Talk:Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)

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Adorno, Theodor W, Max Horkheimer, and Robert Hullot-Kentor. “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.” New German Critique..56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno (1992): 109-141. Retrieved 4 July 2007 JSTOR.
Hohendahl, Peter U. “The Dialectic of Enlightenment Revisited: Habermas' Critique of the Frankfurt School.” New German Critique..35, Special Issue on Jurgen Habermas (1985): 3-26. Retrieved 4 July 2007 JSTOR.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert. “Notes on Dialectic of Enlightenment: Translating the Odysseus Essay.” New German Critique..56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno (1992): 101-108. Retrieved 4 July 2007 JSTOR.
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Caveats

I'm still not satisfied with the organization of the new comments, but in the interest of having more for everyone to look at tonight I'm posting what I've written. I'm looking forward to getting into the material in a more tentative and extemporaneous manner than writing allows. Eric Strome 19:09, 16 January 2007 (EST)

My apologies to anyone who was looking forward to the chapter by chapter breakdown indicated by the previous incarnation of the structure of these comments (my feeling is this is few if any). While trying to compose something I found all the topics bleeding together in such a way that I don’t think a compartmentalized presentation could do justice to them. I suspect the fragmentary nature of the work is a deliberate attempt to model the critical way of thinking that h&a argue was (& is) desperately needed. If the suspicion is correct that a systematization of the ideas in the reading would be the last thing h&a would want, I’m sure they’d be pleased that I couldn’t manage it. Eric Strome 16:14, 12 January 2007 (EST)

Comments

In their first sentence, h&a distinguish their idea of the concept of enlightenment, “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought,” from the proper name of the early-modern European intellectual movement, which they might say is an arbitrarily demarcated episode in what has been civilization’s snow-balling departure from humanity and meaning since the time of Odysseus [see section on Excursus I below]. h&a contend that this departure culminated in the early-twentieth century emergence of Positivism, a system of thought taken to be the logical extreme of enlightenment. The abstraction of subject from object, or sign from signified, was for Odysseus and other early subjects an empowering step that gave human beings some measure of control, and thereby liberated human beings from their fear of nature. Over time, however, those habits or practices of empowered subjects became consolidated and concretized in language. I am not clear on the continuity or discontinuity between mythological versus enlightened power elites, but I think h&a argue that enlightened power elites derive their power from the fact that linguistic expression makes it seem that their way of doing things corresponds to reality: after all, it was Odysseus who found success, and presumably the reason for it was his real purchase on the way things are. h&a argue that although the way human beings think and talk seems to reflect reality, intellectual and linguistic forms were determined within reality to the advantage of certain individuals. As they put it, “Language itself endowed what it expressed…with the universality it had acquired as the means of intercourse in civil society” [16].

Due to this feature of language, I think h&a argue that the price of enlightenment is deception. What I think they are at pains to establish is the possibility for securing the fruits of advancing thought while simultaneously resisting to the greatest extent possible the deception concomitant with that thought’s concretization. h&a describe “determinate negation” as the process by which the deceptive effects of reified thought can be abandoned. The following passage will need substantial explication because of the incidence of terms that seem to have specific meaning for h&a, and at the moment I think it should be what we start with in class.

The self satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of negativity as redemption, are untrue forms of the resistance to deception. The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition. Such observance, ‘determinate negation,’ is not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void. Unlike rigorism, 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. With the concept of determinate negation, Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the know result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and himself succumbed to mythology [18].

I can only list features of this passage which I think make it important, since a single, coherent meaning of the passage still escapes me. The validity of the idea in the penultimate sentence that “determinate negation” is the means to distinguish enlightenment from positivist decay carries high stakes for h&a. The definition of “determinate negation” as the faithful observance of an image’s prohibition, as well as the apparently synonymous use of “determinate negation” and “dialectic” is something to which we should attend. h&a also make use of this concept in their definition of knowledge, which "does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation, but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand" [20].

The passage also includes their use of the terms “untrue”, “falsehood”, “falseness”, and “truth”. Throughout the work, h&a employ the words wrong, false, lie, and untrue to characterize various features of contemporary mentality and culture. Often the authors alternate between using these terms in their pregnant sense and using them in the positivist sense with which h&a’s usage is meant to contrast. On the subject of h&a’s theory of truth, their comment from the 1969 preface is illuminating: “We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history” [xi]. So, one question for us to tackle is the following: While it is clear that h&a deny a nominalist or logical positivist theory of truth, what have they put, explicity or implicity, in its place?

