Abstract
Since its publication, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment has inspired a wide range of interpretations. In particular, its central claim – that active domination over nature ultimately leads to passive domination by nature – continues to provoke debate. Based on a novel ecological explanation of this reversal, the article identifies two contrasting perspectives in the discussions by Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth and Amy Allen, among others. Whereas some critical theorists understand the reversal into domination by nature as the result of human history in general, others regard it as a contingent outcome of specifically modern societies. Finally, the articles argues that both readings attempt to sway the Dialectic of Enlightenment toward a single perspective, while its authors leave the tension between the two unresolved.
Introduction
In ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’, the first excursus of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno propound the thesis around which their seminal work revolves. They interpret the myth of Odysseus’s circumnavigation of the Sirens’ island, as recounted in the twelfth song of Homer's Odyssey, as an allegory for the idea that humans who seek to become masters over nature fall prey to subjugation by it – in short, that the domination of nature reverts to domination by nature. More precisely, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the overcoming of the Sirens symbolizes the emergence of nature-dominating rationality. By using one of his ingenious ruses against the Sirens, who represent nature itself, Odysseus tries to neutralize the threat they pose. His attempt is successful, as he manages to navigate past the dangerous island safely. In Horkheimer and Adorno's eyes, however, this act of dominating nature entails a shift fraught with severe repercussions, ultimately resulting in the type of reason embodied by the hero falling back on nature.
Since its publication, this thesis from the Dialectic of Enlightenment has undergone an immense number of very different readings. Indeed, it might well be impossible to trace all the branches of this delta of interpretations. 1 Nevertheless, according to the argument of this article, we can identify two main streams. While some interpreters, including but not limited to Jürgen Habermas and the early Axel Honneth, consider Horkheimer and Adorno's work as offering a phylogenetic perspective, Amy Allen, among others, regards it as restricted to a theory of modernity. Whereas the trajectory the Dialectic of Enlightenment addresses is clearly ‘the trajectory of European civilization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 9), assessments diverge as to which historical period it covers: when precisely in the millennia-old history of European civilization does the emergence of nature-dominating reason captured in Odysseus’s cunning take place? What are we to understand by ‘historically’ when Adorno (1973: 172) notes that this type of reason ‘was historically dictated by the threat of nature’?
The question of the period referred to by the Odysseus excursus is not a minor matter. If we look at the dialectic of domination from the phylogenetic point of view, it appears to be a fateful event in the long course of the history of our species. If, in contrast, we understand it as a modern phenomenon, it seems more like an avoidable effect of the prevailing societal order. Thus, nothing less is at stake than the issue of whether our history is predetermined or whether some kind of self-determination is, in principle, possible. The article investigates this tension between foredoom and freedom in five steps, engaging both with Horkheimer and Adorno's book and landmark secondary literature.
The first section elucidates the concept of domination of nature based on Horkheimer and Adorno's take on the Siren episode of the Odyssey. The second section then addresses the reversal of this domination into domination by nature, offering a new ecological explanation. Once this reversal has been laid out, the article discusses the question of its historical index. Hence, the third section expounds on the phylogenetic reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, referring mainly to Habermas and Honneth. Analogously, the fourth section deals with the opposing interpretation offered by Allen and others, according to whom Horkheimer and Adorno advance nothing more and nothing less than a diagnosis of modernity. Finally, the fifth section argues that both readings try to resolve a tension that Horkheimer and Adorno did not resolve – a tension that persists theoretically even when taking the notion of second nature into account but that may be resolved in practice.
A genealogy of nature-dominating reason
To comprehend Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of domination of nature, it is essential to examine the figure of Odysseus. The epithet ὁ πολυμήχανος (ho polumēkhanos), which Homer (e.g., 1995: Book 1: 205) ascribes to Odysseus in the Odyssey, displays the hero's cunning. The term comprises two words: πολύς (polus), meaning ‘much’ or ‘many’, and ἡ μηχανή (hē mēkhanē), meaning ‘contrivance’, ‘machine’, and ‘device’, but also ‘idea’, ‘ruse’ and ‘trick’. Homer attaches this epithet to the King of Ithaca because he embodies a subject who, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges, devises ingenious strategies to achieve his goals. The best-known example of Odysseus’s cunning is, of course, the wooden horse with which he enables the Greek forces to capture Troy after many years of siege. During his 10-year wandering following the Trojan War, Odysseus also contrives many ruses to overcome the obstacles that stand in his way. An example illustrating his cunning as if through a magnifying glass is the bypassing of the island of the Sirens.
