Abstract
This article reinterprets the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a retelling of the Christian myth of the Fall. Through its account of the aporia, which Horkheimer and Adorno maintain stands at its core, the Dialectic of Enlightenment rearticulates the doctrine of original sin. The human condition is presented as tragic, and the source of this tragedy is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. While the Dialectic of Enlightenment refuses to abandon hope, emancipation is reconceptualised on the model of redemption; a kind of fulfilment of human nature, which would at the same time be an escape from it. Horkheimer and Adorno dispense, however, with any transcendent source of grace. Instead, the activity of philosophy itself takes on redemptive quality.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a work of philosophy with transformational aspirations. Presenting itself as a treatise aiming to ‘explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xiv), its animating passion belies this mere elucidatory objective. The work appears in this respect simply to carry forward the attitudes and aims of Critical Theory as these were developed and practised by the Institute for Social Research in the inter-war era. Yet the Dialectic of Enlightenment also represents a departure from the approach of the Institute. Lamenting a public life that ‘has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity’, Horkheimer and Adorno insist that in order not to be rendered entirely futile, ‘the attempt to trace the source of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands’. Not only were contemporary linguistic and intellectual conventions untrustworthy, however, but philosophy itself was suspect: In reflecting on its own guilt (…) thought finds itself deprived not only of the affirmative reference to science and everyday phenomena but also of the conceptual language of opposition. No terms are available which do not tend toward complicity with the prevailing intellectual trends. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xv)
In the face of this worry, one increasingly popular strategy has been to redirect our focus away from the text’s propositional content and towards its rhetorical devices, above all its use of hyperbole, exaggeration and parody. Axel Honneth (2000) has developed a reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a form of world-disclosing critique. 1 A disclosing critique of society, he explains, ‘attempts to change our value beliefs by evoking new ways of seeing’. It cannot, therefore, ‘simply use a vocabulary of argumentative justification; rather, it can achieve its effects only if it employs linguistic resources that, by condensing or shifting meanings, show up facts hitherto unperceived in social reality’ (Honneth, 2000: 123).
Discussion of the formal and rhetorical aspect of the text is no doubt an important corrective to interpretations that focus more exclusively on its propositional content. Yet attention to how it is said cannot come at the expense of observing what is in fact said. And as Jürgen Habermas (1990: 109) perhaps most famously concluded, since the Dialectic of Enlightenment purports to practise critique at the same time as it appears to renounce the distinctions with which we make sense of critique, the work stands in a performative contradiction. While we might join Habermas in finding its fundamental thesis troubling, we should not explain it away as exaggeration or parody. At the same time, it would be premature thereby to reject the Dialectic of Enlightenment as confused, to think the authors unable to grasp an evident self-contradiction. Horkheimer and Adorno acknowledge that at the centre of their work stands an aporia: ‘We have no doubt’, they explain, ‘that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking.’ And yet, ‘the very concept of that thinking, no less (…) 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’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xvi). What we need is a reading that can make some sense of this aporia and, in light of this, of the transformation the text encourages.
In seeking to provide such a reading, this article reinterprets the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a retelling of the Christian myth of the Fall. The text’s theoretical centre of gravity, I maintain, is a rearticulation of the doctrine of original sin. In equating the possibility of progress with the inevitability of regression, the Dialectic of Enlightenment paints a tragic portrait of the human condition. By accounting for that condition through an analysis of the emergence of human subjectivity, human nature as such is theorised as the source of the tragedy. In ‘refus[ing] obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands’, Horkheimer and Adorno found in their stead some very old words.
