Originally having read the first two articles in January 2007, I blogged about them on my
Studies in a Dying Culture blog a
couple months later, but only briefly. Since then, the URLs changed,
and I now offer some additional observations. I subsequently address the
third and to me the most exciting of the articles on the context in which
Dialectic of Enlightenment and
Eclipse of Reason were generated.
Schmidt, James. "
Language,
Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and
Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment,"
Social Research, Vol. 65, Issue 4, Winter
1998. Preprint.
James Schmidt reviews the genesis
of
Dialectic of Enlightenment as
Philosophical Fragments, Marcuse’s
incomprehension, the authors’ views of the debasement of language
(exemplified in Hitler's radio addresses), the parallels with
Hegel’s phenomenology, and the logic of what became the title
essay. Schmidt finds
D of E unique in comparison with
Counter-Enlightenment literature.
50 years on one cannot
properly assess
D of E without reconstructing the process
and context in which it was composed, including how the initial
collection of fragments became more of a real book, and the
excision of explicit references to Marxism by Adorno. In this and
other essays Schmidt takes pains to distinguish Horkheimer's view
from other attacks on the Enlightenment and reversion to
Counter-Enlightenment ideologies in the 1940s. Horkheimer opposed
the reinstitution of banckward-looking philosophies such as
Neo-Thomism which were gaining momentum in the USA. A key point of
D of E is a complementarity often overlooked: not only does
Enlightenment become myth, but myth, already from ancient times,
becomes Enlightenment. First, there is magic, then myth, then
Enlightenment, and with the ultimate stripping of all intrinsic
meaning, we are back to myth and magic. (Horkheimer attempted to
keep in touch with one academic discipline in this
period -- anthropology -- in line with his interest in magic and
myth.) However, the goal of
Dialectic
of Enlightenment was to
rescue the Enlightenment from the dead end to which it had
allegedly attained. The planned sequel to this work, a positive
theory of dialectics, was never written.
Schmidt, James. "
The Eclipse of Reason and the End of the Frankfurt School in America,"
New German Critique, no. 100, Winter 2007, pp. 47-76.
The
Eclipse of Reason is often treated as a
footnote to
Dialectic of Enlightenment.
It was initially greeted with enthusiasm by Leo Lowenthal, but
Horkheimer grew to harbor serious doubts about it. The troubled
relationship between the Institute for Social Research and
Columbia University's Sociology Dept. and a concern over the
popularity of Franz Neumann also figure in. The
Eclipse of Reason has its origin in a lecture series Horkheimer
delivered at Columbia in 1944, after Lowenthal sifted through
the proposed topics. The differences between the book and the
lectures are detailed. Horkheimer also had difficulties
grappling with the philosophy of Dewey, not to mention
processing his ideas in English for an American audience.
Horkheimer's anxiety about the book's reception proved to be
founded. It received an enthusiastic review from then-prominent
American philosopher Arthur E. Murphy. On the other hand, Glenn
Negley gave the book a blistering review. John R. Everett was
not so nasty, but still gave a thumbs down to the book,
particularly criticizing Horkheimer's take on American
naturalism. The book ended up in a Gimbel's sale in 1952 for 59
cents, having failed to make an impact.
Schmidt, James.
The “New Failure of Nerve,” The Eclipse of Reason, and the Critique of Enlightenment in New York and Los Angeles, 1940-1947. Munich, Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, May 2011.
Here we find an instance in which intellectual traditions usually
examined separately come together. One aspect of the relevant
intellectual history is the surge of irrationalism and the revolt
against modernity and Enlightenment reason that became fashionable
in the USA in the 1940s. (The popularity of Kierkegaard is part of
this story, though not treated here. See George Cotkin's
Existential
America. I also need to write a screed about how Richard
Wright's use of Kierkegaard was entirely opposite to the trend.)
Other intellectual histories focus on the conservative project of
Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago,
which involved also the creation of the Great Books enterprise, a
grandiose and successful marketing phenomenon though maybe not so
successful in the goal of turning the clock back. It is also well
documented that a coalition of left and liberal intellectuals were
united in opposing this Counter-Enlightenment trend. Sidney Hook,
known to historians of American philosophy and secular humanists,
dubbed this disturbing retreat "the new failure of nerve".