Odysseus has already mastered several dangers in the course of his journey, including the imprisonment in the cave of the man-eating cyclops, Polyphemus, and an encounter with the enchantress Circe, who turned some of his crew into pigs. Back at sea, however, he is confronted with another threat: two Sirens, hybrid creatures with bird-like bodies and women's heads, lurk on an island he needs to sail past. As the myth goes, every man who hears the singing of these creatures is irresistibly drawn to their island, only to meet certain death. Aware of this peril, Odysseus uses one of his wiles to escape this fate. He has his crew tie him to the ship's mast with ropes while they plug their ears with wax. This way, he can listen to the Sirens’ luring calls but is unable to follow them. Despite attempts to free himself from the self-imposed shackles, he remains bound – while the temporarily deaf oarsmen take the ship past the island, out of earshot of the Sirens.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, this ruse or μηχανή symbolizes an archetypal action of ‘self-formation’: ‘The hero's peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of … a self infinitely weak in comparison to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 38). By using his intellect as cannily as he does, Odysseus strives to rise above the natural world represented by the Sirens (though ultimately without success, as we will see in the next section). In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the circumvention of the Sirens’ island captures the genesis of rational subjectivity ab ovo. Thus, the book takes up the central question of natural history as shaped by Immanuel Kant (2007: 196–198), Georg W. F. Hegel (2007: §§ 392–395) and Karl Marx (1992: 355, 391), asking how the ζῷον λόγον ἔχον (zōon logon echon) or animal rationale actually emerged from nature (cf. Pensky, 2004: 138–141).
To explore this issue, the founders of the Frankfurt School scrutinize the link between the suppression of inner and the overcoming of outer nature. They claim that by restraining his instincts with ropes to defy elemental forces, Odysseus elevates himself to the antagonist of nature. Odysseus represents a subject that is no longer a mere beast but a rational subject in the making, one who gradually liberates itself from nature's grip. That is why they talk of a ‘suppression of instinct which constitutes them [humans] as selves and separates them from beasts’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 55). ‘Reason’, in this sense, prevents behaviour from being determined by the chain between inner and outer nature, thus creating some room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the natural world. In the opinion of Horkheimer and Adorno, this process is still underway in the figure of Odysseus.
This line of argument renders the Odysseus excursus a genealogy in the Nietzschean sense of the term (see Nietzsche, 2006: esp. 39; Saar, 2017). Like Nietzsche, Horkheimer and Adorno do not regard reason as naturally given. Unlike him, however, they explain the origin of reason not primarily with repressions imposed by humans on each other but through self-discipline. While for Nietzsche, it is the conformity to social norms that makes suppression of inner nature necessary, for Horkheimer and Adorno, it is, above all, the domination of outer nature. The concept of ‘self-preserving reason’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 259) captures this genealogical thesis. Self-preserving reason aims to quell the fear of the daunting forces of nature and control them instead, which is why, in later writings, it is repeatedly referred to as ‘nature-dominating reason’ (e.g., Adorno, 1973: 179; translation amended). Reason is thus a means for finding strategies to tame the hostile-seeming natural world.
It is crucial to explain the image of nature corresponding with the outlined type of reason to illuminate the turn from active domination over nature to passive domination through nature. ‘Nature’ displays what reason rises against and what it tries to leave behind. It is the hostile and alienated other from which nature-dominating reason distances itself – but to which it remains constitutively related. The negative image of nature results from the exclusion of what the emerging subject deems irrational. The two authors point to a kind of ‘original objectification’: the rational subject arises at the exact moment in which it dissociates itself from the natural world of mere objects (Mendieta, 2011: 152). Accordingly, Horkheimer (1974: 67) argues in Eclipse of Reason that subjectivity originates with the idea of an ‘empty nature degraded to mere material, mere stuff to be dominated, without any other purpose than that of this very domination’. Similar to Herbert Marcuse (2002), Horkheimer and Adorno think that this image of nature stems from a distorted perspective that orients the perception of nature one-dimensionally toward its subjugation: ‘reason, which wants to escape nature, first of all shapes nature into what it must fear’ (Adorno, 2005: 152).