It is not uncommon to point out that the writings of the Frankfurt School are saturated with religious language (Gordon, 2020; Jay, 1996: 31–7; Kohlenbach and Geuss, 2004). Nor is it rare to emphasise that the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as put by Rüdiger Bittner (2004: 157), ‘is studded with words of religious origin’. Many theorists have argued that an adequate understanding of early Frankfurt School writings requires attending to their religious dimension (Angermann, 2020; Dorahy, 2014; Kaufmann, 2000). 2 My approach differs from analyses of the religious language of Frankfurt School authors in at least two respects. First, I limit myself to interpreting one text. I shall not seek here to use my argument about the Dialectic of Enlightenment to make any more general claims about Horkheimer or Adorno’s thought. 3 Second, I am not so much interested in the theologically inflected language of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, or the religious origin of specific words, as I am in the structural analogy we can detect between its argument and the Christian myth of the Fall. 4
To understand the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a reiteration of the Christian myth of the Fall will perhaps be unsatisfying to many of its typical readers. (But perhaps, as I suggest in the conclusion, we should not be satisfied by the text.) Yet it does enable us to make sense of the transformation to which the work aspires. According to the doctrine of original sin, human beings stand in need not of improvement but redemption. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, accordingly, emancipation is reconceptualised. Although we can distil from the Dialectic of Enlightenment a Christian conception of our need for redemption, however, Horkheimer and Adorno dispense with the transcendent source of grace; redemption is instead occasioned by an intellectual activity, which takes on a spiritual dimension. This interpretation also allows us to integrate the importance of the text’s rhetoric into the analysis of its content. The textual intensity of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is far from a contingent feature of it. We rightly detect a more ambitious purpose than what is explicitly recognised. The ultimate aspiration of the book is not only elucidation, but to model a kind of intellectual-spiritual conversion.
The article proceeds as follows. It begins in the first section with an account of Christian ethics as grounded in the self-contradictory nature of original sin as articulated by the myth of the Fall. It proceeds by setting up the Dialectic of Enlightenment in the second section as a rupture with the earlier aims of Critical Theory as promulgated by Max Horkheimer. It then presents the reading of the text as a retelling of the myth of the Fall by explaining how the aporia at the centre of the work, that is, the deep entanglement of myth and enlightenment, rearticulates the doctrine of original sin (section three), how the work reconceptualises emancipation on the model of redemption (section four) and how, when Horkheimer and Adorno dispense with a transcendent source of grace, critical philosophical activity itself takes on a spiritual, redemptive dimension (section five).
The Fall: The original myth of original sin
For Aristotle, and for the ancient Greek philosophers in general, moral theory was structured around an interpretation of the human telos, the ultimate end of human life. Aristotle’s view was that the human telos consisted in eudaimonia, varyingly translated as happiness or human flourishing, and fleshed out as a theory of virtuous action. 5 From this perspective, Christian ethics can be understood as a radical reconstruction of Aristotelianism, brought about by a reinterpretation of the human telos. According to Christian theology, the ultimate end of human life is to stand in a certain relationship to God.
The Christian conception of the human telos is grounded in the understanding of human nature as articulated by the doctrine of original sin. At the core of Christian ethics is the conception that ‘human nature as such is tragically flawed, perverse in its very structure or constitution’ (Mulhall, 2005: 6). 6 The human state of sin is to be perversely turned against oneself of one’s own accord. By our own efforts, the good is necessarily out of reach, and our independent attempts to turn towards it inevitably only confirm our state of sinfulness. Consequently, human beings do not simply stand in need of improvement; the Christian ethical sensibilities demand that the central aim of moral education must be to raise awareness of our incapability of orienting our life towards the good by our own efforts. The doctrine of original sin teaches how ‘that sinful orientation will distort and ultimately invalidate any efforts they might make by themselves to alter that orientation; the only possible solution lies in their attaining a certain kind of orientation to the divine’ (Mulhall, 2005: 6). Seen in a slightly different way, sin can be understood as broken relationality, to oneself, to others and to God. The attempt to repair this by oneself simply confirms the illness. To overcome this state, human beings stand in need of redemption. That requires beginning with the enlightenment of recognising one’s own sinfulness.
Juxtaposing it with Aristotelian eudaimonia brings out two important features of the Christian interpretation of the human telos. First, Aristotelian ethics conceives of the good life as an endeavour over which humans themselves are mostly in control. Admittedly, living a flourishing life according to Aristotle requires accustoming a child to the good through early habituation, and then being taught the truth about the good life through a proper education. It depends also on certain material conditions, such as good health and the possession of some wealth. Yet on the Christian view, human beings are dependent on God, something wholly outside themselves, not only other than, but transcendent to them, to fulfil their nature. Second, the Aristotelian account of a flourishing life might describe a kind of life rarely, if ever, achieved in practice, but it is nevertheless the description of a recognisably human life. Christianity on the other hand not only presents fulfilment as ‘not of this world’, but it is also much more ambiguous regarding the essential human form. The limits imposed by human nature are also construed as limitations; fulfilment of the human purpose is at the same time inevitably presented as an escape from fundamental human characteristics.
