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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
T. W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is fifty years old. Its disconcerting darkness now seems so bound to the time of its writing, one may well wonder if we have anything to learn from it. Are its main lines of argument relevant to our social and philosophical world? Are the losses it records losses we can still recognise as our own?
1 Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Williams, Bernard, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press/Collins, 1985).Google Scholar
2 Moralia, Minima: Reflections from Damaged Life, translated by Jephcott, E.F.N. (London: NLB, 1974), p. 182; emphasis mine.Google Scholar
3 Korsgaard, Christine M., Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 ‘The idealising supposition of a universalistic form of life, in which everyone can take up the perspective of everyone else and can count on reciprocal recognition by everybody, makes it possible for indivduated beings to exist within a community - individualism as the flip-side of universalism.’ Habermas, JÜrgen, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, translated by William Mark Hohengarten (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), p. 186.Google Scholar
5 This is a massively idealising account of the emergence of moral modernity since it ignores the sceptical and naturalistic responses to the identified pressures. For one version of this complex story see Darwall, Stephen, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640–1740 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 Habermas, JÜrgen, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by Lenhardt, Christian and Nicholsen, Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 126–7Google Scholar. In concentrating enlightenment into the phase of adolescence, Habermas is picking up Kant's statement that ‘Enlightenment is mankind's exit from its self-incurred immaturity.’
7 Ibid.; italics mine. Habermas' theory possesses two aspects: a conception of the pragmatic presuppositions of communicative interaction, and an associated moral principle. Consensual speech acts, he contends, rest on a background consensus which is formed from the implicit mutual recognition of four validity claims: (i) that what is said be linguistically intelligible and comprehensible; (ii) that the propositional content or the existential presuppositions of what is said be true; (iii) that the speaker be truthful (honest or sincere) in what she says; (iv) that what the speaker says (and hence does) is right or appropriate in the light of existing norms and values. Habermas' universalisation principle (U), is meant to provide a rule for the impartial testing of norms for their moral worthiness. It states that a norm is valid only if: ‘All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observation can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities)’ (p. 65). It is not to the point to here rehearse in detail objections to Habermas' proposal; for this see my Recovering Ethical Life: Jtirgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar, and Wellmer, Albrecht, ‘Ethics and Dialogue: Elements of Moral Judgement in Kant and Discourse Ethics’, in his The Persistence of Modernity, translated by Midgley, David (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 113–256Google Scholar. Three objections, all of which circulate around the problem of rationalised reason and its abstraction from the concreteness of ethical experience, are worth mentioning at this juncture. First, Habermas makes an error that Kant also makes, namely, conflating norms of rationality (which are norms for argumentation in Habermas' case) with moral norms. As Wellmer nicely states the point, ‘obligations to rationality are concerned with arguments regardless of who voices them, whereas moral obligations are concerned with people regardless of their arguments’ (p. 185; and see also p. 187). Secondly, Habermas is unable to close the gap between norms that have been found intersubjectively valid and those that are true. Thirdly, by its attention to the validity of norms, discourse ethics conceives of normative validity as independent from application, and thereby displaces ethical knowledge from knowledge had through ethical concepts to knowledge about ethical concepts.
8 Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 202.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., p. 203; emphasis mine.
10 Ibid., p. 108.
11 Bittner, Riidiger, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Schmidt, James (ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 352.Google Scholar
12 All references in the body of this essay to ‘DoE’ are to: Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Cumming, John (London: Allen Lane, 1973)Google Scholar. For the sake of accuracy, I have routinely modified Cumming's translation.
13 In pursuing this project they were patently following the lead of Walter Benjamin's ‘Theses on the Concept of History’, which had insisted that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ {Illuminations, p. 258) and that by reifying the entwined process of civilisation and barbarism into a progressive philosophy of history the barbarism of civilisation is ideologically legitimated - it is part of the cost of progress - permitting the process it signifies to continue unabated. Again, the entwinement of civilisation and barbarism is not a thesis an enlightenment thinker need deny; nor that the costs of progress should be remembered. Benjamin's contention can only have force if he can demonstrate that barbarism is not an accidental accretion but intrinsic. But how could barbarism be intrinsic to reason? For Benjamin the answer to this question is that progressive philosophies of history, in virtue of conceiving of history in wholly teleological terms, must regard each present as only a means to the posited end, and thus can deny it significance in itself. And while this is pointed against historicism and strongly teleological theories, it does not touch the breadth of modern, enlightened rationality. Horkheimer and Adorno translate Benjamin's thesis into a narrower conceptual thesis; in place of barbarism they put instrumentality and scepticism. It is the effects of these features of enlightened reason which explain the entwinement of civilisation and barbarism.
14 Wright, Crispin, Truth and Objectivity (London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 196Google Scholar. What makes an explanation good, Wright is contending, is its possessing ‘a wide cosmological role’. Wright contends, plausibly enough, that moral facts are unable to play a wide cosmological role (pp. 197–8).
15 Ibid., p. 198.
16 It follows from the argument of this section that Adorno and Horkheimer do not equate instrumental reason with means-ends reasoning. Rather instrumental reason is defined in terms of the principle of immanence; hence, for them formal logic would count as instrumental reasoning. The justification for employing the notion of instrumental reason to cover whatever falls under the principle of immanence is that the latter is conceived of as the rational expression of the drive for self-preservation, and that drive is the original motive for adopting it. It is thus the genealogical origin of the principle of immanence that reveals its functional or instrumental character. Equally, although it is not a matter I will take up here, because the principle of immanence is grounded in the drive for self-preservation its domination over other (potential) forms of rationality is thought by Adorno and Horkheimer as the domination of nature over culture.
17 Jarvis, Simon, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), p. 24.Google Scholar
18 This definition is defended by Bittner in his ‘What is Enlightenment?’, op cit. The proximate origin of Adorno and
19 See Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), chapter 5.Google Scholar
20 The phrase here is from Robert Pippin's critical account of what Hans Blumenberg was attempting to legitimate in his The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983)Google Scholar: ‘Blumenberg and the Modernity Problem’, in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 283.Google Scholar
21 Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Lawrence, Frederick (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), p. 119Google Scholar; and Vogel, Steven, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 66–71.Google Scholar
22 Again, Bittner's ‘What is Enlightenment?’ draws this conclusion: ‘to call superstitution what enlightenment fights against is to imply that in any case its opponent is wrong … Yes, enlightenment is always right against its opponent …’ (p. 351). What Bittner fails to consider in his defence of enlightenment as critique is the formation of reason, the rationalisation of reason, that is a consequence of that practice.
23 In general, the issue of the priority of the abstract over the concrete can be phrased in terms of whether formal logic, it laws are determining for rationality or whether they are dependent upon, simply ‘make explicit’, the patterns of material inference implicit in everyday practices. Adorno's conception of the priority of material inference structures is implicit in his accounts of, for example, essay as opposed to the system, his own ‘fragmentary’ form of writing, and his notion of constellations. For an analytic defence of the priority of material inference, see Brandom, Robert B., Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (London: Harvard University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
24 For Adorno the prime example of this is in the operation of capital exchanges where ‘living labour’ is converted into ‘labour time’. And while this is readily transparent, I am here contending that less transparently enlightened moral theory imposes an analogous abstraction. This, I would want to argue, is at the heart of the debate between ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ in moral philosophy. I attempt to prosecute this claim in my Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