Before dealing with the timing of this process, we should first consider its effects. The hero of the Odyssey, who personifies nature-dominating subjectivity, may, at first glance, have succeeded in mastering nature's threats. Horkheimer and Adorno, however, believe that the subjugation of nature by humans falls back into a subjugation of humans by nature. This relapse is also methodologically essential since the critique of reason cannot simply consist in showcasing it as self-preserving. Stating that reason is comparable to the ‘tentacles and claws’ of animals (Horkheimer, 1974: 85; translation amended) is in itself only an analogy. Further steps are necessary to turn this analysis into a critique. The path chosen by Horkheimer and Adorno involves uncovering a contradictoriness immanent in reason. The critique they develop seeks to prove that nature-dominating reason runs counter to its own purpose, therefore revealing itself as irrational.
Triumphant calamity as ecological devastation
Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the formation of rational subjectivity is a Pyrrhic victory, as the nemesis of domination by nature retaliates against the hubris of dominating nature. In this section, I first present a psychoanalytical explanation of this peripeteia, foregrounding the eruption of repressed inner nature. Based on this, I subsequently develop an ecological explanation that revolves around another self-defeating dynamic of nature-dominating reason: it starts with the distorted image of nature already described and elucidates how this provokes a drive to dominate that creates ever more constraints.
The psychoanalytical explanation of why the undertaking to subdue nature leads to its opposite involves what is referred to as a ‘return of the repressed’. Horkheimer (1974: ch. 3) famously writes that the sacrifice of withholding instincts for the sake of self-preservation engenders a ‘revolt of nature’. One can take this to mean that by repressing instinctive behaviour through self-restraint, as exemplified by the figure of Odysseus, a backlash is set in motion. Adorno, who agrees with this hypothesis, describes this regressive dynamic in Negative Dialectics as follows: ‘An insight of psychoanalysis – that civilization's repressive mechanisms transform the libido into aggression against civilization – cannot be extinguished anymore’ (Adorno, 1973: 337). The shackling of our inner nature, that is to say, the process of civilization itself, thus implies an anti-civilizational force.
At least implicitly, Horkheimer and Adorno borrow this thought from Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud observes that repressed instincts constantly threaten to break out: it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction … of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. … it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle. (Freud, 1961: 44)
Without having to subscribe to this line of thought entirely, it can still serve as a springboard for an ecological critique of nature-dominating reason. As Joel Whitebook notes, the subject represented by Odysseus erodes the conditions of its emancipation, whether or not it experiences outbursts of repressed instincts: ‘In the process of creating the preconditions for its emancipation, the subject has, in short, so deformed itself – has so “annihilated” itself – that it is in no condition to appropriate those preconditions and create a better form of life’ (Whitebook, 2019: 34). In a similar vein, I now explore how nature-dominating reason might subvert the preconditions for emancipation by damaging its ecological foundations, the driving force behind this tendency being the fear of nature.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, fear is a defining trait of nature-dominating reason since the enemy image of unruly nature is constitutive of this type of reason. This is why Horkheimer (1974: 74) holds that the natural world becomes ‘the object of total exploitation’. The idea is that to overcome the fear of being devoured by nature, humans, in turn, deplete nature as much as possible. To be more precise, by seeking to identify and eliminate dangers emanating from nature, reason creates a frightening delusion of all that it does not (yet) dominate – thereby driving humans into a phobic compulsion of control. 3
Correspondingly, Maeve Cooke (2020: 1173) assigns high argumentative value to the role of fear in the Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘enlightened thought or rationality is an instrumental mode of thought and behaviour that originates in human fear of the natural world’. At the same time, she may be too quick to frame this idea in prehistoric terms by adding that ‘it has its roots in the earliest attempts by humans to overcome this fear by controlling the natural forces that they see as threatening them’. The historical origins of nature-dominating reason is a question that still has to be discussed. Nonetheless, the reference to a certain ‘constitutive connectedness’ (Cooke, 2020: 1174), which the instrumental mode of thought and behaviour denies, is a hint that deserves further exploration.
