The Dialectic of Enlightenment
My preferred way of engaging with books is reconstruction. These notes were created during my reading process to aid my own understanding and not written for the purpose of instruction. With that said, I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they are helpful to other readers.
Summary
The Dialectic of Enlightenment is worth reading because and not despite the seeming absurdity of its central claim: the history of humanity is one of regress rather than progress. Furthermore, the culprit for this regress is the pride of modernity: our increased ability to control and manipulate the external world. While the conclusions of the text may be too pessimistic and extreme, the main critiques within it of mathematics, science, abstraction and knowledge in general are nonetheless relevant.
This book, notoriously difficult to parse, has no semblance of structure or systematicity. Instead, it presents chunks of different philosophical arguments (the book was originally titled Philosophical Fragments) that are all equidistant from the central thrust of the argument. This form was chosen because of the shared belief that society, as it was, was too dysfunctional, inconsistent, and chaotic for any consistent and structured truth to be presented. This summary is, therefore, an attempt to systematize the theoretical foundations of the Dialectic as found in its first chapter. I will present a philosophy of history as well as three different but compatible ways to interpret it.
The Dialectic’s philosophy of history is split into four distinct eras defined by a progression in thought. The magical era interacts with discrete entities through imitation. The mythical era interacts with elements controlled by gods who reveal their mechanisms in myth. The metaphysical era deals directly with concepts such as being, suffering, and love. Currently, the positivist era interacts with the world through the abstractions of mathematics and logic. This progression is motivated by a fear of the unknown and uncontrollable. As a reflex, we’ve expanded the reach of our knowledge and its ability to predict and control reality by making our thinking more abstract, total, utilitarian, unifying, and calculative. The final progression of this development, mathematics and logic, claim to know or at least be able to know the full extent of reality.
The first interpretation is that this history is circular. Myth is no different from positivism because it is rooted from an urge to explain and control. Positivism is no different from myth because it renders the world fated before the rigid laws of mathematics and rejects the authority of concepts. The second interpretation is that this history is ambivalent. Humanity has progressed in its ability to dominate the external world by an increasing domination of itself. This is the unspoken price of discipline. The very abstractedness which makes our thinking so powerful is also what estranges us from ourselves, society, and nature. The last interpretation is an optimistic one: the potential to actualize true freedom has increased even if our freedom has become increasingly restricted.
Context
In the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in and responding to a time overrun by, what they perceived to be, totalitarianism. Surprisingly they equate the three systems of power — the Soviet Union controlled by the communist party, Germany controlled by the Nazis, and America controlled by economic monopolies and culture that is heavily influenced by capital — as equally totalitarian and undesirable systems. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, “what [they] had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism”.
Philosophy of History
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlightenment does not refer to the specific 18th-century intellectual movement but what could be “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought”. That is to say, the historical development of our conceptual schemas through which we view and interact with the world. The goal of Enlightenment was always to “[liberate] human beings from fear and [install] them as masters”. Bacon expressed the hopes for Enlightenment well when he envisioned a patriarchal future where humans, having conquered mythical superstition and in perfect control of knowledge, establish themselves as autonomous masters of the natural world:
Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her by action.
However, the belief that “the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature” proved naïve, as the now “wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”. Indeed, in each of the four historical eras — magic, myth, metaphysics, positivism — we gained more control of nature through acquiring more knowledge by advancing our thought, through Enlightenment. But we became stewards of knowledge at the price of adapting ourselves and society as to introduce new forces, no less pernicious and totalitarian, which now threaten our autonomy.
The philosophy of history presented has four distinct eras. Each era is defined by its dominant mode of thinking and the knowledge that it produces. The primary concern of this mental activity “is not ‘satisfaction, which men call truth,’ but ‘operation,’ the effective procedure”. The purpose of knowledge is neither truth nor satisfaction but rather production: helping man manipulate the external world according to his needs. History begins with magical thinking whose defining characteristic is that it sees difference within the world. It sees the world as constituted by a set of related, interacting but ontologically distinct entities. The objects manipulated by magic were specific: “The rites of the shaman were directed at the wind, the rain, the snake outside or the demon inside the sick person, not at materials or specimens”. This changes drastically in positivism where the object in science is a mere manifestation of a more fundamental matter: “the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities”.
