FAITH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Philosophies and Social Theories for Christian Ethics

SEMINAR PAPER

SUBMITTED BY: JAMES SONDOR.

SUBMITTED TO

Dr. SUNNY PAPPAN.

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 CONTENT

1. Introduction
2. Early development of life and Philosophy
2.1. Theoder W. Adorno
2.2. Max Horkheimer
3. The Frankfurt School
3.1. Dialectic of Enlightenment
3.2. From Culture Industry to Information Society
3.3. Critical Theory
3.4. The Establishment of a System and the Sovereignty over Nature
3.5. Rationalism and Metaphysics
4. Alternative Philosophy
4.1. Adorno, and the idea of a rational society
4.2. Eclipse of Reasons
5. Evaluation
6. Conclusion

Bibliography

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Title: Ethics of the modern society through the History: Theodor W. Adorno and Max
Horkheimer

1. Introduction

The Following seminar paper discusses the Philosophical ideologies of Theoder W. Adorno and
Max Horkheimer. It will try to analyise the system of their thinking how it is benefit for today’s
context? There are certain important philosophies which are discussed with greater depth and
understanding.

2. Early development of life and Philosophy

The distinctive work of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer is its potent combination of
philosophy and social science in the interest of developing a critical theory of Western society.
They have taken the charge: to formulate a critical theory of society that examines the impact of
economic and political institutions on social life and the development of individuals. Addressing
perennial philosophical issues in the course of pursuing their theories, Adorno and Horkheimer
often cross over into critical sociology. Their work has ranged from theoretical accounts of
morality, aesthetics, and epistemology to empirical analyses of democratic and fascist tendencies
in the West, and the psychological and social pathologies prevalent today. In addition, their views
on methodological problems, such as Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments, and the
critical theory of the culture industry in the social sciences, have had a lasting influence on the
disciplines of sociology and anthropology.1
2.1. Theoder W. Adorno
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher, composer, essayist, and social theorist. He was
born in 1903 in Frankfurt, Germany, where his father, Oskar Wiesengrund, was a prominent wine
merchant and assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism. His mother, Maria Cavelli-
Adorno della Piana, was a Catholic and had enjoyed a successful career as a singer until the time
of her marriage to Adorno’s father. (In 1938 Adorno had his name changed from Wiesengrund to
Adorno.) Adorno was an only child in a quite well off household that he described as presided

1
Deborah Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (London: Routledge, 2004) 1.

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over by two mothers. His other “mother” was his mother’s sister, Agathe Calvelli-Adorno. She too
had had a successful musical career, as a pianist.2
At the age of fifteen, Adorno began weekly study meetings with Siegfried Kracauer, a man
fourteen years his senior and then editor of the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. The weekly
meetings continued for many years and had Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as their first object of
study. Adorno later reported that he owed far more of his intellectual development to these
meetings than to his academic teachers. Adorno began his university studies in Frankfurt in 1921,
studying philosophy, sociology, music, and psychology. It was during the time of his studies that
Adorno met and befriended Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin; the latter would become
especially influential for Adorno’s philosophical work.3
2.2. Max Horkheimer
Max Horkheimer was born on February 14, 1895, in Zuffenhausen, a small town on the outskirts
of Stuttgart, in southern Germany. Horkheimer’s parents were part of Stuttgart’s Jewish
community that had grown steadily in the course of the nineteenth century and had succeeded in
establishing itself as an integral part of the city’s economic, political, and cultural life.4
With the beginning of his friendship with Friedrich Pollock in 1911, Horkheimer entered a phase
of latent rebellion against his parents and the well-ordered bourgeois world they represented.
Horkheimer was too fearful of the consequences to rebel openly. In Pollock’s friendship, he had
found a refuge from the external world, but when the two of them attempted to give concrete form
to their utopian ideals, in their experiment with Neumeier and the isle heureuse, they were quickly
checked. Horkheimer’s novellas about young artists who attempt directly to live out their ideals
but who quickly find themselves in desperation, reflect his ambivalent state of disaffection,
longing, and resignation. At the time of the outbreak of World War I, Horkheimer’s dominant
attitude is one of Nietzschean contempt for the norms of bourgeois society and the compact
majority that uncritically adhere to them. With the outbreak of World War I, Horkheimer’s worst
fears is confirmed. Contempt for the rampant conformity of the time remained an important
element of this thought, but during the next few years it was increasingly tempered by a more

2
Tom Huhn, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 1.
3
Huhn, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, 2006. 1.
4
John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the foundations of the Frankfurt School (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011) 19.

