Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment Essay -- Mythology

Adorno and Horkheimers dialectical of EnlightenmentMyth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology(Dialectic of Enlightenment XVI)Adorno and Horkheimers obscure and nihilistic text Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE) is an guarantee to answer the question why slice build, instead of entering a truly humanity condition, is sinking into a untried kind of barbarism (DoE, p.xi). The result is a totalising critique of modernity a diagnosis of why the Enlightenment project failed with no attempt to prescribe a cure. This is achieved by a historical-philosophical submit of the mythic world-view of animism and anthropomorphism and the Enlightenment attempt to dissolve myth through objectification and instrumental reason. DoE also uses Homers Odyssey as a metaphorical interpretation of this historical change, where Odysseus is the prototype of the bourgeois man.This study reveals for Adorno and Horkheimer the failure of the Enlightenment project. Enlightenment has no claim to being less(prenominal) a myth than the mythology it failed to escape. This new myth is defined for them by the contract to dominate reputation at the expense of alienation of man from nature and from his own inner nature. They follow the appearance of the subject as it is objectified on base nature, and is dominated with it. The subject becomes an object and his intellect becomes instrumental, and all instinct and arresting experience that fails to be productive in the pursuit of domination is repressed, man becomes mechanized. They also assert that class domination is a direct and requisite consequence of the attempt to dominate nature, and is therefore inescapable.Background to the text.Adorno and Horkheimer, members of the Frankfurt civilize in Germany, wrote DoE (which was completed in 1944) while Fascism, a kind of barbarism never seen before, was threatening Europe. They viewed this as the epitome of the self-destructive nature of enlightenment, the final evid ence that it would never result in a truly human condition. They wrote in the introduction to DoE that the indefatigable self-destructiveness of enlightenmentrequires philosophy to drop even the last vestiges of innocence in regard to the habits and tendencies of the spirit of the age (p.xi), thence the intensity of their critique.Being part of the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Horkheimer were influenced... ...kfurt school, does not accept Adornos solution. He believes Adorno is being too nihilistic in continued next page deed overing no dash to escape instrumental rationality. Habermass main philosophical project has been to resolve this problem, to allow for the possibility of substantive rationality (i.e. rationality that is not aimed at indicator and domination but, rather, validity) and, thus, to save the project of the Enlightenment. The result is a theory of string out communication that is aimed at an ideal speech situation, that is, at a discourse not tainted by instr umental aims. BibliographyTheodor Adorno and Maw Horkheimer The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Verso London, 1997).Theodor Adorno veto Dialectics (Routledge London, 1990)Jurgen Habermas The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment Re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Jay Bernstein (ed.) The Frankfurt School vituperative Assessments vol.3 (Routledge London, 1994).Axel Honneth The Critique of Power Reflective Stages of Critical Social Theory (M.I.T Boston, 1991).Gran Therborn The Frankfurt School, in New Left Review (ed.) Western Marxism a Critical Reader (New Left Books Norfolk, 1977).