Because of this assumed difference, magic influences the world through imitation. This imitation is explicit when, for example, a shaman imitates a demon to ward it off or a hunter imitates the bear to scare it away. But imitation is not limited between subject and object but also among objects themselves. Imitation between objects is representation, the idea that certain objects have a special kinship and connection. “What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god”. This changes drastically in positivism where “representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar”. Science sees no real differences and treats objects within the world as commutable.
The magical age, the era least touched by Enlightenment, already contains within it the seeds for its burgeoning: fear. “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of Enlightenment”. Since this age is also the age where we have the least amount of knowledge of the world, it is also the age where there is the most amount of unknowns and where this fear of the unknown is most pertinent. This fear and the corresponding reactive instinct to assuage it by knowing more about the world, by subjugating as much as the world underneath the rule of thought as possible is the sole driving force of this philosophy of history.
In the magical era, the reflex to this instinct is mana — an ineffable substance containing ambivalent powers of genesis and destruction, light and dark, etc. Mana was thought to exist behind certain sites and not others, delimiting the sacred from the profane. Mana is not a solution to this fear, that is to say, it did not expand the reach of our knowledge nor provide new means of manipulating the world and thus is not part of the Enlightenment. It is a reflex to this fear. Mana and the other common metaphysical belief of animism was an admission of ignorance, a submission to the unknown, not an attempt to conquer it. They acknowledge and submit to this unknown by equating the nonliving — the calculable and masterable — with the living — the unpredictable and untamable — while positivism attempts to conquer this unknown by equating the living with the nonliving. This reflex of mana which “springs from human fear” is still significant because it represents the first attempt of “the doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force”. This doubling is the predecessor of abstraction, of the urge to look beyond distinct objects to find a common substance, which is paramount to the development of Enlightenment.
If the magical era was the starting point of history and Mana but a meager reflex to fear, then the mythical era represents the beginning of the Enlightenment and its dominant mode of thinking, myth, the first solution to fear. Myth is Enlightenment because it advanced the sphere of knowledge, limited the realm of the unknown, and thus provided new ways to manipulate reality. Myth, like science, “sought to report, to name, to tell of origins — but therefore also to narrate, record, explain”. It is founded upon a desire to explain the world, to reduce it, to make it more manageable and tamable by thought. The manipulation of the external world became more unified and centralized: “The local spirits and demons had been replaced by heaven and its hierarchy, the incantatory practices of the magician by the carefully graduated sacrifice and the labor of enslaved men mediated by command”. This represented an advancement in two ways. First, more of reality was made intelligible and known, albeit through the unpredictable tempers of deities. Second, reality was controllable through the centralized mediator of worship instead of interacting directly with each independent object. This hierarchical view of knowledge was made possible as the social world itself shifted from an egalitarian nomadism to a hierarchical society with fixed property. Material reality progresses symbiotically with knowledge: the former inspiring new structures for the latter, while the latter accelerates the development of the former.
Just as how the shift from nomadism to fixed property engendered the mythical age, an even more accelerated form of commerce and production brought about the metaphysical age and its dominant mode of thinking — concepts. The most representative of concepts, the Platonic forms with their claim to universal validity and hierarchical structure, originated “in the marketplace of Athens; they reflected with the same fidelity the laws of physics, the equality of freeborn citizens, and the inferiority of women, children, and slaves” (Adorno 16). The metaphysical age is where philosophy came to be. Concepts span a wide range of domains, from the metaphysical — being, form, substance — to the humanistic — joy, suffering, love — to the social — norms, signs, values. They are an even more direct, universal, and predictable method of interpreting and controlling the world. “Greeks from the Nile, were converted by these cosmologies into Hylozoic principles and elements, the whole ambiguous profusion of mythical demons was intellectualized to become the pure form of ontological entities. Even the patriarchal gods of Olympus were finally assimilated by the philosophical logos as the Platonic Forms”. No longer is reality mediated by these unpredictable deities; it can be understood through conceptual understanding. Concepts are an advancement in thought over myth as myth was to magic.