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tragic view of the world, which demanded not just contempt, but also compassion and love. The
most important intellectual factor in this shift in Horkheimer’s worldview was without doubt his
serious study of Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose own youth resembled that of Horkheimer in
many respects.5
Horkheimer is remembered primarily as the co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he
wrote with Theodor W. Adorno in the early 1940s. Yet few people realize that Horkheimer and
Adorno did not begin working together seriously until the late 1930s, or that the model of Critical
Theory developed by Horkheimer and Erich Fromm in the late 1920s and early 1930s differs in
crucial ways from Dialectic of Enlightenment. Abromeit highlights the ways in which
Horkheimer’s early Critical Theory remains relevant to contemporary theoretical discussions in a
wide variety of fields.6 Horkheimer’s early Critical Theory could contribute to contemporary
discussions in a number of different fields. First, Horkheimer’s early work provides an excellent
model for a materialist intellectual history of modern Europe. At first glance, “materialist
intellectual history” may appear to be a contradictio in adjecto, but revisiting Horkheimer’s early
lectures and essays makes clear why this is not the case. Horkheimer’s concept of materialism is
historical, not ontological, metaphysical, mechanical, or physiological. He explicitly criticized
attempts by Lenin and others to define materialism as the ahistorical primacy of “matter” over
“mind.” Surveying and bringing up to date the long history of philosophical materialism,
Horkheimer argues that this anti- traditional tradition has manifested itself most consistently in a
critique of ideas that justify socially and historically constructed forms of domination as eternal or
necessary.7
3. The Frankfurt School
Horkheimer and Adorno are two essential members of the Frankfurt School, which is a school of
social theory, social research, and philosophy. The formal name at the school is “The Institute for
Social Research”. This institute is a part of Frankfurt University. The term “Frankfurt School” is

5
Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the foundations of the Frankfurt School, 2011. 46.
6
Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the foundations of the Frankfurt School, 2011. I.
7
Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the foundations of the Frankfurt School, 2011. 10.

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an informal term. The thinkers of this school were influenced especially by the failure of
workingclass revolutions in Western Europe after World War I.8
The first generation of the Frankfurt School especially Horkheimer laid down the foundations of
critical theory. The thinkers of the Frankfurt School made contributions in the area of society and
history. Their works focused on social phenomena such as personality, family and authority
structures. Their first common work, Studies of Authority and the Family, gives examples of these
issues. The realm of mass culture is another phenomenon that they search for in their works.9
According to them, mass culture must be deeply analyzed to overcome it. Adorno says: “the
struggle against mass culture can consist only in pointing out its connection with the persistence
of social injustice.”10 As Peter Osborne says, for Adorno, mass culture is “a form of dependent
art.”11 This in togetherness sparked the anticipation to construct the philosophical thought on social
theories, which are:
3.1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the new critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer set
out to elaborate it in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate
source or foundation of social domination. Such would give rise to the "pessimism" of the new
12
critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom. Furthermore, this
ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which Dialectic of Enlightenment was
originally produced: the authors saw National Socialism, Stalinism, state capitalism, and culture
industry as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within
the terms of traditional theory.13 Yet, contrary to Marx's famous prediction in his preface to A

8
Eylem Yenisoy, “The Critiques Of The Enlightenment By Max Horkheimer And Theodor Adorno And
Their Understanding Of A New Method And Philosophy” Masters of Arts Thesis (Middle East Technical University,
2006) 2.
9
Yenisoy, 2006. 3.
10
Theodor W., Adorno, Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981) 109.
11
Peter, Osborne, “A Marxism for the Postmodern?” in New German Critique, No. 56, Spring Summer,
1972. 182.
12
Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott. (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002) 242.
13
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by F. Lawrence.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1987) 116: "Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer's circle to think

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Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, this shift did not lead to "an era of social
revolution," but rather to fascism and totalitarianism. As such, traditional theory was left, in Jürgen
Habermas' words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal; and when the forces of
production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed
to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope."14