The domination of nature gains a destabilizing momentum when it entails a disavowal of this very constitutive connectedness. From a social-theoretical perspective, societies risk demolishing prerequisites for emancipation when, in their drive to deplete nature, they increasingly ignore the reliance on an accommodating natural environment. Even if one disagrees with Horkheimer and Adorno's argument on the grounds that it neglects other types of reason or rationalities, the point that a fear-driven and nature-dominating rationality threatens to concuss some of the conditions without which our (more or less rational) forms of life cannot flourish can still hold: the ecological devastation arising from the domination of nature brings about constraints to which humans then have to adapt.
Horkheimer and Adorno seem to address this repercussion in the second sentence of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. After stating that enlightened thought falls prey to the hubris of liberating humans from fear and installing them as masters, they maintain that ‘the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 1). Through an ecological lens, ‘triumphant calamity’ alludes to crises in human relations with the environment. Similarly, in his reading of Eclipse of Reason, William Leiss (1972: 164) draws a parallel between natural disasters and eruptions of inner nature. Viewed in this light, the domination of nature reveals itself as contradictory because it triggers an uncontrollable dominance of natural developments or, in other words, domination by nature.
As a remedy, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 32) envision a ‘remembrance of nature within the subject’, which later texts replace with the notion of Selbstbesinnung or ‘self-reflection’ (e.g., Adorno, 1973: 397). 4 The key to understanding this notion lies in the element of ‘Besinnung’, which points to the natural or sensuous (sinnliche) side of the subject. What the type of reason fixated on dominating nature realizes through Selbstbesinnung is that it is itself part of the natural world it seeks to dominate. The hope is that the self can thereby relinquish the drive to dominate such that the tension between self-preserving reason and self-endangering calamities eventually dissolves. By going beyond itself, reason should recognize that even the animal rationale is still, in part, an animal, living both in and on the encompassing realm of nature. Self-reflection – reason applying reason to itself (Adorno, 2005: 152) – thus functions as the lever for ways of seeing and treating nature that are less geared toward its subjugation.
At this point, we have to be careful not to jump to a diagnosis of the present. We have yet to discuss which period the Dialectic of Enlightenment addresses, one that concerns the history of humankind in general or one that relates to Western modernity exclusively. The extent to which Selbstbesinnung can really halt the described reversal from the domination of nature to domination by nature also depends on our answer to this question.
The phylogenetic perspective
When reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment from a phylogenetic perspective, one interprets it as an investigation into the history of our species. In this section, I deal with two authors who significantly influenced the discourse on Horkheimer and Adorno's book along these lines, the first being Jürgen Habermas. Habermas is the leading proponent of the view that the Dialectic of Enlightenment comprises a history of decline of humankind. According to the analysis of his Theory of Communicative Action, the formation of nature-dominating reason lies ‘in the anthropological foundations of the history of the species’, and more precisely, ‘in the form of existence of a species that has to reproduce itself through labor’ (Habermas, 1984: 379). The fact that Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 24; translation amended) indeed attribute the suppression of instinctual pleasure to ‘the work-pressure of millennia’ supports this view. And the phylogenetic reading adds that, as a result of having had to behave like Odysseus for the sake of self-preservation, a mechanism of decay has been set in motion.
From this angle, Odysseus embodies a subjectivity that developed at a particular stage in the early history of our species. Habermas interprets Horkheimer and Adorno's text as a piece of philosophy of history, arguing that they ‘expand instrumental reason into a category of the world-historical process of civilization as a whole’ (Habermas, 1984: 366). 5 While the precise dating in Archaic Greece or before is of secondary importance, the essential point is that the seed for the reversal of the domination of nature into its opposite inheres human history from very early on, such that it appears as the unfolding of primaeval potentials. In ‘The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment’ from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas (1987: 110) summarizes this scheme as a ‘revenge of primordial forces’. The phylogenetic analysis, however, does not imply that Horkheimer and Adorno ignore modern history, which they do not, but rather that they engage with it basically as a corollary of antecedent events.