The final step in this philosophy of history is the age of positivism and its mode of thinking: science. This era only accepts the verifiable data of experience and the conclusions drawn out of it through logic and mathematics as legitimate knowledge. It rejects any a priori speculation of metaphysics and “suppressed the universal categories’ claims to truth as superstition … From now on matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties”. Not only was a priori speculation renounced but any subjective interpretations were rejected. Things could only be grasped objectively in “their abstract spatial-temporal relationships” and not subjectively “as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning — this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned”. In fact, all humanistic thinking about “quality, activity and suffering, being and existence” were denounced, “science could manage without such categories”. With the expulsion of a priori speculation, subjective accounts, and humanistic thinking, concepts themselves were effectively killed off by positivism: “Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics behind”. Of course, the appearance of positivism was made possible by an accelerated a new form of production relations. “The deductive form of science mirrors hierarchy and compulsion … The entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor”.
The arrow to which thought advances in this philosophy of history has the following characteristics. Thought becomes more calculating to help it exert more control over the world: “For Enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion”. Thought becomes more unifying as to find a higher leverage point to encompass and influence the world. “For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows” (Adorno 3). Thought becomes more utilitarian, reducing the world into what can be of use for it. “Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them”. Thought becomes more abstract such that similarities can be found between more disparate objects, such that a wider variety of objects can be subjected to calculation. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities”. The thinking subject becomes more distant to the objects which he controls to allow for abstraction: “The distance of subject from object, the presupposition of abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by means of the ruled”.
These trends changed our thinking in general, and language in particular, by emphasizing signs over images. Signs are abstract representations which reference objects through meaning, while images are imitative representations which reference objects through their formal likeness. Language began as having both of these characteristics; “in them sign and image coincided. As the hieroglyphs attest, the word originally also had a pictorial function”. But, through a division of labor, science took upon the role of sign while art took upon the role of image. The primacy of the former over the latter in our society merely exposes what we already observed in the move away from mimesis in the mythical era: “Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work” bolstered by abstract thinking. Under the light of the aforementioned direction to which thought advances, it is clear why sign won over image. If, to gain power, thought needs to calculate, unify, utilize, abstract, and distance itself from the object, then it cannot afford to splinter into increasingly specific imitative images. Only by distancing itself from objects and unifying their common elements through the abstraction of signs can it calculate and utilize them effectively.
It is unsurprising then that thought as sign pushed to the abstracted extreme — math and logic — are the epistemic arbiters of positivism. “It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable”. Finally, thought found a tool which any and every phenomenon could be reduced into and calculated by. For the first time, it had a grasp on the entirety of reality.
But this grasp is a suffocating one. “Enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be”. Enlightenment is totalitarian because it gets to choose what counts as valid knowledge. “Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is prejudged. When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long-familiar before any value has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems”. We are forced to interpret the world through math, logic, and data filtered through the existing concepts of the world which positivism alone allows to be discussed. But of course, mathematics has no resources of which to critique and better these concepts. Mathematics may be able to forecast or even increase GDP, but it has no method to criticize having GDP as the primary metric to be optimized. Because positivism does not permit any concepts other than the existing ones through which data is interpreted, math and logic must contend themselves with merely making more efficient the existing systems, “to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle”.
Another issue is that since all of math and logic operates under laws, “thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process,” and the thinking subject becomes a mere vessel, a substratum for such thought. By removing any humanistic element from thinking, positivism also removed any agency in man.
The corollary to this fatalism of man is the determinism of the world under the grasp of positivism, for the same reason that the world seems to operate under similarly immutable laws. “Nature itself is idealized on the model of the new mathematics. In modern terms, it becomes a mathematical manifold”.
The total grasp of mathematics limits thought to only be able to think about the immediate: “mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it”. Through these three ways just discussed — denunciation of new concepts, fatalism of man, and determinism of the world — thought confines the modern man to perpetuating what already exists as if it were inevitable.
This philosophy of history starts with an urge to be liberated from a fear of the unknown through broadening the scope of knowledge. It ends with an, at least perceived, total conquest of this unknown by subjugating all of reality under thought. This reality, however, is completely determined with, as we will soon explore, an equally frightening cause for fear of its own.
The Circularity of Enlightenment
The first of three ways to interpret this philosophy of history is that it is circular, namely, it began where it started. The authors themselves claim that this essay “can be broadly summed up in two theses: Myth is already Enlightenment, and Enlightenment reverts to mythology”.