The problems posed by the rise of fascism with the demise of the liberal state and the market
(together with the failure of a social revolution to materialize in its wake) constitute the theoretical
and historical perspective that frames the overall argument of the book that is "the Myth is already
enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”15 Horkheimer and Adorno believe that
in the process of "enlightenment," modern philosophy had become over-rationalized and an
instrument of technocracy. They characterize the peak of this process as positivism, referring to
both the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and broader trends that they saw in continuity with
this movement.16 The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from
practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid
behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism that marks the limits of enlightenment.
The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction
of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical
analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity.
Why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply
in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-
destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the

through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet
Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany. It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without
breaking Marxist intentions."
14
Habermas, Jürgen. "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading 'Dialectic of
Enlightenment'." New German Critique 26(4) 1982).13-30.
15
Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2002. Xviii.
16
Josephson-Storm, Jason. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human
Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) 244–5. The Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism was
a group of philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who
met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick.

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domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres
apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable
opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already
enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis
of the book.17
3.2. From Culture Industry to Information Society
In the contemporary information society, which has become capitalist society of information and
information artifacts, which are increasingly commoditized; a development that serves the interest
of powerful elites. A central problem in the capitalist information society is both a societal and an
individual level. It is the phenomenon of information overload. As the problem of information
overload becomes acute, its dialectic relation to the concept of information society is revealed.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s thoughts about the mechanisms of the culture industry, It’s role in the
structures of late capitalism, the interplay between the culture industry and the subject, as well as
the individual’s and collective’s agency offer us interesting insights when addressing the capitalist
information society and the phenomenon of information overload.18
When Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, members of the Frankfurt School, arrived in the
U.S. in the late 1930’s they were baffled by its distinct cultural and medial reality (in relation to
Europe in general and Germany in particular). In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception, Horkheimer and Adorno discuss how what they termed the Culture Industry operates
as a mechanism or a “factory” that produces cultural goods (magazines, films, radio and television
programs etc.) as standardized commodities. Thus, art is defined by its economic value, instead of
aesthetic aspects that were central for autonomous artworks in the bourgeois society; aesthetic
itself becomes a function of the cultural or artistic object as a commodity. Horkheimer and Adorno
deploy Marx’ definition of commodity character and the differentiation between the commodity’s
use-value and exchange-value in their analysis of cultural goods in late capitalism. In late
capitalism, they claim art and its social and cultural value (i.e. its use-value for society, for
example) to satisfy societal needs in terms of social justice and equality have developed to be

17
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1103 Accssessd on 8th December, 2021.
18
Shaked Spier, “From Culture Industry to Information Society” Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A
Festschrift in Honor of Rafael Capurro ed. by Matthew Kelly (Germany: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2016)
385.

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simply products “on the market.” As such, their value is a function of exchange and price
exchange-value. Thus, art has lost its autonomous character, as it now serves as a means to an end;
namely, the generation and accumulation of capital. In order to pursue this end, the culture industry
has created a global network, which facilitates the production of cultural goods and their
distribution and serves as a marketplace that brings consumers and products together. This network
is based on the capitalist relations of production and follows the capitalist logic.19
In transnational informational capitalism, the almost instinctive comparison drawn to Horkheimer
and Adorno’s argument about a global network represents only a part of the networks that serves
the culture industry’s counterparts in transnational informational capitalism. The necessary
supplement is the global cycle of relations of power, labor, and production that constitute
transnational informational capitalism/capitalist information society’s base its material and
economical basis as a capitalist information society and are manifested in one of its central
characteristics, namely the concept of digital labor in its broader sense.20
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, there is a reciprocal relation between the subject and the
culture industry. On the one hand, due to its commodity character, culture in late capitalism needs
to find its consumers. Therefore, the culture industry adapts its cultural products to the consumers,
amongst others by using the logic of mass production and standardization. In this manner, culture
loses its critical dimension; only what fits in the charts and statistics is produced. Furthermore, the
consumption of culture takes place in the individual’s spare time; whereas the latter is defined in
capitalism in its contrast to labor time. That is to say, the recreational or regenerative phase is
subjected to the working phase. The activities in the regenerative phase are expected to demand
little energy from the individual, which in turn requires culture to be accordingly adapted. On the
other hand, the culture industry reduces individuals to their role as consumers. As such, the culture
industry supplies them with trivial, standardized, superficial content in order to avoid investment
risks. From this point of view, the dangers of the culture industry are the growing passivity of the
consumers—and therefore, of society—paralysis of the ability for critical thinking, and cultivation
of false consumerist needs. This vicious circle is for Horkheimer and Adorno an expression of the
manipulation of individuals by the culture industry. It reveals that the culture industry serves the

