The totalitarianism of Enlightenment

The totalitarianism of Enlightenment 5 April 2016 POL5032: History of Philosophy Essay 1 Dr George Hull Renée Hunter HNTREN004 Word count: 2738 Introduction In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno make the claim that enlightenment is totalitarian. This paper explores their argument to agree with the two Frankfurters, in that the Enlightenment produces a totalitarian way of thinking and accepting. Following Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding of enlightened reasoning, I argue that it is in fact rather natural that Western Europeans were brought to commit the horrors that they did during WW2. The paragraph in Horkheimer & Adorno’s essay that gives rise to this paper is as follows: “For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect. So long as it can develop undisturbed by any outward repression, there is no holding it. In the last process, it treats its own ideas of human rights exactly as it does older universals. Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength. Which means that enlightenment still recognises itself even in myths. Whatever myths the resistance may appeal to, by virtue of the very fact that they become arguments in the process of opposition, they acknowledge the principle of dissolvent rationality for which they reproach the Enlightenment. Enlightenment is totalitarian.”1 Before delving into the argument as posed by Horkheimer and Adorno, I briefly discuss how they understand the concept of Enlightenment. Enlightenment explained Enlightenment is the big concept of importance in the essay by Horkheimer and Adorno. The Enlightenment is the period of roughly the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Western Europe (and North America), during which a new way of ‘enlightened’ thinking became the norm. While this particular period in history has since ended, the enlightened way of thinking has not. The main aim of enlightened thought can be described as ‘liberation’, through sovereign knowledge. Through applying the way of thinking and reasoning as prescribed by the Enlightenment one could achieve liberation from oppressive regimes, oppressive religious structures, or any other kind of ‘dogmatic institution’. As Francis Bacon described it, knowledge is the ultimate sovereignty, which no‐one can take away from you, through which you can resist domination by others, and which gives you the tools to bend people, structures, technology or nature to your will.2 Enlightenment thus strives towards freeing humans from oppressive, dogmatic, imposed man‐made structures. It also strives, on the other hand, to free humans from the fear of the unknown, and most specifically from 1 2 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 6. Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 3‐4. the fear of the chaos of nature, which is uncontrollable and separate from humans. This liberation will be reached through enlightened thought. That is to say, through specific reasoning, empirical experiments, and the quantification of observations, humans can know nature and free themselves from dominating institutions. This prescribed way of thinking and reasoning is the main point of enlightened thought. Proper enlightened thought will let humans see through the illusions of the world, which have constituted ‘knowledge’ until then. This can be achieved through deductive reasoning, and logical rationality. A big part of getting to know nature in an enlightened way is the strong emphasis on categorisation, of bringing things in relation to one another. Specifically, it hinges upon seeing the contents of categories as interchangeable. For instance, a cat is a cat: Cat A does not have an inherently different essence from cat B. Another way in which enlightened reasoning functions, is through the quantifiability or mathematisation of observations. Just like it seeks to identify categories, Enlightenment seeks to identify (iron) laws. Taken further, this means that society’s laws can be drawn up, similar to mathematical rules or equations. One can work out society by looking at it in a formulaic way: If a country is rich in oil, then it will not establish a democracy, for instance. This rule has been established by careful observation, and this is now taken to be the truth. Horkheimer & Adorno’s argument explained In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno take on a number of issues that they observe with the idea of the Enlightenment. A large part of their essay is dedicated to explaining the relationship between myths and enlightened thought, and how enlightenment and myth (anti‐enlightenment, that ignorant worldview that Enlightenment aimed to free humans from) are one and the same. This is not of importance for the totalitarian argument, which I discuss here – rather, it criticises the Enlightenment on its own terms. The mythical side of things will therefore not be discussed further, but had to be briefly pointed out by virtue of the large part of the original essay having dealt with it. The most straightforward reading of the above‐mentioned paragraph in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is that enlightenment is totalitarian, because it only accepts those things that ‘conform to computation and utility’. Any argument that does not conform to this is not acknowledged as an argument at all – mere nonsense, in fact – and anything that does conform but wants to argue against this view of enlightenment is turned around and used as arguments in the proof of the superiority of enlightened thought. The critic is, after all, trying to use reason and arguments against enlightened thinking, which are the ultimate tools of that which they are criticising – meaning