The Christian conception of human nature is given narrative form in the myth of the Fall as recounted in the Book of Genesis. 7 Banished from their natural place in the Garden of Eden, human beings have been denied participation in truth and in the eternal. The crucial, inescapable paradox of the myth, however, is that Adam and Eve only acquire autonomy, or at least become aware of their own autonomous nature, they learn that they can choose between good and evil, by eating of the fruit. And yet they are unavoidably responsible for their decision to do so. By narrating how we become human and acquire selfhood through an act of radical disobedience, the story of Adam and Eve dramatises our tragic nature as ‘autonomously non-autonomous’ (Mulhall, 2005: 9), as always necessarily turned away from God by our own accord.
The myth of the Fall thus accounts for original sin by representing human beings as always already sinful prior to any act of sin. It captures, without explaining (how could it?), this inherently paradoxical condition. Furthermore, by on the one hand representing humanity as belonging in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden yet on the other hand analysing sin as a constitutive feature of human nature, the story also portrays the peculiar manner in which overcoming sin would be at the same time a fulfilment of our essential being and its purpose and an escape from infirmities that are intrinsic to it. Finally, it clarifies that their ability to achieve the necessary orientation to God is ultimately out of our hands. The sinner’s sinfulness leaves them at the mercy of Him to whom they pray for redemption.
To the Christian, the paradox at the core of the doctrine of original sin, our own self-inflicted self-contradictory human nature, confirms the coherency of the account, and the myth of the Fall lays out the internal logic of the Christian account of morality. To see oneself as sinful by being turned against oneself of one’s own accord is to see oneself as in need of redemption. To interpret the state of sin as being turned against oneself because of one’s turn away from God implies the interpretation of redemption as a return to Paradise and a reunion with God. This logic at the same time explains why Christian ethics appears so provocative to a morality based on the idea of human autonomy. The problem to which grace presents itself as the solution is incomprehensible from a perspective external to the Christian account of human nature. While for the Christian any conception of ethics in western modernity only appears to confirm the hubris at the root of human sinfulness, from the perspective of the latter, the thought that a solution to our central moral predicaments is beyond us appears fundamentally offensive.
The central thesis of this essay is that in its structure, the Dialectic of Enlightenment re-narrates the Christian myth of the Fall. At its core stands a conception of the tragic human condition. Any attempt at moral improvement will inevitably relapse into its opposite. The source of this tragedy is then theorised as a constitutive feature of human nature as such, it is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. The work thus rearticulates the doctrine of original sin. Finally, emancipation is presented as at the same time a fulfilment of and an escape from human nature. When Habermas complains that the Dialectic of Enlightenment stands in a performative contradiction, he gives voice to the frustrations of trying to understand the enigma of the Fall from the perspective of the ethics of western modernity. When Habermas protests that a performative contradiction is an intolerably awkward position for reason, he expresses the fundamental offensiveness of an account of human nature as in need of redemption to any moral theory centred around a notion of human autonomy.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment as a rupture in Critical Theory
The aims of Critical Theory as it was envisioned and practised by the members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1930s were most succinctly laid out in a couple of famous essays by Max Horkheimer. In ‘The state of contemporary social philosophy and the task of an institute for social research’ he underscored the utopian aspirations of Critical Theory: ‘The final goal of social philosophy is the philosophical interpretation of human fate – insofar as humans are not mere individuals but members of a community’ (Horkheimer, 1995: 319). The Marxist inflection of Critical Theory’s Hegelian roots transpires in his demand for a philosophy that transcends mere interpretative consolation and assumes the role of transformative reconciliation. Moreover, as opposed to Hegelianism, philosophy could no longer take refuge in the more ‘genuine’ elements of being, and resort to the abstractions of essences and totalities, above and beyond the material life of peoples and classes, but had to be grounded empirically, and motivated by the present emancipatory struggles of real historical subjects. Because no one academic field could hope to comprehend modern capitalist society on its own, Critical Theory had to be holistic, uniting seemingly heterogeneous disciplines. Nevertheless, it still had to be guided by reason. In Critical Theory ‘philosophical questions themselves are dialectically integrated into the empirical scientific process’ (Horkheimer, 1995: 321).