19
Spier, 2016. 391-92.
20
Spier, 2016. 393.

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interest of economic elites by transforming culture into a tool in the hand of capitalism. A tool that
is able to manipulate the consumers themselves (and not only the products). In this manner, the
culture industry has a stabilizing effect on the existing hegemony.21
3.3. Critical Theory
in 1930, Horkheimer tries to distinguish critical theory from traditional theory. He wrote
“Traditional and Critical theory” in 1937. Traditional theory represents the Enlightenment. The
objective reason of the traditional theory aims to formulate the general and to describe the world
by consistent principles. The goal of traditional theory is absolute knowledge. It is not action.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, there is a unique relation between reason and act in the
Enlightenment. This is the endeavor for technological mastery of the world by means of reason. It
is the goal of traditional theory in the direction of activity. This is not praxis for the members of
the Institute. Horkheimer asserts that traditional theory maintained the separation of thought and
action.22 Critical theory does not assert that knowledge is superior to action. It recognizes that
scientific research is not separated from the society that it is performed in. This is impossible; for,
the researchers are always parts of the social object. The perception of researcher is mediated by
the social rules and categories23 This fact is ignored by the philosophers of the Enlightenment
according to Horkheimer and Adorno. On the other hand, although the researcher is definitely a
part of his society, he is capable of rising above it. His duty, according to Horkheimer and other
members of the Institute, is to reveal the negative forces and tendencies in his society. These forces
and tendencies reveal a different and possible reality.24 Critical theorists reject the idea that the
theory is general and abstract. They consider the contradictions in the present and in the
possibilities of future. They try to grasp the whole in concrete particulars. They view the whole as
a specific historical phenomenon. This also means that absolute explanations are impossible.25

21
Spier, 2016. 393.
22
Max Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory", in Critical Theory, (New York: Continuum Publishing
Company, 1989) 226.
23
Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 1989. 227.
24
Martin, Jay, the Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social
Research 1923-1950 (Toronto: Brown and Company, 1973) 81.
25
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1973. 82.

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According to Horkheimer, critical theory proceeds from the theorist’s awareness of his own
partiality. Thus, theory is neither neutral nor objective. Its partisanship has certain goals. One of
them is the idea of reconstruction of a society which is based on non-exploitative relations between
persons. Another is the restoration of man. Every man must be self-conscious and he must be a
self-managing subject of social reality. Further, each must have a central place in the evolution of
human society. The term “critical theory” itself presupposes a definite philosophical standpoint.
However, this awareness does not imply one-sidedness. On the contrary, the core of their critical
theory is the recognition of the fact that the world of perception is a “product of human activity.”26
Horkheimer describes the traditional conception of theory as stored knowledge. Knowledge must
be put in a form, since this form makes knowledge useful. According to Horkheimer, this makes
the description of the facts more possible in the traditional theory.27 The task of critical theory,
however, according to Horkheimer, is to penetrate the world of things, not to formulate them.
Critical theory aims to show the relations between things. It, for example, works on the connections
of things in the Capitalist System. For Horkheimer, the appearance of the capitalist social
communication is that of equal exchange between things. To see the humanistic things in
nonhuman things and to expose that the understanding of equality in the capitalist system is only
to see a surface form. In other words, the critical theorists must look at the life of human being, at
the relationship between one another. They must try to make “reality” open for the human being.
An artist, for example, must show the dialectic, or the contradictory character of reality. He must
not copy “reality” in his work. This copy is not artistic according to Adorno. Likewise, philosophy
must have a social function for Horkheimer. This function must be criticism of what is prevalent.28
Positivism is a kind of traditional theory. This view leaves the question of historical development
aside. According to positivist thinkers, reality can be explained by certain calculations and methods
such as induction. Positivists accepted the role of science as careful recording of facts. Thus, the
positivists assert the certain explanation about the reality according to Horkheimer. Further,
systematic thought forces philosophers to set up a certain system. The thinkers of the traditional
theory use this certainty in order to administer nature and other human beings. Horkheimer and

26
Horkheimer, Critical Theory. xiv.
27
Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 188.
28
Horkheimer, Critical Theory. xiii.

