In 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant announced that enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.

Enlightenment leads to the greatest advances in medicine and technology that man has ever known.

In the early 1940s, war ravages Europe.

Hitler and Fascism seem unstoppable.

Two German philosophers in exile, Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, have a conversation in a kitchen in New York.

The conversation is the beginnings of a manuscript that they circulate to friends in 1943.

The first edition of the resulting book – Dialectic of Enlightenment  – is published in 1944.

Why, Adorno and Horkheimer ask, is mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, sinking into a new kind of barbarism?

How has the Enlightenment gone wrong?

Why, with all of our scientific progress, secularism, and emphasis on human rights, have we just emerged out of decades of catastrophic murder and war?

Their answer: that 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?

According to James Bradley, 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, thereby constantly collapsing into new forms of the very conditions of primeval repression which it earlier set out to overcome’.

I think we can best understand their claim by looking at it thematically, through a number of concepts.

First, we should think of a dialectical relationship between enlightenment – the use of reason – and domination.

What is domination?

Adorno and Horkheimer say: ‘Domination is in effect whenever the individual’s 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 Christian religion, for example – might be seen as a form of domination.

Some might say a guidebook.

Either way, prescribed to you is a ‘correct’ way of doing something that you’re meant to conform to.

Dialectic of Enlightenment might be thought of as a ‘history of domination’.

Of how enlightenment becomes domination.

Enlightenment meant installing men as their own masters.

Kant wrote in 1784 – five years before the French Revolution and, you could argue, year 0 of the Enlightenment – that, ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”—that is the motto of enlightenment’.

Enlightenment 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? We are individual – different, but also the same.

Is there a universal, transcendent, homogeneous reason bigger than any one man?

The rules of mathematics, physics, physiology – all becoming more apparent during the enlightenment – would suggest so.

These aren’t individual – they’re universal and undeniable.

For Kant and Hegel, then, 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 systemisation – a single governing principle – a schema, a blueprint.

As Hegel saw, this lead to a dialectic, a relationship between two poles: there is the individual – with bones and desires and needs – and there is the universal – that which governs and unites all.

For Adorno and Horkheimer this shows us that there are at least two types of reason in men: ‘the transcendental, supraindividual self, … comprises 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 judgement 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 the material of subjugation’.

One type of reason calculates how to live together, as a group – reason between men.

Another calculates how the individual can use his surroundings for his own self-preservation.

What’s the rational way to share these four apples?

For me to survive? Four for me, none 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 use the apples.

They write, ‘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’.

Everything starts to be calculated in reference to this utility. What combination of apples go to each store. Which tools are best used for harvesting the apples quickly. Which skills we need to produce them more efficiently.

This combines into a single principle – there is a best way and it is universal.

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. A system. A physics.

When a system of thought, whether Christianity, or the domination of nature, become ‘fixed ideas and universal recipes’, they lead to ‘the rejection of anything not already analytically assimilated’.

They write, ‘For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry’.

What have we lost in magic?

But was the enlightenment really that special?

If enlightenment is the use of nature for human purposes, didn’t this appear before 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 hurl me down to Death, against my fate. 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’ – Homer

What makes mythology and enlightenment the same?

Both attempt to naturalise 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 or food.

Like calculating utility, it involved a sacrifice now 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 invocations of the magician and the tribe the distinct gradation of sacrifice and the labour of the unfree mediated through the word of command’.

Poseidon, the god of the sea, was Poseidon for all. All must worship him, bestow gifts and sacrifices on him, if they are to have safe passage across the stormy seas.

You talk of Poseidon when you talk about where it is dangerous to sail and where it’s not. He represents a kind of instrumental reason.

Take the Odyssey. Is it a work of myth or of enlightenment?

Written some time in the 8th century BC, Adorno and Horkheimer call it the ‘basic text of European civilization’.

As a cultural artefact it tells us a lot about how the Greeks thought.

