PHILOSOPHY.
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER ON THE CONTRADICTIONS OF MODERNITY | JANUARY 2024
“Dialectic of Enlightenment” is a provocative essay collection addressing the so-called Age of Enlightenment and its counterintuitive impact on society. Written by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two German Jewish intellectuals living in exile in New York, the text was officially published in 1947 but had been circulated among friends three years earlier under the title “Philosophical Fragments.”
The fragmentary nature of the text often begets frustration, with commentators lamenting the sprawling and, at times, under-explained—even contradictory—subject matter. Perhaps this is by design. As two central members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Adorno and Horkheimer were philosophically committed to critically examining society and its contradictions rather than offering a positive account of how society ought to be, fearing that the latter risks crystallization into ideology, which has historically lent itself to dogmatism and domination.
They place a high value on negative thinking, which attempts to strip away or ‘negate’ aspects of society identified as harmful, blaming the perpetuation of unnecessary human suffering on an uncritical acceptance of the status quo. By leaving the text open-ended and thus open to critique, Adorno and Horkheimer implicitly encourage such negative thinking, which to them represents our best hope of overcoming the predicaments of modernity.
The text’s starting premise is that the Enlightenment’s promise of a more civilized world has not come to pass:
“Humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”
As Jewish refugees writing at the time of the Holocaust, Adorno and Horkheimer had good reason to use such charged language. In addition to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews in particular, the two were deeply disturbed by the generalized dehumanization occurring in a society defined by the domination of humans over one another and nature. To be sure, domination has been present throughout human history. But the development of military, industrial, and communications technologies has enabled types of domination…
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