Another scholar who understands the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a history of the human species is Axel Honneth. In The Critique of Power, Honneth calls the leitmotif of Horkheimer and Adorno's book that of a ‘retrogressive anthropogenesis’, meaning that the action by which humans emerged from nature is concomitant with backsliding. ‘Socio-cultural evolution’, Honneth (1991: 37) notes, ‘turns out to be the extended act of regression in the history of the species’. He regards Odysseus as a subject whose appearance initiated an unstoppable downward trajectory. The designation ‘the earliest history of subjectivity’, which Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 43) choose for their narrative, lends support to this reading. Therefore, Honneth (1991: 38–39) adopts it to carve out the phylogenetic side of the Odysseus excursus: It is on this prehistorical act of human self-preservation that the philosophical-historical analysis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment initially concentrates. Adorno and Horkheimer describe the process by which the human species, released from the security of instinctual bonds, liberates itself from the threat of an inscrutable nature. … Humans raise themselves above animal conditions of existence to the extent that they initially learn to master the reflexive sort of conditions that prehuman forms of life physically imitate in situations of fear before threatening natural objects and, finally, to replace them completely through the prophylactic control of nature.
Thus far, their readings evince that both Habermas and Honneth see the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a philosophy of the history of humanity (though, as we will see in the next section, Honneth later moves away from this perspective). They understand Horkheimer and Adorno to mean that history takes a catastrophic direction due to the cesura symbolized by Odysseus’s circumnavigation of the Sirens’ island. This interpretation is in line with the fact that Adorno (1992) entitled a preliminary version of the excursus ‘Historico-philosophical Excursus on the Odyssey’. Altogether, there are good reasons to classify Horkheimer and Adorno's text as a history of the human species.
In Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Seyla Benhabib (1986: 187) articulates the implications of such a classification: If, as the Dialectic of Enlightenment announces, domination is not simply the consequence of a rationality whose potentials capitalism frustrates; if, in fact, reason itself is an instrument of domination, then the ideal of self-legislating reason is also an ideal of domination: autonomy does not mean self-actualization but self-repression, the repression of the nature within and without us … If relations of domination are part of the natural history of reason, of its emergence as a species-specific capacity, then the critique of instrumental reason must go beyond mere self-reflection.
Contingency and contemporariness
In The End of Progress, Amy Allen seeks to demonstrate that the idea of past progress, which led to our current forms of life, stands in the way of future progress. To support this argument, she also draws on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. What interests me here is that Allen challenges the classification of Horkheimer and Adorno's work as a pessimistic philosophy of history, which I presented in the preceding section in relation to Habermas and Honneth. Instead, she proposes a different interpretation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a theory of capitalist modernity: ‘Horkheimer and Adorno compassionately hold up a mirror to the particular historical configuration that enlightenment rationality has taken for us’ (Allen, 2016: 173). In her view, the subjectivity the King of Ithaca prototypically stands for is the product of a contingent historical formation.
The preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an early indication in favour of Allen's point of view, stating that ‘the very concept of that thinking [i.e., enlightenment thinking], no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: xvi). 6 Horkheimer and Adorno locate the cause of the regression at hand within the prevailing society and, hence, within reach to a certain extent. Only this can account for why they go on to formulate the demand that enlightenment should reflexively scrutinize itself: ‘If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate’. If one were to assume, to the contrary, that the development they describe originates in prehistory and inevitably unfolds itself, then no reflection whatsoever could alter the course of history. Their appeal would become pointless because one can speak of someone's ‘own’ fate in a meaningful way only if that someone has an active part in bringing it about.
When we shift our focus to such passages, the domination by nature does not stem from a distant past but from the given societal order. ‘Thus’, Allen (2016: 172) writes, ‘it would be a mistake to read Dialectic of Enlightenment as a negative philosophy of history’. Instead, she suggests that ‘the particular path that has been taken by the dialectic of enlightenment in European modernity’ – which, I would add, is a significant factor in the contemporary ecological crisis – ‘should be understood as a contingent historical process’. From this perspective, Horkheimer and Adorno no longer portray history as a ‘dead-end’ (Allen, 2014: 12) but scrutinize a specific societal order that fosters nature-dominating reason. What has been perceived as a philosophy of history boils down to a diagnosis of Western modernity: ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment thus strives to articulate and reflect upon a contradiction that its authors take to be central to modern, Western societies: enlightenment rationality is both freedom and unfreedom or domination at the same time’ (Allen, 2016: 169–170). Allen thinks the constitution of reason is conditional on circumstances that may vary.