There are also histories of the
Partisan Review cohort and
the "New York intellectuals". Dwight Mcdonald was part of this
history, as one of these intellectuals, a prominent anti-Stalinist
of the left, and a critic of mass culture.
And then there is the Frankfurt School, in this period in exile in
the USA. All of these histories come together in this essay.
Adorno reported to Horkheimer of a meeting with Macdonald, who waxed
enthusiastic about the Frankfurters' work, at the moment in which
he was embroiled in a struggle with the editors of
Partisan
Review. Horkheimer followed the 1943 "New Failure of Nerve"
dispute and even planned an intervention that was never completed,
but this fed into his work on the Enlightenment. Adler scapegoated
contemporary positivists and secular liberals as the intellectuals
responsible for Nazism, opposed to the American way of life. Jacques
Maritain and Carlton J. H. Hayes echoed this line. And this was part
of a whole trend linking Enlightenment rationalism to nihilism and Germany's
fascist fate.
Given the extreme statements made in
Dialectic of Enlightenment,
it is easy to marshal this work into the service of reactionary
thought, however the book work is transhistorical in scope and not much about the actual historical period known as the
Enlightenment.
What tends to be most memorable about Dialectic of
Enlightenment are those pithy formulations (most
infamously, the three words: “Enlightenment is totalitarian”) that
would appear to confirm what readers are ready to assume: that the
foundations of the Nazi terror were laid by the Enlightenment. It
is all too easy to miss the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno never
draw the conclusion to which the perversity thesis typically
leads: the admonition that, since efforts at enlightenment yield
produce perverse results, the project should be abandoned. In
intent, if not always in execution, Dialectic of Enlightenment
pursues an argument of a rather different sort. As Adorno argued
in Minima Moralia, “Not least among the tasks now
confronting thought is that of placing all the reactionary
arguments against Western culture in the service of progressive
enlightenment.” Such a strategy is not without its risks and, in
their attempt to thwart the perverse effects of an enlightenment
gone awry, Horkheimer and Adorno produced a book that yielded a
perverse effect of its own: a legion of readers who assume that
the book constitutes a rejection of “the Enlightenment project”
root and branch, rather than an attempt to understand how
enlightenment might be rescued from what it threatened to become.
In Horkheimer's correspondence with Hutchins, one sees a bemoaning
of a decline since the Renaissance, which sounds familiar to those
familiar with the argument that Enlightenment breeds nihilism. But:
On the one hand, their point was that enlightenment
falls back into myth: all of the substantive principles that
generations of enlighteners had sought to oppose to mythology turn
out to be no less mythical than the traditional prejudices that
they sought to dismantle. Yet, on the other hand, myth is already
enlightenment: it already represents an effort to understand
nature, rather than simply mimic it and, hence, already represents
a contribution to the process of enlightenment.
Horkheimer had earlier published his essay “The End of Reason,”
according to which the decline of individuality is mirrored in the
history of philosophy, wherein its anti-metaphysical thrust
ultimately vaporizes reason itself. Horkheimer and Adorno were also
engaged with Freud and the study of myth. But if myth is the
genesis of enlightenment, then what did myth replace? The answer
is: magic. Hence Horkheimer and Adorno engaged the concept of
mimesis, which was treated in Walter Benjamin's work. Horkheimer
also studied sociologist Marcel Mauss’ work on magic, and absorbed a
swath of sociological and anthropological literature.
Some of the difficulties of this maddeningly dense
[first] chapter begin to dissipate once it is recognized that the
fulcrum around which it turns has less to do with the opposition
between myth and enlightenment — an opposition that had been a
standard trope among conservative cultural critics in the 1920s —
than with a wildly speculative philosophical anthropology that
sketches an account of the development of human relationships with
nature in which magical/mimetic interactions are replaced by those
efforts at conceptualization and categorization that are
fundamental both to mythological forms of thought and to modern,
scientific approaches to nature. Drawing on Benjamin’s discussion
of the weakening of the “mimetic faculty,” Mauss’ account of
magical practices, and Caillois’ discussion of mimetic forms of
adaptation in the insect world, Dialectic of Enlightenment repeatedly
invokes what Horkheimer characterized in one of the notes appended
to the book as a “hidden history” in which mute, bodily reactions
to the overwhelming force of nature were gradually channeled into
magical practices that controlled and ritualized these spontaneous
forms mimetic adaptation.
The process of enlightenment from mimesis to myth to
demythologization is driven by fear, so the argument goes. Note that
this argument precludes any return to a premodern past.
