Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present) 1st Edition

One of the best books for me in several years, easy to read and excellent ideas. Thanks,

Must read for anyone interested in German philosophy, specifically the Frankfurt School.

Essential reading for anyone interested in how culture became the way it is.

This Amazon page is a disaster. The sample pages are from the earlier, terrible translation published by Continuum. One of the reader reviews is (as it notes) actually a review of the earlier translation. What is it doing here?? In fact, all of the reviews predate the publication of the new translation.

By all means read the Dialectic of Enlightenment! But be sure to use only the new translation published by Stanford.

Marxist politics aside, Adorno and Horkheimer's staggering critique of post-enlightenment thought takes everything we "civilized" people take for granted and burns it---in front of your kids.

The examination of the oft-overlooked philosophy of the Marquis de Sade is especially significant, as it critiques the rogue philosopher while paying him his long-overdue respect as a true man of philosophy.

A Frankfurt must have!

Arrived very quickly! Completely satisfied!

Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a dense and difficult book that addresses a diversity of demanding topics. However, for those who have read Horkheimer's later book Eclipse of Reason (1947), Dialectic of Enlightenment is, I think, a bit more accessible. In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer emphasizes the distinction between subjective reason, which concerns means-ends relationships, and objective reason, which focuses on things in themselves. Horkheimer holds that our obsession with quantitative increases in dollar-valued production leads to a near-exclusive concern with subjective reason and almost total neglect of objective reason. This raises essential questions of value: we produce more and more with increasing efficiency, but of what intrinsic value are the things we produce?

The concepts subjective reason and objective reason are not explicitly invoked in Dialectic of Enlightenment. However, if we bear these ideas in mind, some of the difficult material in this text becomes more accessible, and we are better able to understand what the authors mean by the book's title.

During the Enlightenment, men of talent, intellect, and broad learning, as well as lesser lights and entire institutions, sought to disabuse human beings of their crippling adherence to myth, ritual, superstition, and misguided philosophies in making their way through the world. Reason, with pure mathematics and formal logic as exemplars, unsullied by the detritus of failed religions and unfounded, debilitating mythological systems, was to guide the human race to more bountiful and fulfilling ways of living.

Over the centuries, however, it became clear that reason, given that it is inherently devoid of specific content, can lead us almost anywhere, into patterns of behavior and ways of evaluating that are sharply at odds with the full development of human potential. After all, thinking -- reasoning -- is not possible without arbitrary assumptions. We may, in fact, never entertain the admittedly problematic and arbitrary, though ostensibly humane, assumption that all men are created equal, and instead begin with the assumption that Whites are the superior race and all others should serve them. Reason without content gives us no basis for adopting one contrived premise rather than another.

In the absence of rigorous use of objective reason, in whatever way one might accomplish that task, there is no basis on which to assess the comparative merit of the two assumptions, the two bases or starting points that we have arbitrarily suggested for reason. It may be that subjective reason would give the nod to one or the other on practical productive grounds, but failing that, we are left with a commonly neglected concept, objective reason, one that is much more difficult to use and less certain in its application, than subjective reason, and there is no justification for preferring one assumption over another. Who knows? Perhaps each assumption is thoroughly deleterious. Nevertheless, either could serve as the foundation for a science-based, technocratic society where productivity was abundant in purely quantitative dollar terms. Given this set of circumstances, Big Capital, with or without free markets, would be equally satisfied with either.

That this could bring us horrors is not difficult to see. The sterility of reason proceeding without regard for intrinsic values seems as likely to bring us fascism as it does late capitalism or some other system that is incapable of acknowledging and developing the infinite potential of human beings, substituting homogenizing categories and glossy, perniciously captivating images as bases for social life and individual empowerment. The content-free emptiness of reason is an idea also developed by Herbert Marcuse with reference even to theoretical physics in his book One Dimensional Man.

Horkheimer and Adorno's position on mythology leads the reader to conclude that, based on one or another dubious premises, reason will overcome mythology, only to create another mythological system, perhaps more insidiously inhumane, perhaps all-encompassing but taken for granted as inescapably real, whatever its content. Still, the authors' understanding of mythology seems much like George Santayana's position on religion in The Life of Reason. They see real intrinsic value in some myths and their prescribed modes of being insofar as they poetically express the complex intrinsic value of human potential. Such mythological manifestations, however, are exceptions.

Whatever the claims of reason, the authors have no aversion to making value judgments of their own. We may agree with them when they dismiss the "jazz" of Benny Goodman and Guy Lombardo as trash, but the foundation for this judgment is not evident: what does the concept objective reason tell us about "jazz"? And how does one find out?

An especially interesting exchange is presented in the "Notes and Sketches" section of the book (197 - 199). The authors construct a seemingly innocuous, even if annoyingly commonplace, conversation by way of illustrating the distortions to which overweening consistency in the application of reason and logic lends itself. They thereby give us an example of something we've all experienced, the seemingly reasonable transformed into the undeniably stupid. It can be rhetorically difficult, moreover, to counter this sort of stupidity in everyday discourse.

Dialectic of Enlightenment, though difficult, is an interesting and valuable book that merits careful study. It contains a good deal more than can I can adequately acknowledge in a conventional review, and there are, I'm sure, parts of the book that I misunderstood. Even for those of us who comprehend it only imperfectly, however, Horkheimer and Adorno have given us insights and wisdom that make the world a more interpretable place, even if not a more congenial one. Their unqualified judgment that we have the technological wherewithal, but lack the political and moral will and the informed substantive appreciation of objective reason, for everyone to become fully developed human beings bears emphasis and repetition.