An Introduction to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School

Hartigan – August 7th

I. What is Enlightenment?

The cornerstone text of Critical Theory came from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, and was entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment. To understand the “Enlightenment” that the authors are criticising in the text, we must first understand what Enlightenment actually is. An understanding of it can come from Immanuel Kant’s essay An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’.

Kant sees the movement of Enlightenment as a release from authority – a kind of authority that is very often mysterious, for example the mystery of the divine right of monarchs, or the Priest’s ability to comprehend the mystery of religion. The enlightened thinker realises that her own understanding has the capability to clarify the world without the resort to mysterious authority: “The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!” For Kant, the light of Enlightenment is the freedom from authority, and the celebration of our own reason.

It is this position that Adorno and Horkheimer are directly responding to, although in The Concept of Enlightenment they refer to Francis Bacon as a figurehead of Enlightenment. According to the Frankfurt interpretation, anything that doesn’t conform to “the rule of computation and utility” is, in the eyes of the Enlightenment, disregarded. The myth (or mystery) of antiquated thought are examples of anthropomorphism: “the projection onto nature of the subjective”; mythic figures of antiquity all share the human subject as the common denominator. The Enlightenment’s attempt to reverse this was a strive towards complete schematisation: “its ideal is the system from which all and everything follows”.

II. The Frankfurt School’s Criticism

Adorno and Horkheimer believed that, in its attempt to demythologise philosophy and science, the Enlightenment created myths of its own – the aforementioned computation, utility, and schematisation. Looking at the violence of the 20th Century, they suggested that the promises made by the Enlightenment were in fact false and lead to nightmarish totalitarianism. Perhaps substituting the dogma of our own reason for the mythical dogma of antiquity can result in equally negative consequences.

Supposedly, the Enlightenment aimed to rid people of the fear that was so common in their lives: “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown”. But, even as the technology and science that modernity worships become ever more prevalent, we need only look around to us to see unprecedented amounts of chaos, destruction, and fear. Why is this? How is it that the reason championed in the Enlightenment has become irrational? The answer lies in the fact that reason and science have distanced themselves from what many philosophers of the Enlightenment and modernity wanted it to be – Hegel, for example, saw science as the absolute knowledge and understanding of the world. But with the increasing prevalence of global capitalism, science (and especially the technology it is manifested in) becomes more focused on controlling the world, rather than understanding it. This use of rationality as an instrument is known, aptly, as instrumental reason (Horkheimer went on to write essays under the name of Critique of Instrumental Reason). We see this phenomenon come to light in consumer technology, nuclear missiles, and a wealth of other modern scientific innovations.

It is for this reason that Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that the source for the nightmare that was the 20th century was a threefold sense of domination: the human domination over nature, domination of the nature within human beings, and the domination of humans by other humans. The motivation for such domination and control is the aforementioned fear of the unknown. If the world is subjected to the control of people, then it will naturally be understood by the people: “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalised”. In a society like ours, where everything is driven by “progress”, and “progress” is determined by our domination, that which is other, and that which is detrimental to progress, gets shunned or destroyed: “For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell.”

Dialectic of Enlightenment contains the bold claim that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Despite being somewhat unclear, this quote concisely explains the Frankfurt School’s attitude towards Enlightenment, in two points: firstly, the antiquated philosophies that the Enlightenment so strongly opposed contributed to the progression towards the Enlightenment, and so cannot be completely disregarded (“myth is already enlightenment”), and secondly, the Enlightenment has resulted in the establishment of the myths of modernity (the dominating sciences, and so on). It’s important to note that they do not see the Enlightenment as a movement totally without progression, just as they certainly do not glorify the mythical values of the pre-modern era.

III. The Influence of Hegel

As their text’s title implies, Adorno and Horkheimer were clearly applying a method similar to the dialectics of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit when they looked back on the history of philosophy. Just as Hegel applies consciousness’s reason to itself to reveal self-refuting contradictions, the Frankfurt School applied such a determinate negation to the values of the Enlightenment against themselves, resulting in a “dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment”. The Dialectic of Enlightenment “teaches us to read from [enlightenment’s] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth.”

This approach also involves another Hegelian method: that of conceptual self-reflection. Following the dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment, it is revealed that thought and knowledge arises from life’s central needs; needs that become distant as reason becomes instrumental.

IV. Conclusion

Overall, Critical Theory can be seen as following two movements within philosophy: predominantly, the Frankfurt school responded to the Enlightenment, but also to German Idealism in a Marxist way.

For Marx and his contemporaries, Hegel was the last great philosopher to be working towards an understanding of history and humanity in itself. Following Hegel, the “point” of philosophy, as Marx famously put it, was not to interpret the world but to change it. Accordingly, Marx and the other Left Hegelians moved from a strictly theoretical Hegelian philosophy into a new, practical philosophy, changing the methods by which society reaches its aims. In formulating Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School followed this turn, incorporating empirical sociology and history into their theorising, whilst retaining the normative descriptions of truth and ethics of traditional philosophy.