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Adorno are critical of this certainty and this closed philosophical system. Their works have an
“open-ended, probing, unfinished quality.”29
3.4. The Establishment of a System and the Sovereignty over Nature
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept of nature is fundamental in the philosophy of
Enlightenment. This concept suggests that subjectivity and nature are disjunctive things. In the
context of Enlightenment, nature is pure matter, which is structured according to laws. It is capable
of being known via a “mathematically formulated universal science.” This concept of nature is
best expressed in Galileo. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept of nature can be
connected with the aim of dominating nature.30
The development of this notion of nature can be seen before the period of the Enlightenment
according to Horkheimer and Adorno. Firstly, the idea can be traced to myths. For Horkheimer,
mythology intends to give an account of the Beginning. Mythology also aims to give an
explanation of reality, and a confirmation of this explanation. A strong didactic element is included
in myth. Thus, myth portrays a significant state in development of the instrumentalist view of
nature. Secondly, Greek culture is already characterized by a desire for power that Bacon rightly
underlines. Renunciation and sacrifice to the Olympic gods was linked to the control over nature.31
3.5. Rationalism and Metaphysics
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, metaphysics claim that there is a certain thing in the essence
of reality. This essence is eternal and does not change. Horkheimer argues that crude materialism
is a kind of metaphysics, since it asserts that matter is the essence of whole, or that essence is
matter. Horkheimer and Adorno emphasize that metaphysics is inadequate for understanding the
social reality and its transformation. But, it at least understands the discrepancy between
appearance and essence, the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete. In this
respect, metaphysics is better than positivist thought, for it captures the dialectical structure of
reality. Yet, positivist thought reduces everything to the same structure, which is calculable. That

29
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1973. 41.
30
David, Held, Introduction to Critical Theory Horkheimer to Habermas, (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1980) 152.
31
Horkheimer, “Materialism and Metaphysics” in Critical Theory. 25-31.

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is, reason without metaphysics loses the sight of the nature of reality as well as the ability to define
principles that will guide life.32
4. Alternative Philosophy
4.1. Adorno, and the idea of a rational society
Adorno championed radical change through collective action. In Negative Dialectics, he argued
that it is not “up to the individual sufferer to abolish suffering.” This task must be assigned “solely
to the species, to which the individual belongs even where he subjectively renounces it and is
objectively thrust into the absolute loneliness of a helpless object.” Consequently, Adorno
advocates global resistance by humanity as a whole against the suffering inflicted on it by the
entirely self-interested profit-making and power seeking ventures of the ruling class. Emphasizing
this point in his lecture on progress, Adorno sounded this strident note: “the possibility of progress,
of averting the most extreme, total disaster, has migrated to the global subject alone”; it is around
this subject that everything involving progress must crystallize.33
Adorno complains that the “rationality of self-preservation is ultimately doomed to remain
irrational because the development of a rational collective subject, of a unified humanity, failed to
materialize a situation with which, in turn, each individual has to contend.” Adorno was also
extremely critical of the attempts of existing social movements to effect change. He views these
movements and groups as part of the problem rather than as the solution because he believes that
they tend to suppress individuals by forcing them to subordinate themselves to the collective,
thereby merely reproducing their subsumption under exchange relations to the benefit of the false
universality of the entirely self-interested socio-economic order.34
This is why Adorno objected in a 1962 radio lectures that praxis “would inevitably eternalize
precisely the present state of the world, the very critique of which is the concern of philosophy.”
To be sure, he adds immediately that praxis only risks reproducing damaged reality “at this
historical moment.” But his lifelong concern about the suppression of individuality in the name of
a collective order – in the former Soviet Union, for example, which Adorno accused of betraying
socialism by demanding the individual’s complete subordination to society still carries weight.
Alluding to “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” in “Marginalia to Theory and

32
Max, Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2004) 12-13.
33
Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 2004. 140-41.
34
Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 2004. 141.

