The Dialectic of the Enlightenment
In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1969: 3)
This is a typical Frankfurt School statement, a vast generalization which, if it has any effect at all on the careful empirical social scientist or even the careful linguistic philosopher, would appal them. They might at the most grant it the status of bad poetry. The book which provides the heading for this section was originally titled Philosophical Fragments and that is precisely what it is, not a systematic philosophy because the idea of systematic philosophy - totalizing philosophy - was already (in 1944) becoming associated in the minds of the authors with totalitarianism.
A philosophical social science (they were primarily concerned with sociology) must always go beyond science if it is not to become a meaningless measurement, and the style of argument is one of the ways in which it does this. This book gives as good a sense as any of the overall philosophical project of critical theory, which is full of paradox and manipulates concepts in a way distinctly foreign to Anglo-Saxon ears and minds. The book is about the play of rationality and irrationality, the attempts of human beings to liberate themselves and the nature of domination - which is best understood as that which occurs when a person's goals, and means of achieving them, are prescribed for him or her (Marcuse 1970: 12). The ‘story' is about the way myth and enlightenment can turn into each other. Myths can be seen as early attempts to understand and control nature; although they were dismissed by Enlightenment thinkers as forms of superstition, they already contained elements of enlightenment in the broadest sense of the attempt to understand reality.
In a world dominated by myth, however, human beings are still dominated by the nature they struggle to understand.The Enlightenment splits humans from nature and puts them into the dominant place: we adopt an instrumental attitude to nature, seeing our task as classifying, measuring, explaining and using it for our own purposes. In this context knowledge is a tool of power - an insight at the centre of Nietzsche's philosophy and taken up by some contemporary post-modernists and post-structuralists (see Chapter 10). For Adorno and Horkheimer too, the domination of nature produces a technology which dominates human beings. The moral impulse of the Enlightenment - the emancipation of humanity from domination - is lost, and the Enlightenment sciences become another form of domination - a myth. One might say that the notion of God is replaced by the equally irrational notion of a triumphant science.
If the social sciences align themselves with the methods of the natural sciences, as many do, then they distort and misunderstand the reality they study. They isolate objects of study from the dynamics of history, and they remain ignorant and uncritical of their own thought processes.