Critical Theory thus required rethinking the traditional, positivistic notion of theory as ‘stored-up-knowledge’ (Horkheimer, 1975: 188). What was called for was the complete rejection of any view of the world as simply given, in favour of an interpretation of it as continually reproduced by society as a whole. Both the manner in which we receive the world through our human sensorium, and the way in which our concepts organise it, argued Horkheimer, is shaped by human activity. Accompanying the rejection of what Horkheimer (1975: 199) identified as positivism, then, was ‘a radical reconsideration, not of the scientist alone, but of the knowing individual as such’.
This harmonised with a Marxist conception of class-conditioned knowledge. But Critical Theory rejected the naive view whereby class position guaranteed correct knowledge. Nor did Horkheimer think unclouding the perspective of the proletariat by itself would cause revolutionary action. Hence the active role of the intellectual, the Critical Theorist: ‘His own thinking should in fact be a critical, promotive factor in the development of the masses.’ He should form ‘a dynamic unity’ with the oppressed class ‘so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change’ (Horkheimer, 1975: 214–15). This involved taking a firm stance against cynicism and disillusion: ‘The claim that events are absolutely necessary means in the last analysis the same thing as the claim to be really free here and now: resignation in practice’ (Horkheimer, 1975: 231).
That was 1937. The traumas of the Second World War and the horrors of the Nazi regime shocked Horkheimer and Adorno, and it left an ineradicable mark on their thought. Indeed, one way of approaching the Dialectic of Enlightenment, conceived in exile during the war, is to see it as a merciless attempt to think through the collective responsibility of humanity for the most recent depths of suffering it had brought upon itself, including above all the authors’ own complicity, and that of philosophy and Critical Theory itself. Horkheimer and Adorno consequently disavowed many of the theoretical and methodological commitments expressed only a few years earlier.
As indicated by the work’s subtitle, philosophical holism was replaced with ‘philosophical fragments’. Moreover, empirically grounded social research was abandoned. It had become impossible, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, to take up even the remnants of any existing field of study. 8 Even by only thematically adhering to traditional disciplines, they had ‘still placed too much trust in contemporary consciousness’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xiv). Indeed, any existing language, any contemporary mode of expression, Horkheimer and Adorno argued, including those which aspired to critique, were entangled with the given, and thereby confirmed it as legitimate. It might thus seem that Horkheimer and Adorno were driven to reject philosophy itself. If the intention of the Dialectic of Enlightenment was for thought to ‘reflect on its own guilt’, they argued, it had to be ‘deprived not only of the affirmative reference to science and everyday phenomena but also of the conceptual language of opposition’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xv). Finally, the text appeared to dismiss any kindship or alliance with political actors working to transform social conditions: ‘even the most honourable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its worn-out categorical apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying behind it’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xvii).
What had happened to Horkheimer’s condemnation of cynicism? Horkheimer and Adorno insisted that the Dialectic of Enlightenment was a critique of philosophy that did not leave philosophy. But how could philosophy dispense with ‘the conceptual language of opposition’? What transformation could be struggled or even hoped for that could manage without the categorical apparatus employed by threadbare language?