It follows from this that the standard biography of the Frankfurt School, which Nikolas Kompridis (2006: 255–256) depicts as follows, requires revision: According to the now canonical view of its history, Frankfurt School critical theory began in the 1930s as a fairly confident interdisciplinary and materialist research program, the general aim of which was to connect normative social criticism to the emancipatory potential latent in concrete historical processes. Only a decade or so later, however, having revised the premises of their philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment steered the whole enterprise, provocatively and self-consciously, into a skeptical cul-de-sac.
Other scholars also support such a reading, including Christoph Görg. In his book on the regulation of ecological crisis, he makes the following claim about the Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘Domination of nature does not arise “from natural necessity” but is the result of a specific organization of society’ (Görg, 2003: 45; cf. Görg, 2011). As assessed by him and Allen, Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of reason is less fatalistic than often believed.
7
Additionally, there is a related line of interpretation that decodes their critique by focusing on its rhetoric. Surprisingly, the essay ‘The possibility of a disclosing critique’ by Honneth is particularly representative of this subcategory, alongside articles by Bert van den Brink (1997) and Pierre-François Noppen (2015). In this piece, Honneth evaluates his predecessors’ historico-philosophical construction as a ‘device of rhetorical condensation’ (Honneth, 2000: 124). He now argues that their use of allegories, chiasms, and exaggerations serves to disclose social pathologies in today's lifeworlds: The argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment does not pursue the goal of recommending another interpretation of the history of the human species from a social-theoretical perspective, but rather provokes a changed perception of parts of our apparently familiar lifeworld so that we will become attentive to their pathological character. (Honneth, 2000: 124)
The first interpretation is historico-teleological. It says that nature-dominating reason originates from a distant stage in the history of the human species, and it associates a certain finality of the consequences with this emergence. The collapse of domination practiced over nature into domination suffered by nature appears very much like a twist of fate from this perspective. The second interpretation stands in stark opposition to this, as it judges the type of reason attacked in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as an outcome of the modern societal order. This assessment implies some openness and a possibility for intervening in the twofold domination dynamic.
From theory to practice
In this section, I make the case that both the phylogenetic interpretation and the presentist interpretation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment fall short on their own. The flaw of the first reading lies in the undue neglect of the socio-historical variability of reason, while the flaw of the second reading is that it disregards its anthropological anchorage. The interpretations by Habermas and the early Honneth on the one hand and that of Allen and the later Honneth on the other are only partially correct because both attempt to resolve a tension between two historical indices that remains unresolved in Horkheimer and Adorno's work. In addition to the previously mentioned indications that the two perspectives interlock, two findings in particular support this conclusion.
First, the simultaneous adoption of both perspectives becomes evident in one of their most significant statements. Initially, it sounds like a decidedly phylogenetic assertion when Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 26) declare: ‘Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was created’. The German statal passive geschaffen war (‘was created’) refers to the result of a completed process. Furthermore, because the verb is in the past tense, the construction locates the creation of ‘the self’ in the past without a direct connection to the present. This way, their Nietzschean genealogy indicates that the subjectivity in question stems from times long past.
That, however, is only the first half of the sentence. In the second half, Horkheimer and Adorno relativize the phylogenetic inclination by adding: ‘and something of this process is repeated in every childhood’. The present tense processual passive wird wiederholt (‘is repeated’) emphasizes the ongoing dimension of the creation of the self during ontogenesis. The subjectivity in question, which is specified not only as ‘the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings’ but also as ‘the bourgeois individual’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 35), is thus depicted as an effect of the present-day formation of individuals. 8
The second finding, which attests that Horkheimer and Adorno do not resolve the tension, derives from the history of ideas. If they did not want to show that the animal rationale has constituted itself through the domination of nature since ancient times, it would be difficult to explain why they turned to ‘the basic text of European civilization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 37). If they solely aimed at a diagnosis of modernity, they would have to anachronistically assume that the archaic author of the Odyssey somehow anticipated modern conditions. But Homer did not do so, nor do Horkheimer and Adorno think that he did. Their excursus rather represents a critique of civilization reaching far back into the past, which the second interpretation underestimates. Thus, the phylogenetic interpretation is accurate in pointing to the natural–historical foundation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
If, on the other hand, Horkheimer and Adorno did not presume that concrete societal conditions make nature-dominating rationality what it is, they would drop back to a pre-sociological critique of reason. Various passages prove that they indeed conceive of different rationalities as crystallizations of the respective conditions, for example, when they reflect on ‘the dominant reason and of the world corresponding to its image’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: xix). Moreover, it would be redundant to investigate the worldview of, to name but one crucial example, Francis Bacon (who propagates the ‘inquisition of nature’ as a scientific program) 9 if it were not for the analysis of nature-dominating rationality as a genuinely modern phenomenon (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 1–2, 33–34).
