticism that they have simply raised problems to which they have no answer.
They hold a brief in one of their closing "Notes and Sketches" for the book "which gropes forward experimentally." They acknowledge that (their) philosophy has "no abstract norms or goals which could be a practical alternative to those in force," a little before that.
They also recount an imagined dialogue between two young people, one of whom refuses to be a doctor or a judge, he says, because either career would implicate him in the bureaucratized and alienating institutions of capitalist modernity. The other accuses him of being a hypocrite, because he is happy to enjoy the benefits and comforts in his own life that stem in part from having a functioning medical system and courts of law staffed by competent doctors and judges.
The first young man—plainly speaking for the authors of this highly impracticable book—replies that he is happy to contradict himself in this way, because the society in which he finds himself is already in a state of self-contradiction (the dialectic, we might say, of the book's title).
Perhaps the authors' boldest statement anywhere in the book of their willingness to bite this particular bullet—to accept that they have not offered any way out of the problems they have raised in the book, that is, to admit that they too can find no way to get outside of the work of destructive critical reason—occurs in one of the earlier "Notes and Sketches." At first, the authors describe a number of theses of pessimistic philosophy with apparent sympathy, making no real attempt to refute them. Then they declare, having come to the end of this seemingly inexorable line of reasoning: "There is one other possibility"—if one seeks to escape these dismal conclusions—namely, "to scorn logic, if it is against humanity."
Well! At least we're not pretending that there is something approaching a practicable social program contained within the pages of this book. Still, though, we are inevitably dissatisfied at being told that liberal modernity is alienated and insufficient, but given no inkling whatsoever as to what kind of system might replace it. Whenever the authors absolutely cannot procrastinate referencing such an alternative any longer, that numinous cloud we referenced earlier makes its appearance.
There is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it suggestion of the old-school Marxist notion that the path out of our present contradictions—the road to the higher synthesis—might be found in the fact that capitalist modernity has already produced sufficient material abundance such that the methods of the former are no longer needed (in which case great, but why can't we have equitable material abundance and individual human rights on an enlightenment model too?). This conceivably promising idea remains unexplored and unelaborated.
So too, there are occasional references to utopia, as if it were some readily-available social state that we could merely step into one day, by an act of will or conscious philosophizing. (In one place, the authors refer to "the utopia of a humanity which, itself no longer distorted, no longer needs distortion"—the kind of line that would have seemed to mean something profound—I'm sure— if I had read this book as a humanistic Marxist teenager. Seeing it now, I can only be reminded of Leszek Kołakowski's acid remark on a similar line by E.P. Thompson: "This is a very good sample of socialist writing. It amounts to saying that the world should be good, and not bad, and I am entirely on your side on this issue.")
I think there's something to be extracted from the book's second excursus about how the critical methods of the enlightenment might be used to salvage the concept of human freedom even from the ravages of the second-order convolution of enlightenment that one finds in Nietzsche. We get there—the suggestion seems to run—by applying these same critical methods to the concept of "power"—the last shibboleth, the last item taken on faith, the last unexamined metaphysical reality in Nietzsche's philosophical scheme. Maybe we can apply the same critical techniques that he used to such great effect in demolishing moral ideas, that is to say, against the remaining props of his own system. Faced with the challenge of a second-order convolution, we overcome it with a third-order one.
It's an intriguing possibility—but our authors don't shed a lot of light on how we might accomplish this; and they quickly move on.
There's much more altogether nebulous stuff in the book about "nature" and how human beings might attain some kind of release from their present woes by a return to or reintegration with the same. This is the sort of profoundly abstract claim that either has emotional truth for people or it does not. I for one am at a loss to discern how such a return to nature would be different in practice from various retrogressive and anti-modern moves (though the authors insist it is), how exactly "nature" is separable from human societies that have always existed in a planetary setting and have relied on natural processes, etc., or how we know that we'd be happier and better off anyways if we could effect such a transition.
It all sounds an awful lot like the leap of faith that the authors have already forsworn; and indeed much of their caustic writing against the logical positivists has a tone that suggests a more personal vendetta: perhaps our authors—and their methodology—feel rather directly challenged by the positivists' attempt to purge all metaphysical, numinous claims from the toolbox of ideas available to philosophy.
