Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment Essay -- Mythology

Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of insight story is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology(Dialectic of Enlightenment XVI)Adorno and Horkheimers obscure and nihilistic schoolbook Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE) is an attempt to answer the question why man mixture, instead of come in a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of viciousness (DoE, p.xi). The result is a totalising critique of modernity a diagnosis of why the Enlightenment project failed with no attempt to prescribe a cure. This is achieved by a historical-philosophical study of the mythic world-view of animism and anthropomorphism and the Enlightenment attempt to decompose myth through objectification and instrumental reason. DoE as well as uses Homers Odyssey as a metaphorical interpretation of this historical change, where Odysseus is the prototype of the bourgeois man.This study reveals for Adorno and Horkheimer the disappointment of the Enlightenment project. Enlightenment ha s no claim to being less a myth than the mythology it failed to send off. This new myth is defined for them by the drive to subdue nature at the expense of alienation of man from nature and from his bear inner nature. They follow the appearance of the subject as it is objectified alongside nature, and is henpecked with it. The subject becomes an object and his intellect becomes instrumental, and all instinct and sensory sire that fails to be productive in the pursuit of control is repressed, man becomes mechanized. They also assert that class domination is a direct and inevitable import of the attempt to dominate nature, and is therefore inescapable.Background to the text.Adorno and Horkheimer, members of the capital of Kentucky school in Germany, wrote DoE (which was completed in 1944) while Fascism, a kind of barbarism never seen before, was threatening Europe. They viewed this as the epitome of the self-destructive nature of enlightenment, the concluding evidence that it would never result in a truly human condition. They wrote in the introduction to DoE that the indefatigable self-destructiveness of enlightenmentrequires philosophy to discard purge the last vestiges of innocence in regard to the habits and tendencies of the spirit of the age (p.xi), hence the colour of their critique.Being part of the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Horkheimer were influenced... ...kfurt school, does not accept Adornos solution. He believes Adorno is being too nihilistic in continued next page allowing no way to escape instrumental rationality. Habermass main philosophical project has been to resolve this problem, to allow for the misfortune of substantive rationality (i.e. rationality that is not aimed at power and domination but, rather, validity) and, thus, to save the project of the Enlightenment. The result is a theory of open conference that is aimed at an ideal speech situation, that is, at a discourse not corrupt by instrumental aims. BibliographyTheodor Adorno and Maw Horkheimer The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso London, 1997).Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics (Routledge London, 1990)Jurgen Habermas The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment Re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Jay Bernstein (ed.) The Frankfurt School vituperative Assessments vol.3 (Routledge London, 1994).Axel Honneth The retrospect of Power Reflective Stages of Critical Social Theory (M.I.T Boston, 1991).Gran Therborn The Frankfurt School, in New Left Review (ed.) Western Marxism a Critical Reader (New Left Books Norfolk, 1977).