The first half of this sentence, that myth contains the defining characteristics of Enlightenment, is easier to understand for the task of both is to expand our understanding and control of the world to relieve fear. “Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins — but therefore also to narrate, record, explain” just as Enlightenment is, first and foremost, and advancement in thought in the direction that would enable us to better explain, and therefore control, phenomena.
The second half of this sentence, that Enlightenment contains the defining characteristics of myth, is true in two ways. First, both myth and Enlightenment are exempt from the criticism of concepts. This is a defining characteristic of myth: “Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts”. One can offer the most rigorous conceptual critique of the reality of a myth without damaging the faith of its most fervent adherents. What sustains myth isn’t primarily its conceptual plausibility and whether it can stand up to the test of falsification, thus, in a sense, it is exempt from the critique of concepts for it operates in an orthogonal epistemic plane. Enlightenment, at least expressed in its most recent form of positivism, is also exempt from conceptual thinking. “Mythology itself set in motion the endless process of Enlightenment by which, with ineluctable necessity, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief, until even the concepts of mind, truth, and, indeed, Enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic”. That is to say, within the movement of Enlightenment there always existed an element of self-critique of not only specific thoughts but the type of thinking at hand. Specifically, every system is being criticized that it is still not close enough to the actual, that it still cannot map out and control the entirety of reality, “that it is only a belief”. This force of self-criticism is what gave birth to concepts in the metaphysical era that critiqued the unreality of the myths of the previous era. But, in the move to positivism where mathematics and logic took reign, these concepts themselves were being attacked as still far too removed from reality. Thus, both Enlightenment thinking at its infancy, as mythology, and at its maturity, as positivism, are exempted from conceptual criticism. We must imagine that a fervent believer of the myth of intelligent creation will dismiss the concept of evolution as blasphemous just as a positivist economist would dismiss the concept of alienation as ungrounded and subjective.
The other defining characteristic of myth which Enlightenment, in its mature positivist form, takes on is fatedness and determinacy. A common theme in myth is “The principle of the fated necessity which caused the downfall of the mythical hero, and finally evolved as the logical conclusion from the oracular utterance”. This idea that a prediction in the realm of thought is inescapable and eventually actualized in the realm of reality, ”refined to the cogency of formal logic, [is precisely what underlies] every rationalistic system of [current] Western Philosophy”. Positivism carries with it fatedness in ways we have already described: it prevents any chance of breaking away from the status quo by only permitting familiar concepts; it makes thought autonomous and objectified and thereby removes the agency of the subject; it makes the world seem as if it did operate under a set of predictable laws. “Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape. For mythology had reflected in its forms the essence of the existing order — cyclical motion, fate, domination of the world as truth — and had renounced hope. In the terseness of the mythical image, as in the clarity of the scientific formula, the eternity of the actual is confirmed and mere existence is pronounced as the meaning it obstructs”. The danger of this determinism is that we completely lose any and all agency and are reduced to automatons. I can no longer control or even relate to my own subject experience but must understand my experience through the tools of abstraction: e.g. I may feel confined to the statistics of the abstracted race, gender, and economic groups that I am a part of and believe that there is nothing in my power I can do to transcend these outcomes. Abstraction is fate in a modernized form: “Abstraction, the instrument of Enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd”, which Hegel identified as the outcome of Enlightenment”. This is indeed a circular progression of history: “Through the mediation of the total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity”.
The Ambivalence of Enlightenment
Of course, to say that history is circular is not to say that nothing has changed whatsoever but merely that some significant elements have been repeated. A second and compatible interpretation of this philosophy of history is that it is ambivalent: it represents both progress and regress, increase and decrease. This reading makes an appearance early on in the preface:
The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before.
I will attempt to explain what exactly increases and what decreases by synthesizing two terms from the text: power and goodness. Enlightenment marks an increase in power and a decrease in goodness.
By power, I mean the ability for any system, a gene, a biological organism, a group, a name, an idea, to exist. At any temporal slice of the universe, any system that “exists well” — that is to say, there are numerous copies of it — must ipso facto be powerful. Certainly, this does not mean it will continue to be powerful nor does this explain why it is powerful, but any system which exists abundantly at a certain time is, in the way I have defined it, powerful. Power is the Darwinian currency, it is orthogonal to normativity and alone accounts for the degree to which any and every system exists.