The deep entanglement of myth and enlightenment: Fear and nominalism
The central thesis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment states that: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xviii). The target of critique is enlightenment’s own self-understanding, made manifest throughout modern philosophy, as a step out of a mythological universe, a qualitative advance away from myth. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the same fear of the truth and of difference that motivated myth, the same terror at departing from the given, including existing structures of oppression, still fuels the enlightenment. And the same principle of explanation with which myth sought to eradicate that fear, the principle of equivalence, still guides enlightenment thought. Instead of myth’s equating of the inanimate with the animate, the enlightenment, however, denies life by reducing everything to a single, unitary substratum to be possessed and dominated by the progress of an instrumentalising knowledge given shape by technology. Unmasking this development as play of power was a central goal of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
In their attempt to establish the first part of their thesis, that myth is already enlightenment, in their first excursus, Horkheimer and Adorno turn to the Odyssey, ‘one of the earliest representative documents of bourgeois Western civilization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xviii). That Horkheimer and Adorno choose to demonstrate their argument by turning to the Odyssey is significant. First, by presenting a conceptual argument through an allegorical interpretation of an ancient epic, implying its superiority over any sociological or historical study, Adorno and Horkheimer seek to exemplify their aim of unsettling the notions that structure enlightenment thinking and philosophy itself, without thereby abandoning either the enlightenment or philosophy. Second, by reaching all the way back to the Odyssey, they make it clear that that which they are narrating the emergence of, enlightenment thought, is not restricted to anything like the historical, sociological period called ‘the Enlightenment’. Enlightenment thinking might find concrete historical form in bourgeois culture. But when the origin of this culture is traced back to the ancient, some might say prehistoric, or indeed mythic, roots of western civilisation, it is evident that Horkheimer and Adorno are not presenting a straightforward analysis of capitalist society. Their tale is better understood as a genesis of human subjectivity – already enlightened and bourgeois.
The Odyssey is an epic, and its structure consists of episodic challenges Odysseus faces on his return from Troy. The dramatic content of the epic is found in the disparate encounters between Odysseus and his opponents, mythic creatures bent on blind domination. The emergence of subjectivity is manifest in the mythic world through the cunning by which Odysseus escapes the traps laid out for him, and in the sacrifices, including, famously, self-sacrifices, made to preserve his life: ‘[T]he primal powers, which are hallowed and outsmarted at the same time, already occupy a first stage of enlightenment in the primal history of subjectivity’ (Habermas, 1990: 108). Because subjectivity and human selfhood emerged through the subjugation of nature, including our own human nature, selfhood is, as an organising concept, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, inherently tied to domination.
Their analysis might helpfully be contrasted with Sigfried Kracauer’s (1995) essay on the mass ornament. Kracauer’s essay is an ambiguous discussion of modern reason. Although conceding that it represents an advancement in comparison to traditional, organic romantic unity, Kracauer argues that it has become lost in abstraction; it rationalises only the form and not the content of society and thus acquires a mythos of its own. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the contingency that characterises Kracauer’s unification of reason and instrumentalist abstraction has seemingly succumbed to inevitability. Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of Odysseus inscribes the unity between reason, self-preservation and instrumentalising domination into the very structure of human subjectivity. 9
The second element of the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s fundamental thesis, which states that enlightenment reverts to mythology, indicates that Horkheimer and Adorno do not equate enlightenment and myth. As for Kracauer, reason is lost in abstraction and this fetishisation constitutes enlightenment’s own mythology. But contrary to Kracauer, this fall of reason is no contingent failure. The relationship between reason and myth is more complicated than a simple identity; for Horkheimer and Adorno, enlightenment and myth are enmeshed in what I propose to understand is a deep, inextricable entanglement.
If the Dialectic of Enlightenment ever identifies anything like an ultimate cause of the entanglement of enlightenment and mythology, it is fear. Enlightenment’s ‘relapse into mythology’, it is claimed, is caused by ‘the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: xvi). Indeed, ‘[e]nlightenment is mythical fear radicalized’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: 11). Humans attempt to expel their fear by banishing the different and the unknown. While myth does so by equating the non-living with the living, enlightenment equates the living with the non-living: ‘Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: 9).
While the source of the entanglement of enlightenment and myth, reason and self-preservation, is traced back to a common source in fear, the vector through which fear makes enlightenment a mythology is enlightenment ‘as a nominalist tendency’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: 17). From human fear springs the ‘doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: 10). Yet tragically, nominalism, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, is merely a new version of knowledge’s reduction to power and domination, and its consequent destruction. As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: 13)
Emancipation as redemption: Fulfilment and escape
Kracauer remains unequivocal in his conclusion: progress demands the continued move towards a more substantive concept of reason. Recall the firm rejection in pre-war Critical Theory of cynicism and disillusion or any other expression of the inevitability of the present. Hope is not abandoned in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno are adamant that ‘freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking’. Moreover, the grounds for hope in the Dialectic of Enlightenment still lie in the potential for its despair to turn Hegelian, in the promise of its negation to be determinate: ‘With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2007: 18). But the intertwinement of reason and myth means that hope must be conceptualised in quite different terms. The deep entanglement of one with the other within the structures of human subjectivity means that determinate negation is no simple advance of reason.
