Adorno and Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment - Part I

[Music] why Adorno and Horkheimer asked is mankind instead of entering into a truly human condition sinking into a new kind of barbarism how has the Enlightenment gone wrong and why with all of our scientific progress secularism an emphasis on human rights have we just emerged out of decades of catastrophic murder and war their answer the reason itself has a dark side enlightenment man's use of his own reason was meant to be the antidote to myth to religion to unjust Authority phenomena that men followed blindly but for Adorno and Horkheimer myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology what does this mean [Music] according to James Bradley for Adorno and Horkheimer they see enlightenment as subject throughout history to a dialectic wherein it all too easily gives itself an absolute status over and against its objects there by constantly collapsing into new forms of the very conditions of primeval repression which had earlier set height to overcome I think we can best understand their claim by looking at it though matically through a number of concepts the first is domination we should think of a dialectical relationship between enlightenment the use of our own reason and domination so what is domination they say domination is in effect whenever the individuals goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him domination can be exercised by men by nature by things it can also be internal exercised by the individual on himself and appear in the form of autonomy mythology in the form of say Christian religion might be seen as a form of domination a flood - might be seen as a form of domination or a political system some might say that the Christian doctrine is more of a guidebook than a number of rules that are meant to dominate you either way prescribed to you is a correct way of doing something that you're meant to conform to this is what they mean by domination the book might be thought of as a history of domination of how enlightenment becomes domination [Music] enlightenment meant installing men as their own masters count wrote in 1784 five years before the French Revolution and potentially years zero of the Enlightenment that enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another this immaturity is self-imposed when it schools lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another SAP air all day dare to know have courage to use your own understanding that is the motto of the Enlightenment enlightenment then meant dispelling myths and superstition unjust laws laid down by corrupt men using God as their justification enlightenment meant removing each man's blindfold encouraging him to use his own rational mind Kant argued that men had an innate capability for reason but what is reason if men are individuals is each man's reason different or do we all have the possibility to understand a shared reason is there a universal transcendental homogeneous reason that's greater than any one man the rules of mathematics physics and physiology say these aren't individual they're universal undeniable for Kant and Hegel men had the faculties to be reasonable to think logically but reason was larger than any single man it was the unity of all logic all nature in a systematization a single governing principle a schema a blueprint for Hegel we would gradually work towards this and human reason would synthesize as Hegel saw if you had individual men and universal reason this would lead to a dialectic a relationship between two poles there is the individual with bones and flesh and desires and needs distinct from everything else then there's the universal that which governs and unites all four Adorno and Horkheimer this shows that there are at least two types of reasoning men individual reason and collective reason they write the transcendental supra individual self compromises the idea of a free human social life in which men organize themselves as the universal subject and overcome the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole this represents the idea of true universality utopia at the same time however reason constitutes the court of judgments of calculation which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it to the material of subjugation this is a difficult but important quote one type of reason calculates how to live together as a group reason between men another calculates how the individual can use his own surroundings for his own self-preservation these two types of Reason can come into conflict but which one is more reasonable what's the rational way to share these four apples for me to survive for for me none for you or with that anger you two for me two for you either way though the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment sees a neutral world of material objects to be used to further human ends what matters is how we or I use the apples they right from now on matter would at last be mastered without any illusion of ruling or inherent powers of hidden qualities for the Enlightenment whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect we don't care about anything else about the Apple we just calculate how best to produce and consume them everything starts to be calculated in reference to this utility what combination of apples goes to each store which tools are best used for harvesting the apples quickly which skills do