To exist and continuously exist, to remain powerful, one must both self-preserve — protect the integrity of the existing system — and self-propagate — replicate and multiply the existing system. The self-preserving imperative is fundamental to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer identified that “Spinoza’s proposition: ‘the endeavor of preserving oneself is the first and only basis of virtue, contains the true maxim of all Western civilization”. Similarly, the self-propagating imperative is implicit in their discussion of representation, for what is representation but to manifest the self through an intermediary that is an extension of the self: “Just as the capacity to be represented is the measure of power, the mightiest person being the one who can be represented in the most functions, so it is also the vehicle of both progress and regression”. I believe that the ability to preserve and propagate is actually what we refer to when we speak of power even colloquially. Intuitively, we think of power as control, but I believe it is the specific type of control which helps a system be fruitful and multiply.
Different systems preserve and propagate through different mechanisms. Humankind propagates through sexual reproduction; an idea propagates through transmission. Oftentimes these mechanisms are at odds with one another, just as a virus might propagate at the expense of its host. Furthermore, what counts as preservation and propagation changes depending on how we define a system, what we think the identity conditions of a system are. For example, when analyzing the power of capitalism, one might consider current China a preservation of capitalism because it permits private property while another who defines capitalism with more stringent conditions may not consider it as such. Power is therefore not an objective metric but is dependent upon both the systems we choose and what we think the identity conditions for these systems are.
We must now ask what are the systems that have increased in power in Enlightenment. The most obvious answer is that both the individual human whose identity is their physical body as well as humanity whose identity is the biological constituents that makes us human have become more powerful. That is to say, both the individual and humanity as a whole have become better in ensuring the protection, survival, and propagation of the physical parts of what make us human. This is identical to the domination over nature which constantly threatened our physical survival detailed in this essay. But this is also quite a sweeping, bland, uninteresting, and, given the regression of the mental parts of humanity as we will soon discuss, misleading picture. The more specific and accurate answer is that the schematized individual and the dominated whole have become more powerful.
A schematized individual is one who satisfies a specific schema of industrial society. “Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schemata assigned to it”. The schematized worker is productive and obedient, the schematized capitalist is profit-seeking, a schematized house-wife is dependent and non-ambitious, the schematized successful person has multiple houses, cars, and luxury goods, etc. Each schema contributes to the operation of capitalism in some fundamental way. A schematized individual’s identity condition is that they fit one of these specific schemas. For a schematized individual to cease existing, the human need not perish. To fail to meet any schemas is enough. Conversely, this system propagates through conversion when, for example, if a hippie decides to be a hedge fund manager. To say that the schematized individual has become more powerful is to say that, just as hawks who multiply rapidly on an island of doves, there are more schematized individuals in society and less genuine individualism. Why might this system be powerful? One answer would be that since schematized individuals contribute to the operation of capitalism, they are aligned with the powers at be and have more resources to advertise their lifestyle.
A dominated whole is any group of individuals who have chosen to discipline and subjugate themselves, their inner psyche, as not to be disciplined and subjugated by nature. They dominate themselves to dominate nature: “Power confers increased cohesion and strength on the social whole in which it is established. The division of labor, through which power manifests itself socially, serves the self-preservation of the dominated whole”. Why might this system be powerful? One answer would be that because they are the most effective stewards of nature, they have the most resources to protect themselves, thus ensuring self-preservation. The system self-propagates either through the allure of its material wealth as was the case with China’s reform and opening or through force as was the case when America forced the free market on Japan through military might.
“The realization of [these dominated wholes implies that their] rationality is thereby multiplied over again”. There is a third and more appropriate subject for an increase in power: the “rationality” of the dominated whole, power itself. That is to say, power is becoming more and more prevalent in people’s minds. An increasing amount of decisions are made based on power, self-preservation and control, instead of goodness, what would be good for them and society. This is true in two senses. First, the Enlightenment subordinates “life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation” and makes it seem as if control of nature was the sole telos of life. “The control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life”. Second, an increasing number of decisions in our life, due to the oppressive nature of the dominated whole on the schematized individual, is a genuine choice “between survival and doom” and thus of power and self-preservation. Of course, we aren’t constantly threatened with literal death. The idea would be that enlightened society has become so ruthless and competitive such that we are constantly presented with decisions where only a small subset of the options would enable us to preserve the identity which enabled us to make this decision in the first place.