For instance, the authors deem the "most up-to-date positivist" as nothing more than an "employee of the latest administration"—meaning, I suppose, a mere philosophical lackey of the established order—which seems a rather heavy-handed attack on people who were simply following out the implications of a legitimate philosophical insight.
Indeed, Adorno and Horkheimer's book is rife with unfounded allegations against other schools of philosophy, many of which they write off as "bourgeois" systems on the strength of a kind of bizarre argument from analogy. Kant—for one—we are told structured his system of logical categories on the same principle of hierarchy that prevails in class-based society.
Well... so? we ask. Be that as it may, logical categories are not people. It might be wholly legitimate for one to be understood as hierarchical but not the other. What is the vague morphological analogy between the two supposed to tell us?
This is exactly the kind of conceptual confusion that I had always feared might be found in the works of the great pillars of critical theory and continental philosophy, once I cracked them open — and are a large part of the reason I had long since consigned the whole genre to the mental flames (as Hume, let us recall, long ago bid us do with any works of philosophy or metaphysics that made the perilous mistake of conflating mere "relations between ideas" with "matters of fact").
Speaking of Hume, it is really his humor and common sense that one most longs for in reading Adorno and Horkheimer—if only they could show a little humility and offer a laugh of self-deprecation before the profound riddles that they, like so many before them, have admittedly been unable to solve.
But why should we solve them?, they seem to retort. We've already done our part! We did the important work of criticism! Why should we have to do everything? Why expect more from us? Someone else should have to come up with the solutions! Leave us alone!
Okay, but if Adorno and Horkheimer have offered nothing more than critique, then what exactly have they contributed to the sum of our philosophical knowledge that we did not already possess? It is clear enough from their book that prior thinkers had already shown the self-destructive capacities of critical reasoning—the way in which the methods of the enlightenment can be used to refute even the moral precepts of the enlightenment itself, with its doctrines of equality and human rights. Adorno and Horkheimer quote authors like Nietzsche and Sade extensively to prove as much. Plainly, the critique has already been made and registered.
Then, of course, there is the famous chapter on the so-called "culture industry," containing our authors' fulminations against everything from radio serials to mass-produced cars to jazz musicians. It is a specimen of critique that seems to be much more full of polemical outrage than philosophical reasoning. While their loathing of mass culture takes on an ostensibly Marxist form, and is waged in the interests of some sort of ultimate egalitarian leveling, it is largely impossible to distinguish it in practice from the aristocrat's contempt for the humble acquisitions of the middle classes.
It is hard to read Adorno and Horkheimer's outpourings on these matters, that is to say, without feeling that we are looking not at a dispassionate analysis of any real oppression, but a projection of the intellectual's feeling of insecurity and territoriality in the face of the encroaching aspirations of mass society.
But perhaps the authors would reply that my inability to see anything more than personal motives and status fears in these passages—as in their attacks on the logical positivists—is itself exactly the kind of "demythologizing" move that enlightenment reasoning can always choose to apply—if it so wishes—to almost any and every idea (they cite examples along these lines of attacks that have been made on familial love, romance, etc., reducing each at last to motives of self-interest and self-preservation)—and which itself contributes to the destructive dialectic of the book's title.
And the thing is, they also wouldn't say I was wrong, exactly, to make this move. Because once again, they have nothing to refute or put in place of the insights and methods of enlightenment reasoning—as they freely admit. So what do we do?
We could, as our authors seem to wish, hold a blank space open in our minds for a kind of utopia we cannot define or imagine. I do not see any harm in doing so. Though if it is truly a blank space, I'm not sure why we are convinced we want to be moving toward it.
But I think we can also acknowledge that, while all philosophy and human life proceeds under conditions of ultimate uncertainty, the system of post-Enlightenment liberalism, with its concepts of individual rights, has gotten us closer to conditions of human freedom, human security, and human prosperity, than any other system yet devised. The fact that in its existing form it is enormously flawed is of course plain enough. But that these flaws are due to an intrinsic feature of the method of reasoning that undergirds it is altogether less clear to me. And Adorno and Horkheimer, for all their valuable insights, have not persuaded me otherwise.
I noted the following errata in this edition:
p. 28 "rehearsed by the those in charge [...]" (sic)
p. 33 "in order [to] control that antidote." —missing the "to"
p. 171 sentence ending with "impenetrable character" missing a period.
p. 189 "which had developed th[r]ough transactions" (sic)
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