we need to produce them more efficiently this combines into a single principle there is a best way and it's universal we should all add ear to it it dominates us this is how Adorno and Horkheimer make the provocative claim that enlightenment is totalitarian everything must be made to conform to the principle of utility a unity the system of physics when a system of thor's whether it's Christianity or the best way of producing apples becomes fixed ideas and universal recipes they lead to the rejection of anything not already analytically assimilated they write for the Enlightenment and I think which cannot be resolved into numbers and ultimately into one is illusion modern positivism consigns it to poetry the beauty of the Apple the art of the Apple got [Music] but was the Enlightenment really that special if enlightenment is the use of nature for human purposes didn't listen for the enlightenment didn't the Enlightenment really precede the enlightenment is the modern enlightenment part of a longer process could magic and myth be a part of this narrative why so much grief for me no man will hold me down to death against minor things and fate no one alive has ever escaped it neither brave man nor coward I tell you it's born with us the day that we are born what makes mythology and enlightenment the same both attempt to naturalize the universal rule attempt to dominate the individual based on an eternal rule of instrumental reason even magic was an exchange a deal with nature with the gods to preserve man think about sacrifice this was meant to placate the gods with a gift to them in order to secure safe passage of food like calculating utility it's involved a sacrifice knack for being better off later the ancient Greeks took this logic and expanded it in place of the local spirits and demons there appeared heaven and its hierarchy in place of the invitations of the magician and the tribe the distinct gradation of sacrifice and the labor vm3 mediated through the word of command magic sacrifice that exchange evolved into mythology into religion take Poseidon Poseidon the god of the sea was Poseidon for all all must worship Him bestowed gifts and sacrifices upon him if they are to have safe passage across the stormy seas you talk of Poseidon when you talk about where it's dangerous to say on where it's not he represents a kind of instrumental reason he features largely in the Odyssey is it a work of myth or of enlightenment written sometime in the eighth century BC Adorno and Horkheimer call it the basic text of European civilization as a cultural artifact it tells us a lot about how the Greeks thought home accolades popular Greek myths into one man's story Adorno and Horkheimer see Odysseas as the proto bourgeois individual they write the contrast between the single surviving ego and the multiplicity of fate reflects the antithesis between enlightenment and myths Odyssey is his journey is the path of the self through myths his self-preservation takes precedent over the consuming power of the natural world often described metaphorically as the gods beside an the god of the sea is used the god of lightning Aphrodite the goddess of love they are things that have domination over us they represented something outside of human control something that affects humans they writes all the adventures Odyssey s survives a dangerous temptation as deflecting the self from the path of its logic Odysseas must forge a path between the gods and nature's will and his own desire for self-preservation on his journey home and he's a cunning figure rationally working out what belongs to nature what he cannot manipulate and must align himself to and what he can use what he can make use of to get by he foreshadows in many ways the bourgeois man of the Enlightenment take his encounter with the sirens creatures whose beautiful singing withdrawal sailors towards the rocks to shipwreck them Odyssey s is too curious about the sirens cool but he is also cunning he orders his men to plug their ears with beeswax and to tie him to the mast the men row forward Bolivia's to the sirens cool like proletariat workers they must ignore their desires and keep rowing the master bourgeois man must listen to nature's call to work out what's logical what's reasonable what can be instrumentally used they write the formula for Odyssey s is cunning is that the detached instrumental mind by submissively embracing nature renders to nature what's hers and thereby cheetah the mythical monsters under whose power he fools represents as it were petrified contracts and legal claims dating from primeval time or take his encounter with the monsters skilar and Charybdis they live on either side of the strait of messina one represents rocks jutting from the water the other a whirlpool passes through must choose between the two Odyssey s is advised that if he passes by Scylla he would lose only a few men instead of his entire ship calculation instrumental reason enlightenment the myth represents necessity the power of the currents and the danger through this route and nature has a right a legal claim on this no man can avoid it in myth and they see the codifying that describing the marking of both the predictable elements and the unpredictable elements in nature is this not reason is this not a practice not much different from the scientific one of modernity in the Marquise decide to the door no and Horkheimer see individual desire that too can