The second sentence of the block quote above includes the phrase “the right of the image,” which I think is roughly synonymous to “the use of the view.” It seems to me that here (as elsewhere) h&a are hamstrung in their attempt to communicate their idea by the fact that certain words and phrases cannot but reflect the denotations inherent in reified, enlightened linguistic expressions. I think the idea is that for whatever image one has of good or utopia, what is beneficial in that view erodes to whatever extent it is realized, since the very realization of one’s hopes alters the circumstances of one’s predicament. h&a argue that this has occurred with enlightenment: the idea that thought should advance, once realized, allowed everyone the comfort of advanced thought and led to the stagnation of thought. This is importantly different from “rigorism,” which never admits that some concrete achievement does in fact realize the idea in question. It seems to me that h&a seek to liberate the concept of enlightenment from the uses to which dualisms, understood as one instance of enlightenment, have been put.

Questions

"Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress itself, 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" [xi].

What do we make of their choice of the phrase “real humanity?” What are h&a’s tacit assumptions about the nature of humanity? Does their view of human nature stand in contrast to their statements in the 1969 preface about truth, such that human nature is invariable with respect to historical change in a way that truth is not?
Just what are the remnants of freedom, and what does their existence say about the authors' arguments for the increasing totality of culture? Is s the free exercise of real humanity powerless against historical change, or does it only seem that way? Is the trick of total, administered culture to make it seem that way in the effort to prevent the free exercise of real humanity?

"The development toward total s integration identified in the book has been interrupted...[xi-xii]”

Does this offer a clue as to what the free exercise of humanity looks like in their eyes? To what could or does this interruption refer?

To what extent is it possible, accoring to h&a and/or oneself, that art or faith can ameliorate the predicament of administered experience?

Excursus I

Although epic and myth are casually understood to be synonomous, h&a argue that myth is in fundamental tension with the narration of epic. They demonstrate that there is far more continuity between the worldview of Odysseus and contemporary bourgeoisie than one might expect. For h&a, assumptions about the difference in kind (rather than degree) between the Greek and industrial mentalities originate in the attempt to justify humanistic thought as a reclamation of Hellenistic culture.

Connections with reason, liberality, and middle-class qualities do indeed extend incomparably further back than is assumed by historians who date the concept of the burgher from the end of medieval feudalism. In identifying the burgher where earlier bourgeois humanism had imagined some pristine dawn of culture, which was taken to legitimize that humanism, the neo-Romantic reaction equates world history with enlightenment [36-7].

Although h&a seem to wish that the German neo-Romantic “cultural fascists” with their “fashionable ideology” in the service of “national regeneration” had never stumbled upon the nihilistic half of Nietzsche’s understanding of the dialectic of enlightenment, they agree with the industrial apologists’ unconscious implication that history has witnessed the steady increase of enlightenment at the expense of myth. In other words, the fact that Odysseus can be identified as a burgher, or can be seen to share aspects of the mental life of industrial townsfolk, means that western civilization did not experience a sharp break from Greece, whose cultural meaning and worth the Enlightenment was only much later recovering. Instead, Odysseus’ narration of his own success at running the mythological gauntlet momentously tipped the balance between his enslavement to myth/nature and his rational power just enough to set western civilization on its course to disenchant the world, and from which it has yet to deviate. In his trial by fire, Odysseus is the first subject in western history to employ cunning, understood as an exploitation of the difference between word and object (as in the episode with Polyphemus the Cyclops) but also understood as a means of exchange. That exchange is of risk for reward. Odysseus already becomes “homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resemble” given that “Bourgeois economics later enshrined this principle in the concept of risk: the possibility of foundering is seen as moral justification for profit.” [48] h&a suggest that the outcome of Odysseus’ journey established nothing less than the possibility for individuals who are subject to nature to become selves who master nature. As they put it,

The contrast between the single surviving ego and the multiplicity of fate reflects the antithesis between enlightenment and myth. The hero’s peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self infinitely weak in comparison to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness…All the adventures Odysseus survives are dangerous temptations deflecting the self from the path of its logic…Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels after him, throws himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself; he achieves his estrangement from nature by abandoning himself to nature, trying his strength against it in all his adventures; ironically, it is implacable nature that he now commands…[38-9](on these topics I found note 5 to be particularly helpful)

Words I had to look up while reading

(Does a section like this seem like a good idea to anyone? I found I couldn't make sense of some sentences without hitting the dictionary, and contrary to the introductory statement of a previous version of this page, I realized I did assmue others might find a section like this helpful - otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I hope that assumption didn't offend...)