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world-views ( "'The Social Psychology of World Religions'", in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, New York 1974, p. 293). He describes this process as originating with the demand that 'the world order in its totality is, could and should somehow be a meaningful "cosmos"' ( ibid., p. 281 ). Such efforts at systematization are present in all world religions -- resulting at times in monotheism, at times in mystical dualism, and at others in mysticism. Second, common to all such efforts at systematization over the centuries is a decline in the role of magic [Entzaubemng] ( ibid., pp. 290 ff.). Weber appears to have analysed such processes of cultural rationalization in the light of a major distinction, namely, the distinction between those worldviews leading to an ethics of world abnegation and those leading to world affirmations. See Weber, "'Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions'", in From Max Weber, pp. 233 ff.; originally "'Zwischenbetrachtung'" to Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie ( 1920); W. Schluchter, "'Die Paradoxie der Rationalisierung'", in Rationalismus und Weltbeherrschung, Frankfurt 1980, pp. 19 ff. |
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| 32. |
See, most recently, Jürgen Habermas, "'The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment'", New German Critiqw 126, Spring-Summer 1982, pp. 13 ff. |
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| 33. |
F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen. Auflössung einiger Deutungsprobleme, Frankfurt 1974, p. 275, note 26, as cited by J. Schmucker, Adorno -- Logik des Zerfalls, Stuttgart 1977, p. 17. |
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| 34. |
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, p. 27. |
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| 35. |
Ibid., pp. 51, 167. |
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| 36. |
Ibid., p. 167. |
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| 37. |
Ibid., p. 37. |
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| 38. |
Ibid., p. 207. |
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| 39. |
Ibid., p. ix. |
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| 40. |
Ibid. |
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| 41. |
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, London 1974, p. 50; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimemional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston, MA 1964. |
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| 42. |
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, pp. 62-3. |
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| 43. |
Ibid., p. 13. |
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| 44. |
Ibid. |
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| 45. |
The critique of identity logic underlying Western reason had been a concern of Adorno's since his 1931 lecture on the 'Actuality of Philosophy'. Whatever differences may exist between Adorno and Horkheimer in this regard, the search for a nondiscursive, non-identitarian logic, be it in an esoteric philosophy of language, in symbol, or in the collective unconscious of the species, characterizes both the Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Eclipse of Reason. |
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| 46. |
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, pp. 17-18. |
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| 47. |
Ibid., p. 3. |
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| 48. |
Ibid., pp. 16-17 ; Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, p. 181; Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, p. 156. |
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| 49. |
Thomas Baumeister and Jens Kulenkampff, 'Geschichtsphilosophie und philosophische Ästhetik: Zu Adornos ästhetischer Theorie', Neue Hefte für Philosophie 6, 1974, p. 80; my translation. |
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| 50. |
In this context, Habermas has distinguished between the 'traditional critique of ideology' and 'totalizing critique' as practised by Adorno and Horkheimer: 'The critique of ideology wants to demonstrate that the validity of a theory under investigation has not freed itself from the context of its genesis. It wants to demonstrate that hidden behind the back of this theory is an inadmissible tension of power and validity and that it is moreover to this tension that it owes its recognition' ( 'The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment', p. 20). Totalizing critique, by contrast, assumes that reason, once instrumentalized, has become the assimilated to power and has thereby given up its critical power' (ibid.). It is forced to renounce 'the totalitarian development of the Enlightenment with its own means -- a performative contradiction of which Adorno was well aware' (ibid.). |
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