be thought of logically and reasonably the self-preservation of passion desire decide is the writer of impulse of individual desire of the person's libidinal passions he who wants something can work out logically how to get it ffred or no and Horkheimer decides work represents the embodiment of enlightenment values about the sanctity of the individuals needs and desires the work of the marquis de sade they write mockingly exhibits understanding without direction from another that is to say the bourgeois subjects freed from all tutelage they disgust Assad's book Juliet Juliet teaches as follows on the self-discipline of the criminal first reflect on your plan for several days in advance consider all its consequences paying attention to what can be useful to you and what might possibly betray you weigh these things just as soberly as if you were sure to be discovered Juliet loves science she hates God and anything else she deems irrational a dead God she says of Christ nothing is more comical than this nonsensical combination of words from the catholic dictionary God which means eternal death which means not eternal idiotic Christians what do you intend to do with your dead God instead preserve your desire work out what you want calculate how to guess it it's the Nietzschean will to power that morality is actually nothing more than the imposition of the will of the stronger on everyone else which leads us to totalitarianism [Music] whether it's the codified myth of Scylla and Charybdis the rationality of working out your desire and convincing others to follow it if objects are valueless to be used just for the purposes of self-preservation why would this not apply to people too [Music] repetition and predictability are key to understanding how myth enlightenment and totalitarianism at linked the point of myth was to try to understand and codify something that wasn't understood the point of science of observing is to codify something - every time you go near that coast you hit rocks every time water is placed over fire it boils the key is repetition and predictability they write the principle of imminence the explanation of every event is repetition which Enlightenment's upholds against mythical imagination is that of myth itself the arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new Under the Sun because all of the pieces in the meaningless game have been played and all the great thoughts have been thought all possible discoveries can be construed in advance it's about standardization a key feature of fascism that everything everyone is in its place repeatable obedient you take out one part and you can replace it with another they write the more dominant the complex social organism becomes the less it tolerates interruptions of the ordinary course of life today as yesterday tomorrow as today everything must follow the same course if reason is the perfect homogeneity of everyone calculating the universal together then what's left of the individual reason then is totalitarian the unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured and a type of society which could make people into individuals enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings this is why Nazis cannot abide any promiscuity it's the practicing of individual particular fleeting bodily passions at the expense of the obedience to the single governing total rule to sum up we should return to the foundational quote that myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment revert to myth it's still a difficult phrase but it does connect the disparate parts of the argument in some way domination enlightenment mythology individual passion totalitarianism Simon Jarvis puts it this way in order to escape the charge that it's merely subjective thought sets itself the task of replicating what exists with no hidden extras thought is to confine itself to the facts which are thus the points at which thought comes to a halt question as to whether these facts might change is ruled out by enlightened thought as a pseudo problem when a person a storyteller scientist a law maker thinks creates observes he describes he edges in stone turns it in something that he wants to be accepted and the more powerful and systematized it becomes the more it connects to all the other parts the more weight at bears dying the more it dominates and encourages you to accept it the dialectic of enlightenment is a difficult book it's style by design is fragmentary sometimes contradictory even their intellectual friends complained of its complicated structure when Horkheimer asked Leo Lowenthal to recommend figures who might provide feedback for them he replied preferring ironically to the books pessimism and complexity that Huxley didn't read German and Joyce was dead [Music] if you like these videos I need your help and here's my request if you think you get the same value from four of these videos as you do from just one cup of coffee then please consider pledging just $1 per video that's three to four dollars per month to keep this channel going you can even limit your pledge to one dollar a month and if you pledge $5 out add your name to the credits to those that already support them and I thank you so much this channel just wouldn't exist without you you can also hit like share follow me on Twitter and Facebook etc all of these things really contribute to helping Ben and I grow thanks for watching and see you next week