An example would be if a CEO were presented with the option to either maximize profit at the expense of the environment or to protect the environment, underperform, and be ousted by the board. When we consider their identity to be a human being, either option would enable them to self-preserve. But as CEO, and this identity is not arbitrary because it was what enabled them to make this decision in the first place, the only option that would enable them to self-preserve is the former. This is not to say that there is no genuine choice left, they may very well choose the latter at the expense of losing the ability to make future choices. But, over the long run, the only CEOs left are the ones who chose and consistently choose the former. Of course, this is an extremely simplified and constructed scenario and certainly not all options to self-preserve see such a drastic divergence between self and group interest. But it does show that Enlightened society is fated in some way. It is so efficient as to not tolerate any slight hinderance such that for most decisions, only a few choices are self-preserving. From a societal perspective, the hand is forced in the sense that only those who choose these self-preserving options are left to make future decisions. Enlightenment brought about a decrease in the set of self-preserving choices because it made societies more competitive internally. More people are competing for your position so the margin of your error, as well as the set of plausible choices, decrease.
Enlightenment seeks to escape fate but traps itself in fate: “Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell”. That is to say, under the compulsion of power — the primal urge to self-preserve from the physical threat of nature — human labor leads us to conquer the determinism and fatedness from the uncontrollable forces of nature we find in myth. But through the mechanisms of power we have just discussed, humanity falls back under the spell of fatedness from societal instead of natural forces.
“Adaptation to the power of progress furthers the progress of power, constantly renewing the degenerations which prove successful progress, not failed progress, to be its own antithesis. The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression”. Each individual’s adaptation to meet the power of progress — the standards as set by the schemas — in the aggregate lead to the progress of power. That is to say, power becomes more prolific as the sole arbiter of decisions. The more everyone tries to meet these standards, the more competitive society will be and the more decisions will have to be made out of self-preservation. And it is precisely this progress of power, that comes with regress. To this and to the concept of goodness we now turn.
By goodness, I mean the actuality of any and all positive states of well-being and the prevention of any and all negative ones. Goodness is invoked whenever the authors use terms such as “freedom”, “satisfaction”. “pleasure”, “happiness”. In like manner, the regression of Goodness encompasses “alienation”, “estrangement”, “suffering”, and “fear”. The subject of goodness is the only subject capable of experiencing it: conscious sentient beings. Specifically, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlightenment is a regression in the goodness of humans in two significant ways.
First and foremost, Enlightenment is a form of regress in goodness, or stagnation at best, because it does not liberate us from the fear we sought to escape from. In the magical era, when our grasp of the world through thought was the weakest, we experienced a fear of the unknown that we thought would be alleviated by increasing our sphere of knowledge. And yet “today, when Bacon’s utopia, in which “we should command nature in action,” has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself”. In positivism, where everything is known or at least knowable, this fear did not subside and proved itself to be not a fear of the unknown but the uncontrollable. We made this mistaken attribution because this new fear encompasses the old fear: what is unknown is ipso facto uncontrollable. Not only is this fear preserved, but it is also in some sense worse because it has become total. “In the enlightened world, mythology has permeated the sphere of the profane”. That is to say, mythology, specifically that of the magical era, confines fear to a limited arena: that of Mana, that of the sacred. “It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness”. The world is thus divided into the unknown, uncontrollable, and sacred sphere of Mana and the known sphere of the profane which could be influenced through mimesis. But as positivism made the entire world known and profane but also deterministic, every part of reality seemed “eternally immune to intervention” and thus fear-inducing. It must be added that it is not simply our conceptual schemas which make us seem powerless against the world, although that is a large contributor, but the actually deterministic way in which production relations are organized. Our current fear is of the same quality but all the more total because there is no place to hide. Before positivism, fatalism was reserved for the unknown realm that was clearly delineated from a known realm where man had agency. But “the fatalism by which incomprehensible death was sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life. The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans as an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the world, which is without issue, to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless”. Ironically, the attempt of the self to preserve autonomy and prevent an overpowering external force from rendering it a mere object actualized this very possibility.
Furthermore, not only did our urge for domination actualize our greatest fears but we also paid for it by being alienated from reality. In this second way, Enlightenment also represents a regression of goodness. “Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind”.
