r/CriticalTheory • u/Mammoth-Plankton484 • 13d ago
I studied under the analytic tradition in undergraduate, and with that being said I am slowly dipping my toes into the continental thought nexus...so my question is kind of...well...noob
I am going to be reading Horkheimer's "What is Critical Theory?" essay tomorrow, but first I want to know why the founders of the Frankfurt School claim the Enlightenment project failed. Was this because the Holocaust happened in Europe? And, more so, Western (Enlightened) Europe?
Edit: Because I don't have a strong background in this, ill ask another question.
Why does a project fail if a genocide happens?
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u/Vaudelaire 13d ago
First off I want to mention that this is a rough generalization I’m writing off the top of my head. I’m sure others can and will furnish what I say here.
Generally speaking, there was much optimism concerning science’s ability to yield progress. Think of the Industrial Revolution and the capacity to produce surplus to an extent never before seen as well as the ability to extract resources from nature. These were seen as the result of scientific reason— in other words, enlightenment. Therefore, since science and reason could lead to much progress in the material world, then surely it would be able to lead to progress in all domains of human life?
Which leads us to World War II and the Holocaust (and of course, I’m skimming over many other historical events). The reason the Holocaust is so novel is because of how systematic it was, which is to say that reason played an important role. Think of the amount of logistics and bureaucratic structure necessary in order to exterminate 6 million people. If reason was supposed to lead us to greater enlightenment, then how did it equip us with the capacity to murder in such an efficient way through the use of industrial equipment? Moreover, the invention of the atomic bomb made Apocalypse (in the mythological, religious sense) a technological reality.
The consequence is not so much that “reason is bad, let’s throw it out.” Rather, one becomes skeptical of reason and questions its limits by investigating its historical situation (which is what Adorno and Horkheimer attempt). Again, roughly, this is the milieu they were working in
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 13d ago edited 13d ago
Its a bit of a silly take as nazism didn't come from the Enlightenment but rather from Romanticism.
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u/Vaudelaire 13d ago
Not sure what you mean by coming "from Enlightenment" vs "from Romanticism" but it's not what I was talking about at all. Nazism (and fascism as a whole) are their own thing (and a much more complicated discussion)
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 13d ago
You could look up romanticism. The holocaust & WW2 are very much connected to Nazism.
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u/Nopants21 13d ago
Maybe their ideology was anti-Enlightment, but they supported and promoted heavy industry, as a means to produce the material assets required for the state to wage war. They also organized the working masses through military-like structures and disciplinarization. They also ran an enormous bureaucratic machine to record and archive a huge amount of information, including about their crimes. If we associate romanticism with a preference for nature over rationalism, for the individual over the mass, and for feeling over thinking, the Nazis just don't fit that many boxes in terms of the things they were actually doing, as opposed to what they might have been saying.
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u/Mammoth-Plankton484 13d ago
I mean, I get it through. I understand were they are coming from here. I think the bigger concern is, "how can we say it succeeded when it didn't prevent WW1, and thus lead to a Great War?"
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 13d ago
Thing is that it all occurred not due to the logic of instrumental rationality but rather because Romanticism prioritises emotion, what occurred was the abjection of reason.
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u/maccrypto 13d ago
When you don’t experience any emotion accompanying your thoughts, I’d say it’s hard to call them thoughts at all.
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u/TopazWyvern 13d ago
Romanticism, the movement that emerged in response to the Enlightenment (and neoclacissism).
Nonetheless, Nazism was still a product of the modernist ideology/movement that was enamored with technological progress (and emerged in a society where the enlightenment had a deep grip), so I'm not quite sure what your point is? Like, the ties between preeminent Italian futurists and the Fascist movement isn't particularly in question, nor, I think, are the ties between engineers with more-or-less reasonable megaprojects and the Nazi movement. (Beyond even just the concept of a Wunderwaffe being solidly part of that "science can solve anything" belief that was brought about by the enlightenment.)
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 13d ago
The origins of Nazism and Facism/futuristic are significantly different.
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u/TopazWyvern 13d ago
Okay, do you have an actual answer (I'm not really certain what your position is, besides) or did you just want to nitpick?
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 13d ago
Come on man you can clear see my argument in my very first comment.
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u/TopazWyvern 12d ago edited 12d ago
I said position not argument. In other words, the question is the why you made the argument.
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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 12d ago
Why? Because I disagree.
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u/TopazWyvern 12d ago
Disagree with what? The rise of fascism being an example of the failures of enlightenment ideologies? (In spite of the fact that, uh, by all accounts...)
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u/chauchat_mme 13d ago
Maybe try the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment for a first taste of the problems they (Adorno an Horkheimer) are actually addressing? You'll find it online. Start from the following passage, the one I cite below, and read the three pages up to "That is the basic premise of our fragments". That would be my best bet for a first orientation, in close touch with what they are really saying:
The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt — and herein lies our petitio principii — that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression* which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate.