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Praxis,” Adorno observed that group discussions in activist circles are frequently corrupted by
strategic maneuvers. While all participants ought to be heard, and to contribute to decision-making
processes on an equal footing, discussions today are often manipulative, directed only to scoring
points for particular positions. Opposing views are “hardly perceived, and then only so that
formulaic clichés can be served up in retort.” In short, what prevail in activist groups are particular
interests disguised as universal ones; it is the force of a group member (or members), rather than
the force of the better argument, that usually carries the day. Here again, collective practice merely
reflects and reinforces existing conditions.35
4.2. Eclipse of Reason
Max Horkheimer in his Eclipse of Reason elucidates some important concepts among which are
reason, system and essence. Horkheimer investigates these concepts in the history of philosophy.
These concepts are important for the critique of the Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno,
and they should be examined carefully to comprehend their critique.36
Horkheimer points out the difference between objective and subjective reason. Subjective reason
can make inferences and classifications, but cannot determine general purposes. It takes into
account particular situations and social norms. It finds instruments for the ends, which are already
accepted. On the other hand, the objective reason, which not only individuals but also social
institutions and nature have been endowed with, aims at establishing a general and universal
system. It deals with universal truths that dictate whether an action is either right or wrong. The
objective reason is able to set up a general and regular system that all existence is based on.37 The
difference between the objective and the subjective reason in terms of relations between reason,
system and essence is important to evaluate. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, in the epoch
of the Enlightenment, reason becomes sovereign over everything and changes into the instrumental
form.38 Horkheimer and Adorno criticize the Enlightenment over the concept of reason, too.
Reason is the central concept in their critique of the Enlightenment. There is a disticntion between
the objective and subjective reason in Horkheimer. First, this distinction is just appearance, but

35
Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society, 2004. 142.
36
Yenisoy, 2006. 65.
37
Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason. 3-7.
38
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason. 6.

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inevitable for him. The mistake is not in the essence of this distinction. However, to make one of
them absolute against the other is the real mistake according to Horkheimer.39
5. Evaluation.
Horkheimer and Adorno think that society and culture set up a historical totality. So, the inquiry
of freedom in society is inseparable from that of enlightenment in culture.40 Society means the
political and economic structures within which human being live. Horkheimer asserts that social
theory cannot achieve the immutable truth on its run. Natural philosophy and individual scientific
disciplines must be related to other disciplines such as psychology and sociology. This relationship
is dialectical. Furthermore, social theory must take advantage of different methods that are used in
other disciplines. The methods of social theory, for Horkhemer, “were to include the use of public
statistics and questionnaires backed up by sociological, psychological, and economic interpretation
of the data.”41 The thinkers of the Frankfurt School are not opposing the empirical method. They
use this method in most of their works. For them, this method is essential for understanding social
phenomena. Yet, this emphasis does not mean that the American empirical method must be central
in research. It lays stress upon its profitability.42 Horkheimer especially emphasizes that social
theory must be interdisciplinary.43
Horkheimer argues that true materialism does not mean a type of metaphysics, which is based on
the ontological priority of matter. For him, materialism giving primacy to matter is mechanic
materialism. Horkheimer and Adorno reject this kind of materialism. For Horkheimer, materialists
are and must be concerned with the future of the society. Namely, they must have a political
thought and take sides with the changing negative social conditions. Martin Jay states that for the
question what one should do with political power, Horkheimer “presupposes the condition which
is supposed to disappear: the power of disposition over alienated labor.”44
From today’s perspective, the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers can be considered the last
grand modern attempt to offer transcendence, meaning, and religiosity, rather than “emancipation”

39
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason. 118-119.
40
Horkheimer, and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. xvi.
41
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. 26.
42
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. 251.
43
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. 253.
44
Yenisoy, 2006. 87-88.