First, we are estranged from all dominated objects (human beings and ourselves included) because the price we paid for unification and abstraction is distance. We can no longer relate to the immediate and the visceral and are forced to interact with reality through a lens of abstraction at a distance. Experience becomes mediated. The price we pay for utility is calculation. We can no longer relate to any object in-and-of-itself and must judge value based off of what it can provide. Experience becomes polluted by means-ends thinking: every moment is incomplete for we cannot value it without knowing what it will provide in the future. Adding fuel to the fire, the external world of dominated objects is also exerting incredible power over us, as mentioned in our discussion of fear.
Second, we are estranged from all humans (ourselves included) because the price we pay for calculation is the removal of agency. Only that which is non-living, that which has no agency and operates by laws alone is a valid object for calculation. “Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things”. And subjectivity whatsoever is “itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order, which therefore run all the more smoothly … [Positivism] eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm”. Instead, whatever subjectivity and individualism may appear is only an illusion, resulting from “the countless agencies of mass production and its culture [which] impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures”.
On top of these two ways of estrangement, for the self is both an object and a human, we further estrange the self by numbing our own senses. The unspoken price of discipline is self-mutilation. “Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self — the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings — was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood”. To develop into calculable, economic machines, we have had to suppress our random but legitimate human urges, to learn not to listen to ourselves. The more productive and complex the task, the more one needs to do this: “The more complex and sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the operation of which the system of production has long since attuned the body, the more impoverished are the experiences of which the body is capable”.
We have arrived at our conclusion: Enlightenment, much like a parasite, is the progress of power at the expense of its hosts who experience a regress in goodness. This is a very pessimistic conclusion because this progress of power is meaningless if not downright undesirable if what exists and is being multiplied is a being who lacks goodness. Man started off unalienated but fragile in the magical era and his wish of preservation and propagation was fulfilled. But what propagated, the identity that carried over, was simply the physical parts of man while his mental sphere became tormented with alienation.
In the final analysis, “the essence of Enlightenment is the choice between alternatives, and the inescapability of this choice is that of power. Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self”. Throughout this entire process of Enlightenment, individual humans were always presented with two options at every juncture: remain powerless and preserve goodness or become powerful at the expense of goodness. We can either be dominated by reality or be estranged from reality and dominate it. This choice is the essence of Enlightenment, and its outcome is inescapable not because we can never choose the former. There is always a genuine choice for an individual. Its outcome is inescapable because power, over the long run, is inescapable. The individuals who choose the latter will simply be able to replicate their choice better either through force or advertisement. The latter group “reproduces” better (ie. is more powerful) than the former. Society is fated to trend more and more towards power regardless of what the individual chooses. “The inescapability of this choice is [the inescapability] of power”.
Bacon’s dream was actualized albeit in an ironic manner. Knowledge indeed was out of the control of kings but also everyone else. Humanity was made into a mere vessel that serviced the propagation of knowledge. “Bacon, dreamed of the many things “which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command, [of which] their spials and intelligencers can give no news.” Just as he wished, those things have been given to the bourgeois, the enlightened heirs of the kings. In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed”.
I will now list out a set of theses on power and goodness in the general to better understand the dynamics of these forces:
Just as cities will not find peace until philosophers become kings or kings philosophers, humanity will not flourish until the good become powerful or the powerful good. The truth of this thesis is tautological: humanity will flourish if and only if there exists an abundant number (power) of individuals who flourish (goodness). It is not enough to achieve the good, but the way in which one is good must continuously spread and replicate that goodness. The powerful but not good is evil, the good but not powerful is impotent.
There can be a convergence between the powerful and the good. Some systems are powerful because they are good. One could argue that democracy has spread simply because constituents within non-democratic systems desire the goodness they see democratic citizens enjoy. Some systems are good because they are powerful. Bitcoin is stable and secure because there are so many decentralized nodes that run the protocol. Adorno and Horkheimer paint an incredibly pessimistic view of history by arguing that the powerful can never be good because to be powerful one must interact with the world in an estranged, calculative, and soulless manner.