that they effectively accept the superiority of those tools for achieving argumentative ends. Enlightenment thus becomes an all‐encompassing circle from which one cannot escape through reason, which seems to be cheating. One cannot conceive of something so all‐ encompassing that any argumentation about the concept whatsoever would be futile. That would mean that it would be so grand that humans could not possibly have such an all‐encompassing view as to possibly come up with alternatives. But then how could humans have come up with the understanding of this grand concept in the first place? Any human conception must be something that can be rationalised about and discussed, since that is how birth was given to that conception in the first place. This is not, however, the only way in which Horkheimer and Adorno see the Enlightenment to be totalitarian. In reading the Dialectic of Enlightenment, there are a number of ‘totaliarianisms’ that can be identified in relation to the Enlightenment. • Totalitarianism of reasoning Enlightenment accepts only one way of reasoning and completely denies the possibility of achieving insights in any other way. Enlightenment strongly prescribes the enlightened thought as the one true way of observing the world and coming to conclusions about it. In order to arrive at knowledge, you must observe, and deduce or infer conclusions from those observations. Or one must logically reason step‐by‐step from such an observation to come to a conclusion. Any knowledge that has not followed those steps of reasoning is, for enlightenment, complete nonsense. Note that it is not even considered to be ‘untrue’ or ‘uncertain’, rather it is complete nonsense and not even worth wasting time on to discuss. • Totalitarianism of objects Enlightenment only accepts concepts or observations characteristics, and classifies as illusions anything else. that fit certain This type of totalitarianism is related to the previous one. The difference, however, is that the first type of totalitarianism applied to the way that humans could reach conclusions or new knowledge; whereas this totalitarianism applies to the knowledge that might arise out of the proper reasoning/rationality. That is to say, one might have followed the correct experimental, reasonable, rational steps and reached a conclusion. However, if the conclusion, or the object observed, is not such that it can be quantified, categorised, and used in mathematical, formulaic understandings of the world, enlightenment sees it as an illusion. Anything that cannot be quantified cannot be a real thing. Just like totalitarianism aims to fit all people into a single system and a single mode, so enlightened science aims to fit everything into a single scientific method, and disregards everything that does not measure up to that method. • Totalitarianism of the process The Enlightened process of acquiring knowledge has been decided from the start: there is no true and open ‘exploration’. “For enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system. Its untruth does not consist in what its romantic enemies have always reproached it for: analytical method, return to elements, dissolution through reflective thought; but instead in the fact that for enlightenment the process is always decided from the start.”3 Because the objects that can be known have already been determined so strictly (quantifiable, categorisable, etc), and the way in which this knowledge may be acquired likewise, much of the process of acquiring knowledge is already very firmly decided from the start. Because one knows the types of objects one might possibly observe, or one might possible know, all possibilities for ‘new’ knowledge are known from the outset. More so even because one knows exactly in which ways this knowledge will be acquired – there is but one scientific method of arriving at new knowledge. And finally, due to the formulaic, iron law‐ determined view that Enlightenment has of the world, one knows that the (as yet) unknown must mathematically fit into the existing iron laws. It is like an x in an equation – despite the fact that the value is unknown when one starts to work out the problem, the answer is in fact already buried in the equation itself. New knowledge, following the enlightened model, is like the x in an equation: Currently not quite worked out yet, but actually already known to a certain extent. • Totalitarianism of the opposition Enlightenment does not accept any opposition to its vision, since it takes any opposition and turns it into proposition. This is the totalitarianism that comes across from the initial paragraph from Dialectic of Enlightenment that was quoted earlier in this section. Enlightenment lends itself to circular reasoning, and whenever critics of enlightened thinking want to use reason against it, it may turn around and argue that the very fact that the opposition uses reason themselves, shows that they have accepted the superiority of reason and rationality, which is exactly what the Enlightenment stood for. Opposition is thus not possible. • Totalitarianism of the worthwhile Enlightenment determines which types of knowledge are worth pursuing. Finally, Enlightenment has a strong value‐judgment over which pursuits of knowledge should be considered worthwhile. The enlightened process is tied together tightly with technological developments, the Industrial Revolution and subsequent leaps in economics and society to become ever more cost‐effective, ever more efficient. Knowledge that aims to contribute to ever better efficiency and greater savings is judged to be worthwhile knowledge. Any other knowledge (that which is acquired simply to fulfil curiosity, for instance) is considered frivolous. An interesting situation