The understanding of determinate negation in the Dialectic of Enlightenment instead follows from Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2007: 18) analysis of language: determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs.
Curious as it is, this passage is perhaps made best sense of by turning to the text to which it makes quite an explicit reference. In ‘On language as such and on the language of man’ Walter Benjamin first sketches out the ‘bourgeois conception of language’, which ‘holds that the means of communication is the word, its object factual, and its addressee a human being’. He then aims to lay bare ‘the invalidity and emptiness’ of the bourgeois conception of language by contrasting it with an alternative that ‘knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication’ (Benjamin, 2004: 65). It is Benjamin’s dichotomy ‘between instrumental language that communicates information’ on the one hand and ‘a paradisiacal language that communicates nothing but bodies forth its own essence as language as such’ (Eiland and Jennings, 2016: 219) on the other, which is rehearsed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Language, to be ‘more than a mere system of signs’, has to be ‘both creative and the finished creation’, not merely refer to or express the essence of things, but make manifest the unfolding of that essence. The invalidity and emptiness of ‘the bourgeois conception of language’, or of nominalism as Horkheimer and Adorno called it, is its limitation to inter-personal communication, and its inadequacy for participation in the unfolding of essential truth. As Adorno (1992: 288) lamented elsewhere, ‘[p]ure creaturely language is hidden from human beings or lost to them, because its quintessence would be nothing but the quintessence of represented truth’. 10
It is helpful to trace this distinction between language as a system of signs and language as essential truth to Kant. It appears with his contrast between a discursive and an intuitive intellect. A discursive intellect, according to Kant, reasons from particulars to universals, and its knowledge consists in the correct subsumption of intuitions under concepts. Intuitions must be grasped by concepts, and concepts do not determine intuitions. This is the ground for the distinction between possibility and actuality (Kant, 2000: 271–9). Influenced by a theological tradition that held discursive reasoning to be an unacceptable limitation for God, Kant nonetheless leaves open the possibility that a different, non-discursive intellect could be able to experience reality in all its manifold particularity. An intuitive intellect reasons from universals to particulars. Its concepts generate their own intuitions and what it knows is thus true by virtue of a creative act of judgement in which the distinction between possibility and actuality breaks down.
Kant is adamant, however, that all that the human intellect can be is discursive. Finite, embodied creatures can only reason from particulars to universals. For humans, the distinction between possibility and actuality is fundamental. For Benjamin, it is less clear that we cannot escape what he characterises as the bourgeois, instrumentalist conception of language and return to a true, revelationist alternative. This ambivalence is productively put to use by Horkheimer and Adorno. There is, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a fundamental instability between limit and limitation. There is a constant fluctuation between conceiving of the nominalist linguistic confines of finite, embodied, human existence, as a limit and lamenting it as a limitation, between viewing the communicatory nature of our language as constitutive of the human condition and opposing it as an impediment to be overcome. Or perhaps more precisely, the limits of the human condition are at the same time thought of as limitations.
To sum up, nominalism, understood as the use of language as a system of signs in order to communicate, is identified by Horkheimer and Adorno as the germ of regression contained in enlightenment thinking, the genesis of the deep entanglement of reason and power, enlightenment and myth. Thus is the source of our tragic condition inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity. A determinate negation with the potential to sublate the dialectic of enlightenment, disentangling thought from power and subjugation, and free human subjectivity of its corruption, would require overcoming nominalism. Through a higher intelligibility characterised by the unity of image and script lies the possibility to disclose ultimate meaning. But no attempt is made to show how language, for a recognisably human intellect, can be more than a system of signs. Hence the ambiguity between limit and limitation means that emancipation is reconceptualised on the model of redemption: a fulfilment of human nature that is also at the same time an escape from it.