There can be a divergence between power and the good. The canonical example is the repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment where we start with 1000 random algorithms that play repeated prisoner’s dilemma with another randomly matched algorithm in the pool. The winner within the duel replicates itself in the loser. That is to say, there are now two copies of the winning algorithm and zero copies of the losing algorithm. This process is repeated ad infinitum. The most “good” scenario, as measured by the aggregate payouts algorithms would receive, is if all 1000 algorithms only played cooperate. But such a system which is the most “good” will easily be overrun by one lone algorithm that chose to consistently defect, beat whatever algorithm it was playing against, and replicate itself repeatedly. This is the archetypal tension between power and goodness.
Power is a function of the good. That is to say, power is the aggregate result of each individual pursuing their own goodness function.
In living systems, power explains what exists and why while goodness explains what these existents are striving towards.
One ought never to pursue power for its own sake but only so much as to sustain the good.
The Potential of Enlightenment
Lastly, there is one positive interpretation of this philosophy of history that is offered. Enlightenment is a process of increase in the potential for the fulfillment of true freedom. That is to say, each step of the way, there is an increased potential for a state in which we neither dominate ourselves and others nor are we dominated by nature to be actualized.
First, this potential lies in our increased capacities for material control that would free us from the domination by nature. We simply have more effective ways of manipulating the external world even if we do not currently utilize it properly: “Poverty … is growing beyond measure, together with the capacity permanently to abolish poverty”.
Second, this potential lies in our growing realization that the fatedness of society is reinforced by our particular social conditions and can, therefore, be altered. To put it in terms we have already developed, the necessity of making decisions based on power is not an objective natural fact but a social fact due to the rules our society operates upon. And this should be expected, given our definition of power. What is powerful depends highly on the larger system. Just as a tiger thrives in the jungle but meets its end in the ocean, the estrangement, competitiveness, and calculation that is selected for in our current economic system might not be in a radically different one. The realization of the socially reinforced nature of power and domination is the prerequisite to escape it.
Enlightenment accelerates this realization simply by making its conclusions more and more obvious. “Today, with the transformation of the world into industry, the perspective of the universal, the social realization of thought is so full open to view that thought is repudiated by the rulers themselves as mere ideology”. As the entire world is transformed into human-controlled industry, it becomes increasingly clear that domination increasingly comes from society rather than nature. It is socially realized. Leaders can no longer explain “their own atrocities as necessary consequences of logical regularities, in resolute contrast to earlier bourgeois apologetics”, because the role of humanity in domination is becoming evident. Instead, they advertise their plans with the much less determined, much more agent, but no less “mythological lies about ‘mission’ and ‘fate’ … The rulers themselves do not believe in objective necessity, even if they sometimes call their machinations by that name. They posture as engineers of world history”.
That is not to say this domination is sustained by the minority whose removal would actualize freedom. We all contribute to the sustenance of the current system by the conceptual frameworks and schemas we operate under. “What is done to all by the few always takes the form of the subduing of individuals by the many: the oppression of society always bears the features of oppression by a collective … It is the concrete conditions of work in society which enforce conformism — not the conscious influences which additionally render the oppressed stupid and deflect them from the truth”. In other words, it is the summation of all our individual decisions that render society’s oppressive reason necessary. But “that reason’s necessity is illusion, no less than the freedom of the industrialists, which reveals its ultimately compulsive nature in their inescapable struggles and pacts”.
What prevents this illusion from dissipating and our freedom from actualizing is “the suspension of the concept” as discussed in the transition from the metaphysical to the positivist era. “By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, Enlightenment forfeited its own realization”. Theory was confined to the narrow “oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify” namely: mathematics, logic, and science. Any discussion of alienation or suffering is rejected as unscientific, thinking is now solely confined to advancing the status quo. It is the rejection of conceptual thinking in the positivist era that has induced a blindness which sustains the illusion. “The fault lies in a social context which induces blindness. The mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history”.
In the final analysis, “humanity may be unable to interrupt its flight away from necessity and into progress and civilization without forfeiting knowledge itself, at least it no longer mistakes the ramparts it has constructed against necessity, the institutions and practices of domination which have always rebounded against society from the subjugation of nature, for guarantors of the coming freedom”. This recognition, that we are not free and actually less free, is a progress in the potential for freedom. But its actualization would require the return of the concept. “The fulfillment of that prospect depends on the concept. For not only does the concept, as science, distance human beings from nature, but, as the self-reflection of thought — which, in the form of science, remains fettered to the blind economic tendency — it enables the distance which perpetuates injustice to be measured”.