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 53,408

Rating: 4.9364791 out of 5

Keywords: Then & Now, Then and Now, History, Philosophy, Politics, adorno and horkheimer, dialectic of enlightenment, part i, critical theory, culture industry, what is enlightenment, kant critique, odysseus or myth and enlightenment, the concept of enlightenment, marquis de sade, nietzsche, hegel, totalitarianism, the odyssey, the odyssey analysis, homer, enlightenment, instrumental reason, introduction to adorno and horkheimer, juliette

Id: vMiF9Bv-72s

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dubleeh]

I really liked this video. Needs a little more time for saturation when showing quotes. I do love these types of observational media; the clean crisp clips that play, soundless in the back ground; As a narrator slowly but distinctly states a story of thoughts. I am not enough familiar with philosophical, literal intelligence to add the this, seemingly pedantic, analysis of A&H material. I would like to comment that I appreciate the assertions of continuity between the themes described. The nuance that is showed has great supporting vertices. I will be subscribing and following the material of this content provider. Thanks for the share.

[u/mosestrod]

not quite the conflict between individual and collective reason, but within reason itself - reason is domination insofar as reason wishes to fully and completely encompass the world/things, reduce everything to its own schema; thought determinations are less, but higher, than what can be subsumed into them - in Kant, for example, things given to our senses are a bare undifferentiated mass, a manifold of sensory data that waits for the recognition and categorisations of the understanding, indeed throughout the CPR Kant alternates the immediately given and the mediately thought, emphasis on the former undermines the solvency of reason's claim to completeness, and yet without it, reason, in the form of concepts risk being a complete tautology; this problem pressures the creation of the thing in itself (which crucially falls out of the CPR at that central part, the transcendental deduction, much to the ire of Schopenhauer) and the faulty claim that the pure forms of intuition are not concepts, despite their behaviour. Either way the thing in itself, by curtailing reason as total system, became what Kants inheritors in German Idealism wrestled to eliminate and thus provide reason with completeness which was equal to its true.

The result: any existence of things independent of human reason is lost, and they being becomes conditional upon reason itself, which provides the unconditional ground, such that nature in Kant is just a function of the unity of the human understanding; you look at an object, and see only the thought determinations (colour, size etc.) which you/reason itself provides. Yet by by making all empirical things - including humans - conditional upon a supra-individual reason the diversity and individuality of things is lost, since what cannot be registered in a concept is not only worthless, but has no being at all, or as the similar criticism from Deleuze had it, what cannot be re-presented, reappear for reason, and this includes the sensuously empirical human, such as Kant, who actually undertakes the writing of this supra-individual reason, is nothing. For Adorno/Hork things do have an excess that evades concepts, though this is visible only negatively, in the ultimate failure of all systems to fully encompass everything, totality, without falling into contradiction and tautology, which is brought out philosophical in immanent critique, and which the course of history displays, in the way self-preservation places all of human at risk of destruction; whether nuke or climate change. The parralel here is reason and capitalism - things for capitalism have only existence when they have passed through its own logic, been given a price etc. Domination because reason/capitalism finds in things it encounters only what it already possesses, encountering the empirical just certifies the legitimacy of the pure concepts, such that the empirical itself is nothing but a concept; similarly capitalism, which Hegel registered by talking of the *labour of the concept, by materially transforming bare things into value and price, just as concept do to matter, can claim that this is what they really are, and we forget or cannot think what things are likes minus capitalism; and yet this very process of domination is beset by constant violence and crisis, because it cannot fulfil the lie it tells itself about the world.

This all occurs without any reflection on its own process, since reflection would halt that process; it is because A/H affirm the enlightenment as self-reflection, that they side with it, against its own tendency to forget and conceal its own processes. Concealing for the sake of what appears as its own success, mastery of nature and preservation, and yet this success is always half-baked, not only because things prove to be not completely malleable and identical to reason, but because the ends for which this reason is undertaken are systematically eliminated, the meaning of what we do is lost, and we end with a profit for profits sake and a logic which puts our own existence amid a dying planet at stake. Such does enlightenment demystify, that it undermines the positive goals of its own project (universal peace, cosmopolitan harmonious political order), reason becomes available for use by any torturer, and its demystification is mockingly shown by the likes of Nietzsche who takes it to the end by asking why be reasonable at all, what makes reason rational, for which it of course has no answer without presupposing itself.

[u/Bytien]

I'm a bit confused as to how a&h see domination. I was frothing at the mouth to come here and attack the idea of the individual having some special powers of reason but later on it seems like they themselves critique that. I can totally understand the argument if I leave it at arms length from my own epistemology and accept the kantian version of rationality, but still I'm deeply critical of that perspective. Is it similar for a&h?

Also I really dont like how the apple metaphor totally fails to discuss the political economy of capitalism and how it demands apple production centers around the most profitable form, not the most correct as determined by the rational person. Again I understand the argument, and in this case even agree with it, but there are more concrete material factors at play when were talking of capitalist production

[u/SonRaetsel]

the sirensepisode isnt about singing, it is about a promise of absolute knowledge. odysseus is faced with the conflict of enticement of omniscience and the appearance of a corpsemountain and has to ask himself what he believes. the sirens themselves are death birds. odysseus was previously warned by kirke, who is the daughter of helios. kirke did not tell him anything precise, nor did she tell him whether the promises of the sirens were true or false. odysseus should check this himself, kirke advised him to listen and at the same time render himself incapable of action.

the interpretation of odysseus as first bourgeois is therefore wrong, since the acting of odysseus is based on divine knowledge mediated by kirke.