These observations substantiate that an unresolved tension runs through the magnum opus of early Critical Theory. From the first angle, the domination by nature – understood here as constraints arising from environmental degradation – looks like the unfolding of a historically deep-seated seed. In contrast, from the second angle, it appears as a contingent outcome of contemporary society. Yet, this domination can only be contingent if society itself does not function as a wholly congealed ‘second nature’ that, like the ‘first nature’ studied by natural sciences, operates according to unchanging laws (cf. for instance, Schmidt, 2014: 42–43). There is a broad debate about whether Horkheimer and Adorno regard society in this way. However, this question merely relocates the tension between foredoom and freedom. The main issue of whether or not the members of society can shape their history persists but becomes relegated to the realm of social theory, opening up a different line of inquiry than the one pursued in this article. 10
In closing, I believe that Horkheimer and Adorno point to practice for a possible way out of this theoretical aporia. They understand practice as a touchstone for the possibility of emancipation from nature-dominating reason and the constraints it creates, hoping that practice might demonstrate what theory has yet to establish. In the preface to the 1969 edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the two authors reveal this practical orientation in dealing with the underlying problem: ‘Critical thought … requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: xi). It is this practical stubbornness – this unyielding commitment to ‘freedom’ and ‘humanity’ despite apparent futility – that makes Horkheimer and Adorno proponents of the Enlightenment with a capital E.
Conclusion
In this article, I pursued two interrelated goals. First, I developed an ecological explanation of the reversal of active domination of nature into passive domination by nature, as addressed by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Second, I shed light on the modalities of this shift by examining key secondary literature on the subject.
As for why the attempt to dominate nature ends up in its reversal, I began with an analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno's genealogy of ‘nature-dominating reason’. They use the Homeric episode of Odysseus sailing past the Sirens to illuminate the emergence of a type of reason that functions as a tool to control a seemingly hostile natural world. Building on this, I proposed the ecological explanation that the domination of nature becomes contradictory, as it incites a dominance of natural developments. This dialectic is also reflected in Adorno's chiastic concept of natural history, which captures an entanglement of nature and history – understanding nature as historical and history, conversely, as natural (Adorno, 1984: 117). Based on this, the Anthropocene emerges as an epoch in which humans wield unprecedented power yet remain largely powerless.
On the one hand, natural events that seem to befall humanity as fate are, in fact, human-induced. Anthropogenic climate change and its accompanying extreme weather events exemplify this dynamic, revealing how nature, from the planetary to the elemental level, is shaped by human intervention. In Adorno's terms, nature reveals itself as historical. On the other hand, nature imposes its rhythm of human history, forcing the overburdened societies of modernity to respond to climate change through adaptation strategies such as solar radiation modification or carbon dioxide removal. Thus, history, as Adorno suggests, proves to be naturally driven.
I further argued that whether a way out of this situation exists depends on the historical index of the reversal. The first classification reconstructed in this article is that of Habermas and the early Honneth, who both understand the Dialectic of Enlightenment as addressing human history as such. They take the phylogenetic perspective that the turnaround is rooted in the provenience of our species, virtually condemning us to suffer from it. The second classification comes from, among others, Allen and the later Honneth. They treat Horkheimer and Adorno's work as a diagnosis of modernity, arguing that it is the current societal order alone that drives the double-edged process of dominating nature and being dominated by it.
Finally, I have claimed that both readings are partially valid but that each tries to pull the Dialectic of Enlightenment onto one side, whereas its authors leave the tension between the two perspectives unresolved. Viewed in this light, Horkheimer and Adorno refrain from deciding whether a different relationship between the realm of humans and the realm of nature is achievable. They leave this question without a theoretical answer, deferring it to practice to demonstrate that emancipation from the chain between the domination of and domination by nature is possible.
Footnotes
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The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
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