Meanwhile, Sidney Hook, John Dewey, and Ernest Nagel were busy
defending naturalism from the accusations of the philosophical right
wing. Hook led the charge, with a mighty powerful argument. Norbert
Guterman, a Polish emigre, defended Kierkegaard. He 'suggested that
those “modern ‘existentialist’ philosophers” who claimed to be
Kierkegaard’s heirs had, in fact, far more in common with the
“rationalists” they claimed to denounce'. The arguments of other
debaters are summarized.
Macdonald was already antagonistic to Hook
and company, accusing Hook of failing to understand the why of the
“rising tide of obscurantism”. Macdonald saw the draining of
meaning as a result of historical and social forces, contrasting the
ideological struggle of World War II with that of the Napoleonic
wars. As Schmidt puts it: 'While the armies of revolutionary France
sought to “politicize the struggle,” the forces engaged in the
battle against Hitler’s armies made every effort to play down the
ideological stakes'. I think this aspect of war propaganda is worth
looking into. Macdonald drew a distinction between the affirmative
values of the rising bourgeoisie and the draining of meaning and
value by the contemporary bourgeoisie, intent on preserving
capitalism
sans the assertive progressive values of the early
bourgeoisie. And here one finds Macdonald's sour view of mass
culture. Not surprising that Adorno, author of the landmark essay on
the culture industry, would enthuse over Macdonald.
We see from citations from Horkheimer's letters in 1943 and 1944
that Horkheimer intended to enter the "new failure of nerve" debate,
while immersed in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment project,
which nevertheness did not expand in scope from 1944 to its formal
publication in 1947. Some of what Horkheimer was writing found its
way into
Eclipse of Reason. Horkheimer labeled Hook, Dewey,
and Nagel as positivists, and seems to have been more sympathetic to
their opponents, though he did recognize that they were fighting a
rearguard action. Horkheimer argued that the neopositivists could be
hoisted by the same petard as the neo-Thomists. Horkheimer's schema,
which you will find in
Eclipse of Reason, involves the
question of "objective reason", which has disappeared by the
exclusive modern focus on "subjective reason". Schmidt continues:
If science is to serve as a bulwark against obscurantism
— a stance that Horkheimer sees as fundamental to “the great
tradition of humanism and the Enlightenment” — it is incumbent on
it to provide a principle that can serve as “the criterion for the
true nature of science.” But instead, all that is offered is a
set of “empirical procedures” whose claim to truth rests on
nothing more than the “dogmatic criteria of scientific success.”
In its “preference for uncomplicated words and sentences that can
be grouped at a glance,” positivism falls prey to the
“anti-intellectual, anti-humanistic tendencies apparent in the
development of modern language, as well as cultural life in
general.” Its failure to offer any resistance to these tendencies
suggests that it, too, suffers from a “failure of nerve.”
As Horkheimer himself admitted, his own project was incomplete and
subject to similar criticism, and he was projecting a follow-up
“positive theory of dialectics,” which never came to fruition.
Ruth Nanda Anshen's praise for
Eclipse of Reason drew a
rejoinder from Horkheimer, emphasizing that he does not advocate a
pseudo-religion or a return to myth. ("Objective reason" in this
argument is equated with a return to outmoded metaphysical views.)
Here is a quote directly from Horkheimer:
She leans heavily on pseudo-religious prestige values
and boldly proclaims her belief in some of the most commonplace,
universally accepted ideas. My intentions are precisely the
opposite. In spite of my critique of “subjective reason” and its
relapse into a second mythology – a critique bearing only a
superficial resemblance to certain antipathies nourished by Dr.
Anshen – I have never advocated a return to an even more
mythological “objective reason” borrowed from history. … I have
attacked enlightenment in the spirit of enlightenment, not of
obscurantism.
But Horkheimer's protest was in vain. For the intent of
Dialectic
of Enlightenment is too often and too easily misunderstood.
Schmidt's essays are invaluable in interpreting the full meaning of
this landmark work of Horkheimer and Adorno, which was quite novel in
its time. All things considered, though, I still maintain that the
thesis of this work is false, and that only the seminal chapter on
the culture industry is worth salvaging.
See also:
Jeffrey Herf on Reactionary Modernism & Dialectic of Enlightenment
R. Dumain's Critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment