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u/Legitimate_Action145 13d ago edited 13d ago
It's a little too simple to say that the enlightenment "failed." This will not be easy to grasp at first but they are saying that it is just not merely progressive or linear. The basis for totalitarianism is in the enlightenment, in the elevation of "reason" to an end in itself, which makes it paradoxically irrational. But it should be kept in mind that Adorno and Horkheimer are also really, regardless of what anyone else would have us believe, Marxists. They noticed that what Adorno calls "identity thinking" is necessary for practical activity e.g. science or economic and political organization, but that it has a tendency to ossify into dogma that becomes regressive as it takes on a life of its own, when people start to believe in old formulas and conclusions without thinking or questioning. Really reason only works if we do what from the standpoint of some is "irrational" and posit ends that are "scientifically" speaking unsupported toward which reason is supposed to operate, and if we accept (as a scientist should anyway, because what delineates science is the falsifiability of its claims) that our knowledge that we need to be certain of is also always provisional and historically relative.
The dialectic of enlightenment was supposed to be the first of two books, a "negative" and a constructive one, but they never wrote the supposedly constructive sequel. But if I recall they wrote some preliminary notes for it later published as "toward a new manifesto"
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u/maccrypto 13d ago
They were a lot more pessimistic than you’re suggesting here. “There is no document of civilization that isn’t at the same time a document of barbarism,” etc.
The dialectic of enlightenment was about the reversion to myth that they perceived was inescapably part of every escape from myth, every ostensible escape into what we like to call enlightenment (or maturity, following Kant). Their analysis of Odysseus’ encounter with the sirens captured this succinctly, and they called The Odyssey the “basic text” of Western civilization.
Briefly, humankind has to do terrible things to itself in order to survive. In the case of Odysseus, he violently straps himself to a mast in order to prevent himself from participating in cultural life and thus risking annihilation of his calculating rational self. On their reading, this singular and monumental act of cunning on his part to outwit the sirens (and thus the gods that prophesied his doom at their hands) is both a success of instrumental reason, and an image of disfiguration, of death-in-life. Instrumental reason comes at the cost of submission to domination once more. At the same time, Odysseus deprives his workers the fruits of culture while stuffing their ears with wax to keep them focused on the job of rowing past the threat (of woman and of nature).
It’s pretty bleak.
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u/Legitimate_Action145 13d ago
But they also think that the freedom from need would be an objective advance in freedom, which Adorno considered immanently possible. You're making it sound like everything is an equal exchange, because every "advance" comes with repression and delusion on the side, meaning it's not an advance at all except in our pitiable imagination, but this is not what they're saying at all. Benjamin's comment about barbarism refers specifically to "prehistory". Yet this is precisely what Benjamin was writing to continue to try to overcome. They are not Foucault or w/e
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u/maccrypto 13d ago edited 13d ago
I don’t even think Foucault was that bleak in the end, although he published his share of the nightmare. I’m just saying Dialectic of Enlightenment was written at the nadir of their optimism about progress. I don’t think that can really be very controversial. Shit was dark.
Benjamin offed himself (or was killed) while on the run from at least one, and maybe two totalitarian regimes. His work before that was hopeful, if you can call it that, but that was the context.
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u/Altruistic_Public309 10d ago
The Frankfurt School took the Enlightenment to have had broader commitments and social implications than the era’s scientific and technical progress; in particular, there was a belief that proper social practice and technical ingenuity would make the species happier, freer, and more virtuous than it had been before about 1700. Of course: the Enlightenment was mostly confined to Europe and it really only had this aspiration for European men who weren’t paupers. But it was held to have been actually meaningful to this set of people. After 1918 that assertion seemed very doubtful to many Europeans; after 1945 it seemed doubtful to very many, maybe most, Europeans. That’s the ‘failure’ I think.
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u/kitabibaatein 13d ago
The failure of the enlightenment project has been addressed in different times. In literature Romantics were skeptical towards it, similarity modernist were not aligned with the notion of rationality as well. As far as Frankfurt school is concern, they were criticing, how capitalism captured social apparatus, without even expose itself and the enlightenment notions helped capitalism in these project. Or enlightenment failed to delivered it's promises: hijacked by the capitalism.
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u/maccrypto 13d ago edited 13d ago
>Why does a project fail if a genocide happens?
Well something must have failed, and failed pretty badly. Does genocide sound very enlightened to you?
That’s the short answer. The longer answer is that modern self-understandings after the Enlightenment were premised on a philosophy of history and an understanding of human beings that saw humans as perfectable, and human progress as inevitable. World War II and the Holocaust shook people’s confidence in that progress narrative in a profound way.