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and “truth”. In the very first stage of their work, up to World War II and the Holocaust, Theodor
W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer interlaced the goals of Critical Theory with the Marxian
revolutionary project. The development of their thought led them to criticize orthodox Marxism
and it ended with a complete break with that tradition, as they developed a quest for a religiosity
of a unique kind, connected with the Gnostic tradition and emanating, to a certain extent, from
Judaism. This religiosity offers a reformulated negative theology within the framework of what is
called “Diasporic philosophy.”45
Adorno can be very difficult to read. He writes in a manner which does not lend itself to ready
comprehension. This is intentional. Adorno views language itself as having become an object of,
and vehicle for, the perpetuation of domination. He is acutely aware of the extent to which this
claim complicates his own work. In attempting to encourage a critical awareness of suffering and
domination, Adorno is forced to use the very means by which these conditions are, to a certain
extent, sustained. His answer to this problem, although not intended to be ultimately satisfying, is
to write in a way that requires hard and concentrated efforts on the part of the reader, to write in a
way that explicitly defies convention and the familiar. Adorno aims to encourage his readers to
attempt to view the world and the concepts that represent the world in a way that defies identity
thinking. He aims, through his writing, to express precisely the unacknowledged, non-identical
aspects of any given phenomenon. He aims to show, in a manner very similar to contemporary
deconstructionists, the extent to which our linguistic conventions simultaneously both represent
and misrepresent reality. In contrast to many deconstructionists, however, Adorno does so in the
name of an explicit moral aim and not as a mere literary method. For Adorno, reality is grounded
in suffering and the domination of nature. This is a profoundly important distinction. Adorno’s
complaint against identity-thinking is a moral and not a methodological one. However, it must be
admitted that understanding and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of Adorno’s
philosophical vision is a difficult task. He does not wish to be easily understood in a world in
which easy understanding, so he claims, is dependent upon identity-thinking’s falsification of the
world.

45
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226325984_Adorno_and_Horkheimer_Diasporic_Philosophy_
Negative_Theology_and_Counter-Education accessed on 12th December, 2021.

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Adorno overestimates the extent to which reason has been instrumentalized within modern,
complex societies. Instrumental reasoning, therefore, is nowhere near as extensive and all-
encompassing as Adorno and Horkheimer presented it as being in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The fact that Adorno and Horkheimer could proclaim that ‘enlightenment is totalitarian’ amounts
to a simultaneous self-refutation. The performance of the claim contradicts its substance.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s accounts of reason and their advocacy of ‘non-identity thinking’ appear
to prohibit critical theory from positively or constructively engaging with social and political
injustice. Horkheimer and Adorno are accused of adopting the stance of an inveterate ‘nay-sayer’.
Being critical can appear as an end in itself, since the very radicalness of their diagnosis of reason
and modernity appears to exclude the possibility of overcoming domination and heteronomy.
Adorno and Horkheimer do is simply false and an example of an apparent tendency to over-
generalize in the application of particular concepts.

6. Conclusion

In the Christian Enlightenment Christ brings in the perfect picture of knowledge and absolute
revelation to all our contextual requirements. Methodological Ethics stands as a great tool to define
enlightenment, critical philosophy and reasoning. As a mere human knowledge, Adorno and
Horkheimer presented too much to digest. They have made human information as product of
modern day commodity where they conclude that Man is also becoming the factory product and
has no sense at all in God’s plan. My conviction for all these theories stands firm on God being
actively making changes for better life that we may have and in response to actively participate in
the perfect humanization in His Cosmos.

Bibliography
Abromeit, John. Max Horkheimer and the foundations of the Frankfurt School. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by E. Jephcott.

Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.

Cook, Deborah. Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. London: Routledge,
2004.

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Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by F.
Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1987.

Held, David. Introduction to Critical Theory Horkheimer to Habermas. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1980.

Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1989.

Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2004.

Huhn, Tom. The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of
Social Research 1923-1950. Toronto: Brown and Company, 1973.
Josephson-Storm, Jason. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the
Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Spier, Shaked. Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honor of Rafael
Capurro ed. by Matthew Kelly. Germany: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2016.

Yenisoy, Eylem. “The Critiques Of The Enlightenment By Max Horkheimer And Theodor Adorno
And Their Understanding Of A New Method And Philosophy” Masters of Arts Thesis.
Middle East Technical University, 2006.

Journals ans Articles

Webliography
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1103 Accssessd on 8th December, 2021.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226325984_Adorno_and_Horkheimer_Diasporic_Philosophy_Negative_T
heology_and_Counter-Education accessed on 12th December, 2021.

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