arises, however, where the aim of the enlightened process is to reach ever better means, while the ends to which these means are implemented are never examined. Normative considerations are not necessary: as long as the end – whichever end that may be – is achieved as quickly and 3 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 24. properly as it can, then the knowledge that makes that possible, is worth the scholar’s (or anybody else’s, for that matter) time. How the Enlightenment positioned Europeans to commit the horrors that they did in WW2 “Enlightenment becomes wholesale deception of the masses.”4 That the horrors of the Second World War should not have surprised us so much as they did (however devastating this realisation may be), can be argued through a few characteristics of the Enlightenment. First of all, the Enlightenment had a certain effect on people’s thinking. ‘Indoctrinated’ as they were by enlightened thought, Western Europeans were conditioned to accepting ‘generally accepted knowledge’ or ways of thinking. More than just accepted, this enlightened way of thinking is obsessed with efficiency and instrumentality. Normativity does not have a big role to play. The question is not about the end of something, rather how to most efficiently achieve an end – whichever end that may be. Secondly, there is the way in which enlightened thought influences what to even think about, or consider exploring. As explained above, only those things that can be fit into the ‘equation’ of the known world are considered knowable objects. Taking this further: only those things that man can manipulate, are worth knowing or considering. In the context of a dictatorial regime, I can see this leading to conforming, collaborationist behaviour. After all, it might not be efficient for the ordinary German to try and fight the system. First of all, in the context of WW2, this was extremely dangerous, and secondly, the ordinary German could not have changed – manipulated – anything anyway. So then what would the point of knowing even be? It would be most rational to keep your head down and not examine to critically or closely what goes on around you. Thirdly, besides enlightened thought disciplining people into accepting a limited way of thinking and a limited view of possible knowledge, it leads to a society ruled by equivalence. There is a constant drive for that which can be captured by a system, or that which can be related to one another in a mathematised, quantified, formulaic way. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”5 To my mind, this is a way of thinking that can quite naturally lead to racism. 4 5 Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 42. Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 7. One the one hand, one could argue that those things that cannot be related to the system or the classifications in a rational way becomes an illusion. This would mean that differences between humans, of different races, would be reduced to an illusion. We scientifically see that these are all humans, after all – so differences between humans that cannot be rationalised must be illusions. On the other hand, however, the enlightened society experiences a constant drive for fungibility. Populations of one category must be interchangeable, since how else can they be a category? This drive for unity, interchangeability within the category, echoes in the myths of the Aryan race in Germany just before and during WW2. The whole German population was encouraged to assimilate to the ideal Aryan or German. People who did not, could not or did not want to fit that bill had no place in Germany. The differences between humans within a category, that were not rational, must have been illusions; and those humans that did not fall within the category at all had no place in Germany. It was all or nothing. That the second way of thinking about differences between humans prevailed has to do with the Enlightenment’s strong push for categorisation and hierarchies. There is a common argument that the Enlightenment carries the roots of racism, and it is quite telling that the age of Enlightenment is the age in which slave trade was so profitable. The thinking that ‘racial’ differences must be an illusion would suit modern views on racialism very well, but would not hold under older understandings of race. So, affected as the Western Europeans were by the kind of enlightened thinking, as well as the way of categorising and thinking about human differences that made it acceptable to put humans in vastly different categories, it does seem quite natural that a horde of accepting, efficient objects (as opposed to subjects) would be found in Germany, ready to be swayed to certain actions or conclusions by a dictator. Reasoning under Enlightenment is a very efficient, rather than normative, business, and the way in which the Enlightenment aims to make sense of the world, made anti‐Semitism quite accepting. It was part of the obsession with categorisation, and the drive to unity – pushing out anything that might upset that unity. One aspect of Enlightenment that was not considered here, is the way in which it affects/has affected not the domination over the way of thinking of the mainstream, but rather the literal domination of people over each other. This choice was made because the original paragraph giving rise to the question in this paper led me to think of this totalitarianism more in terms of prescribing a way of thinking. Due to size constraints, the way in enlightened thought leads people to dominate over one another (and ultimately themselves) could not be considered here, but it is definitely something to examine in thinking about the totalitarianism of the Enlightenment further.