Relocating the source of redemption: Critique as conversion
The structure of the Dialectic of Enlightenment can thus be understood as an analogy or reiteration of the Christian myth of the Fall on several levels. At its core stands a tragic conception of the human condition expressed by the aporia that motives the work, which states that ‘freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking’ yet that the germs of regression are contained in ‘the very concept of that thinking’. The Dialectic of Enlightenment narrates its own version of a story of the Fall in an analysis of the Odyssey. It explains, moreover, how the deep entanglement of enlightenment and myth, reason and power, is inscribed into the very structure of human subjectivity through an account of the constraints of nominalism. The Dialectic of Enlightenment hence presents human nature itself as in a state of self-contradiction, always already turned against itself, in quest of emancipation, doomed to domination. Finally, while hope is not abandoned, it is reconceptualised on the model of redemption. The deep entanglement of reason and power, secured by the limit/limitation of discursive reasoning and nominalist language, entails a form of emancipation that is at the same time a fulfilment of human nature and an escape from it.
This takes us, finally, to the self-understanding of the Dialectic of Enlightenment itself and the transformation in which it evidently seeks to assist. Having presented human nature itself as consigned to a perpetual dialectic of enlightenment and myth, reason and power, freedom and domination, having denied that emancipation is possible by the progress of reason, what role is left for philosophy? Why write the Dialectic of Enlightenment at all?
Horkheimer and Adorno, clearly dispense with the idea of a transcendent being as the source of the redemption of which human beings stand in such desperate need. Yet, although humanity is presented as doomed to domination, that does not leave us free to succumb to it. Although grace might not be available, philosophy must proceed as if it were. The interpretative key that unlocks the last mystery of the Dialectic of Enlightenment was articulated most succinctly in a work Adorno (2006: 247) also started during the Second World War, and which he finished a few years later: The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. (…) Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought.
It does so by tirelessly rejecting any claim that poses as emancipation. In this very process of relentless negation, including constant self-undermining, what is urged is a way of orienting oneself in rejection of a fallen world. In short, ‘there is no finding but in ever refusing to believe that one has found’. The wager we are presented with in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is that in such ‘untiring critique of pretended unities the falsity of the separation you insist upon may come out, and with it, the truth’ (Bittner, 2004: 167). Bittner (2004: 168) arrives at this conclusion after what he characterises as a ‘desperate interpretative move’, and acknowledges that the idea, in his interpretation, is ‘floating in mid-air’, without argumentative support. On the reading offered in this article, however, where the Dialectic of Enlightenment is understood to reconceptualise emancipation on the model of redemption yet dispense with a transcendent source of grace, the idea sits comfortably within the structure of the text. In the face of despair, ‘critique’ itself takes on redemptive qualities.
Conclusion
I have presented a reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment by way of a structural analogy to the Christian myth of the Fall. Horkheimer and Adorno dispense, however, with a transcendent source of grace. Hope is instead implicit in the redemptive qualities of philosophical critique itself. There are other aspects of the text that this reading illuminates. I began this essay by remarking on the passion that animates the Dialectic of Enlightenment. I noted the recent tendency to focus more on its rhetorical devices than its propositional content. Reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment as an attempt to model the kind of intellectual-spiritual conversion that would be required somehow to overcome our tragically flawed human nature, can integrate the formal and rhetorical features of the text within an interpretation of its propositional content. If the transformation the Dialectic of Enlightenment seeks to engender is not social revolution, but a kind of spiritual conversion, or rather, if the Dialectic of Enlightenment is an attempt at modelling this conversion, its passion and hyperbole can be seen as crucial aspects of it.
Finally, however, if this reading of the text can indeed make new sense of it, what are we to make of the Dialectic of Enlightenment? To the Christian, I argued, the paradox at the core of the doctrine of original sin, our own self-inflicted self-contradictory human nature, confirms the coherency of the account. Perhaps the final lesson of this reading, then, is that our assessment of the Dialectic of Enlightenment inevitably depends on whether we view it from within or from outside of the internal logic of its conceptual structure. From within the perspective offered by the Dialectic of Enlightenment, any positive vision of a world different from this one, any other critique than critique of self, any other struggle than struggle with our own human nature, is an expression of human hubris and a confirmation of the logic of its own internal conceptual structure. If this is correct, however, from the perspective of a morality built around the idea of human autonomy, the text will necessarily be provocative. Indeed, from the perspective of a politics based on struggle for emancipation, we should be insulted.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
For productive discussions and constructive criticism of earlier drafts of this article, I thank Michael W Jennings and Kjell Madsen. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.