Dialectic of Enlightenment (Taschenbuch)

One can sympathize with the translator -- he did the translation at a time when very little by Horkheimer and Adorno was in English and it appears that he worked under a rather tight schedule (it is possible to find errors piling up on a page and then suddenly ceasing -- suggesting that the poor fellow took a break and came back later on, with happier results). But there is no forgiving the publisher for leaving this text uncorrected for so long despite a long-standing consensus among students of the Frankfurt School that this is a deeply flawed translation. That anything of the power of the original makes it through the muck of this translation is a testimony to the force of Horkheimer and Adorno's ideas.

A new translation is long overdue. Until then, readers coming to the work of the Frankfurt School might want to seek out Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason, a summary of the argument elaborated here which Horkheimer delivered in English at Columbia University at about the same time of as the publication of the German original of this book.

The unreadability of Frankfurt School texts is an artifact of the very phenomena they criticize. Educated people in America at the time Dialectic of Enlightenment was written were influenced, directly and indirectly, by the pragmatism of John Dewey and English Logical Positivism as mediated by Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer. A bit later, the Continental school of Logical Positivism came to America fleeing Fascism.

Pragmatism is the homegrown American philosophy that the useful is the true and the true, useful. Logical Positivism in Britain and on the Continent is the view that the meaningful is only the verifiable statement of natural science. Both traditions are completely inimical to the older Continental views of Adorno and of Horkheimer, based as they are on those of Hegel, Freud and Marx.

Adorno would probably see straight through the question begging that goes on in both Pragmatism and Logical Positivism. Both these philosophies fail to self-apply, in a logical failure which is also a failure to exhibit the intellectual virtue of humility. If we ask the Pragmatist about the utility of his view that truth is utility he cannot answer. Similarly, Logical Positivism's own claim, that meaningful statements are either verifiably true or verifiably false using the procedures of science, fails, even less than Pragmatism, to self-apply, because we simply can't verify the nonexistence of a meaningful but unverifiable statement. This result, which conclusively has shown nearly all major-league philosophers that Logical Positivism is deep nonsense, has been generalized in recent years to show that there are even apparently scientific statements, such as statements as to what transpires inside black holes, which are not verifiable.

However, the nonsense of Pragmatism and of Logical Positivism had in the period 1930 to about 1980 much influence, again direct and indirect, on educated Americans. Directly, they were exposed to it in undergraduate survey courses and of course as philosophy specialists. Indirectly the ideas were in the air, and they have had strong influence on the management, and the mismanagement, of America's economy and its foreign policy.

For this reason, and because of the deconstruction of a decent educational system, contemporary post-moderns in America find actual post-modern classics including Dialectic of Enlightenment tough going.

But to be constructive. "Dialectic" in the title refers to a form of logic which commencing with the early 19th century German philosopher Hegel. It is presented, superficially, in survey classes as a weird kind of pseudo-logic in which things become their opposite, and then the thing and its opposite "synthesize" to form a higher, more involved thing.

But this superficial nonsense fails to account for the dialectic at all. The dialectic is a response, in the real material conditions that have obtained in developed societies since the end of the 18th century, to the fact that mere traditional logic is a closed system. Mere traditional logic seems to the ordinary person verbal games and, strikingly, it is the same to the evolved modern mathematician if he's of the "formalist" school. You merely have to change the axioms to get the results you want in mere traditional logic.

Tradtional (and modern) logic is like a machine for accomplishing our purposes that it becomes (in indeed a dialectic fashion) the opposite of what we need. The 17th century philosopher Leibniz was so impressed by the apparent power of primitive forms of modern logic that he thought that any dispute would be by now, at the close of the millenium, settled in gentlemanly fashion with "let us calculate, sir." As what would now be termed a high-paid "consultant" to the CEOs of his time and place (petty, and small-minded, German princelings) Leibniz included political and social matters in this view.

Leibniz saw in logic a machine that would remove decisionmaking from passion and self-interest and indeed logic, and its technological, embodied form the modern digital computer, does so with such thoroughness that the "fair" decision machine becomes its opposite. We merely have to change the program to get the results we want, whether those results be true and fair and just, or deep nonsense.

Hegel, Marx and Freud were healthy and human reactions to this manipulative spirit, and dialectical logic, far from being anti-modern-logic (as its more hysterical opponents like Quine seem to feel), actually rescues traditional and modern logic from criminal manipulation. For example, in human and in social affairs, the very fact that each actor is not a thing and has capabilities to react to features of the system in totality, consistently makes social planning self-defeating. In the Five Year Plans of the Stalin era, the very fact that factory managers were more or less informed of the direction of the whole caused the numerical decision procedures used in determining whether those targets would be met to be distorted towards optimism that caused famine and war. In the Reagan White House, the commitment of an autistic Chief Executive to meeting impossible economic targets likewise caused his budget director, David Stockman, to fudge the numbers using a primitive spreadsheet and what Stockman called "the magic asterisk" to identify needed savings, not yet identified, that would balance the books.

Traditional and modern logic is a babe in the woods as regards such chicanery. But the dialectic, centering human over technical relationships, sees and can account for this behavior. Its overall procedure is to weigh irreconcilable interests against each other, to predict the synthesis that will result. In Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectical claim is that the very science and technology produced by the 18th century enlightenment would over time produce its opposite. Kant's individual freedom to be a knower (a scientist or independent entrpreneur) would turn, amid the pressure of real human events, into a higher form of enslavement.

This fails to do justice to the complexity of the book, but the complexity is as I've mentioned an artifact of