Homer collates popular Greek myths into one man’s story.

Adorno and Horkheimer see Odysseus 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 myth’.

Odysseus’ journey is the path of the self through myth. His self-preservation takes precedent over the consuming power of the natural world, often described metaphorically as the gods.

Poseidon the god of the sea.

Zeus the god of lightening.

Aphrodite the goddess of love.

They represented something outside of man’s control – something that affects men.

Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘All the adventures Odysseus survives are dangerous temptations deflecting the self from the path of its logic’.

Odysseus must forge a path between the God and nature’s will, and his own desire for self-preservation on his journey home.

He’s a cunning figure, rationally working out what is nature’s – what he cannot manipulate and must align himself too – and what he can use, what we can make use of.

He foreshadows the bourgeois man of the Enlightenment.

Take his encounter with the sirens – creatures whose beautiful singing would draw sailors towards the rocks to shipwreck them.

Odysseus is curious about the sirens’ call. 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, oblivious to the sirens’ call.

Like proletariat workers they must ignore their desires and keep rowing.

The master – bourgeois man – must listen to work out what is logical, what is reasonable.

Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her. The mythical monsters under whose power he falls represent, as it were, petrified contracts and legal claims dating from primeval time’.

Or take his encounter with the monsters Scylla and Charybdis on either side of the Strait of Messina.

One represents rocks jutting from the water. The other a whirlpool.

Passers through must choose between the two.

Odysseus 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. That no man can avoid.

In myth then they see the codifying, the describing, the marking of both the predictable elements and the unpredictable elements of nature. Is this not reason? Is this not a practice not much different to the scientific practice of modernity?

And in the Marquis de Sade they see individual desire that can too be thought of logically, reasonably.

De Sade 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.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, de Sade’s work represents the embodiment of Enlightenment values about the sanctity of the individual’s needs and desires.

‘The work of me Marquis de Sade, they write mockingly, exhibits ‘understanding without direction from another, that is to say, the bourgeois subject freed from all tutelage’.

They discuss de Sade’s book Juliette: ‘Juliette 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”’.

Juliette 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?”’

Preserve your desire. Work out what you want. Calculate how to get it.

It’s the Nietzschean will to power – that morality is nothing more that the imposition of the will of the stronger.

Which leads us to totalitarianism. Whether or not 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 for the purposes of self-preservation – why would this not apply to people too?

Repetition, identity, sameness, utility, expansion.

Repetition and predictability are key to understanding how myth, enlightenment, and totalitarianism are 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 too. Every time water is placed over fire it boils.

The key is repetition and predictability.

Adorno and Horkheimer write, ‘The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself. The arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new under the sun, because all 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 standardisation, a key feature of fascism. That everything – and everyone – is in its place, obedient.

‘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 then what is left of the individual? Reason is totalitarian.

‘The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the 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 is the practicing of individual, particular, fleeting bodily passion at the expense of obedience to the single governing total rule.

To sum up, we should return to the foundational quote: that myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to myth.

It’s still a difficult phrase – but it does connect the disparate parts of the argument.

Simon Jarvis puts it this way: ‘In order to escape the charge that it is merely subjective, thought sets itself the task of replicating what exists – with no hidden extras. Thought b to confine itself to the facts, which are thus the point at which thought comes to a halt. The question as to whether these facts might change is ruled out by enlightened thought as a pseudo problem’.

When a person – a storyteller, a scientist, a lawmaker – thinks, creates, observes, he describes, etches into stone. Turns it into something that he wants to be accepted.

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a difficult book. Its style, by design, is fragmentary, sometimes contradictory. Even Adorno and Horkheimer’s intellectual friends complained of its complicated structure.

When Horkheimer asked Leo Loewenthal to recommend people who might provide feedback for them, he replied, referring ironically to its pessimism and complexity, that Huxley didn’t read German and Joyce was dead.

Sources

David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory

Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

James Schmidt, Language, Mythology and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment