Habermas - Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment

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Duke University PressNew German Critique

The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment Author(s): Jrgen Habermas and Thomas Y. Levin Source: New German Critique, No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (Spring - Summer, 1982),

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The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment*

byJiirgen Habermas

The dark writers of the bourgeoisie - such as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Mandeville - had always appealed to Horkheimer, who was himself influenced by Schopenhauer. Clearly, from their works there still remained ties to Marx's social theory. These connections were broken by the really nihilistic dark writers of the bourgeoisie, foremost among them the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche. It is to them that Hork- heimer and Adorno turn in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, their blackest, most nihilistic book, in order to conceptualize the self-destructive process of Enlightenment. Although they no longer placed hope on its liberating power, inspired by Benjamin's ironic "hope of those without hope," they nonetheless refused to abandon the now paradoxical labor of analysis. We no longer share this attitude. However, under the sign of a Nietzsche restored by some post-structuralist writers such as Derrida and the recent Foucault, attitudes are being disseminated today which appear as the spitting image of those of Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is the confusion of the two attitudes that I want to prevent.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a strange book. A substantial part of the work was composed from notes taken by Gretel Adorno during dis- cussions between Horkheimer and Teddy in Santa Monica. The text was completed in 1944 and published three years later by the Querido Press in Amsterdam. Copies of this first edition were available for almost twenty years. The impact which Horkheimer and Adorno made with this book on the intellectual scene of the Federal Republic of Germany especially during the first two decades after its publica- tion, stands in curious contrast to the number of its purchasers. The composition of the book is equally unusual; it consists of an essay of

*This essay which is published here for the first time was delivered as a lecture at Boston University on March 25, 1982.

13


14 Jiirgen Habermas

just over fifty pages, two excursuses and three appendices which constitute more than half of the text. The rather obscure manner of presentation makes it difficult at first glance to recognize the underlying structure of the train of thought.

I will therefore first explain the two central theses (I and II). This leads to the problem which concerns me with regard to our present situation: I am interested in the subtle strategies to radically enlighten the Enlightenment about itself(III). Nietzsche was the most significant model for what I will call a totalizing self-transcendence of the critique of ideology (IV). The comparison of Horkheimer and Adorno with Nietzsche shall illuminate not only the contrary directions in which the two sides pursue their cultural criticism, but, in the end, shall raise doubts concerning the repeated reflexivity of Enlightenment itself (V).

I. Enlightened thinking has been understood as both a contrast to

myth and as a force opposing it. As a contrast because it counters the authority of tradition with the non-coercive coercion of the better argument; as an opposing force to the extent that it breaks the collective spell of the mythical powers by means of individually acquired insights which gain motivational strength. In this manner, the Enlightenment was supposed to contradict myth and thereby escape from its power.' Challenging this opposition, of which enlightened thought is so certain, Horkheimer and Adorno instead propose a thesis of secret com- plicity: "Myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology."2 This thesis, announced in the introduction, is developed in the title essay and subsequently substantiated by means of an interpretation of the Odyssey.

Reflected in the adventures of the cunning cast-off Odysseus is the primal history of a subjectivity which wrenches itself free from the mythical forces. The mythical world is not the homeland but rather the labyrinth from which one must escape in order to gain one's identity. The mythical stories do indeed call the individual back to his/her origins mediated genealogically through the chain of generations, but these ritual events which are meant to bridge and heal the guilt-ridden distanciation from the origins also widen this gap at the same time.s The primal myth thus involves both a sense of origin and escape: the dread of being uprooted and the sigh of relief at getting away. Hork- heimer and Adorno therefore pursue Odysseus' cunning into the

1. Klaus Heinrich, Versuch iiber die Schwierigkeit Nein zu sagen (Frankfurt am Main, 1964).

2. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (New York, 1972), p. XVI; hereafter referred to as DoE.

3. Klaus Heinrich, Dahlemer Vorlesungen (Basel/Frankfurt am Main, 1981), p. 122f.


Myth and Enlightenment 15

heart of the sacrificial rites: these contain an element of deception insofar as people attempt to redeem themselves from the curse of the vengeful powers through the offering of symbolically enhanced sub- stitutes.4 This layer of myth points to the ambivalence of a type of consciousness for which ritual practice is both real and imaginary. The regenerating power of a ritual return to the origins is vital for the collective consciousness because, as Durkheim has shown, it guarantees social cohesion; equally vital, however, is the merely imaginary charac- ter of the return to the origins which, by developing the egos of the members of the tribal collective, simultaneously enables them to escape these origins as they must. Thus in the primal history of subjectivity, the primal powers which are simultaneously sanctified and out- witted already constitute a stage of Enlightenment.

If distance from the origins meant liberation from the repressive genealogical chain, Enlightenment would be successful. However, the mythic powers impede the striven-after Enlightenment and con- tinually prolong the ties to the origins which are experienced as captivi- ty. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that at every new stage, this process of gaining mastery over the mythical powers inevitably brings about the return of myth. Enlightenment is said to revert to mythology. The authors go through the Odyssey episode by episode in order to discover at what price the experienced Odysseus emerges from the adventures he had encountered with an ego that is both strengthened and rigidified.

The episodes tell of danger, cunning and escape, and of the self- imposed renunciation through which the ego (which has learned to master danger) gains its own identity and at the same time relinquishes the archaic unity with both inner and outer nature. The song of the Sirens recalls a joy which was provided long ago by the "fluctuating relationship with nature"; Odysseus yields to the temptations as one who knows himself to be already in chains: "Man's domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken; for the substance which is dominated, suppressed and dissolved by virtue of self-preservation is none other than that very life as functions of which the achievements of self-preservation find their sole definition and determination: it is, in fact, what is to be preserved" (DoE, p. 54). This idea - that people develop their identity by learning to control external nature at the price

4. "The discovery that symbolic communication with the deity through sacrifice is not actual must be an age-old human experience. The sacrificial representation that a fashionable irrationalism has so exalted cannot be separated from the deification of the human sacrifice - the deceit of a priestly rationalization of death by means of an apotheosis of the predestined victim" (DoE, p. 50 f.).


16 Jiirgen Habermas

of repressing their inner nature - provides Horkheimer and Adorno with the model for a description in which the process of Enlighten- ment reveals itsJanus-face: the price of renunciation, of self-seclusion, of the interrupted communication of the ego with its own nature which has become an anonymous Id - all this is interpreted as the conse- quence of an internalization of sacrifice. The ego which originally outsmarted its mythical fate by sacrificing a substitute is again overwhelmed by this mythical fate as soon as it is itself forced to internalize this sacrifice. Thus, in terms of world history, the human species has distanced itself ever further from its origins, through the process of Enlightenment, while still not freeing itself from those mythical origins.

An almost completely rationalized modern world only seems to be demystified; on it rests in fact the curse of demonic objectification and fatal isolation. The symptoms of an emancipation running loose in idle motion express the revenge of the primordial powers upon those who tried to emancipate themselves and yet could not escape. The compul- sion to rationally subjugate the natural forces which intrude from without has engaged the participants in a formative process which increases the forces of production ad infinitum purely for the sake of self-preservation while it allows the powers of reconciliation (which transcend mere self-preservation) to wither away. Domination of an objectified external nature and a repressed inner nature are the hall- marks of Enlightenment.

With this thesis, Horkheimer and Adorno vary Max Weber's well- known theory in which the old demystified Gods are seen rising from their graves in the form of impersonal powers in order to renew the irreconcilable conflict of the demons.5

II. The reader who does not allow him/herself to be overwhelmed by

the rhetorical presentation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and instead takes a step back and seriously considers the claims of this text, can get the following impressions:

- that the thesis which is being developed here is no less risky than Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism which is formulated in a similar manner; - that the authors are aware of this risk and, contrary to a first impression, are making a serious attempt to substantiate their cultural critique;

5. Max Weber, "Wissenschaft als Beruf," trans. as "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 148.



- but that in doing so, they put up with generalizations and simplifications which ultimately threaten the plausibility of their project.

I would like, first of all, to examine if these impressions are correct. Reason itself destroys the humanity which it had made possible in

the first place - this far-reaching thesis is substantiated in the first excursus, as we have seen, with the argument that the process of enlightenment is from the very beginning dependent on an impulse of self- preservation which mutilates reason because it can only make use of it in the form of purposive-rational domination of nature and instinct, i.e., in the form of instrumental reason. This does not yet prove, however, that reason remains subject to the dictates of purposive- rationality even in its most recent manifestations; i.e., in modern science, in the universalist conceptions of justice and morality, and in autonomous art. The title essay on the "Concept of Enlightenment," the excursus on Enlightenment and Morality, and the appendix on the culture industry all serve to demonstrate that this is indeed the case.

First, Adorno and Horkheimer are convinced that, with logical positivism, modern science has come into its own and has relinquished its emphatic claim to theoretical knowledge in favor of technological exploitability. The earlier critique of the positivistic understanding of the sciences is sharpened and culminates in the global reproach that the sciences themselves have been absorbed by instrumental reason. Secondly, Horkheimer and Adorno want to demonstrate through a reading of the Histoire deJuliette and the Genealogy of Morals that reason has been exorcized from morality and justice. With the disintegration of religious and metaphysical world views, all normative moral standards are said to have lost their credibility in the face of the sole surviving authority of science. De Sade and Nietzsche "have not postulated that formalistic reason is more closely allied to morality than to immorali- ty" (DoE, p. 118). The earlier critique of the meta-ethical reinterpreta- tion of morality turns into a sarcastic approval of ethical skepticism. Finally, in their analysis of mass culture, Horkheimer and Adorno want to demonstrate that art, when fused with entertainment, is drained of its innovative power and emptied of all its critical and utopian content. The earlier critique had concentrated on the affirmative aspects of bourgeois culture; it now turns into an impotent rage over the ironic justice of an irreversiblejudgment which mass culture executes on art which itself had always already been ideological.

Thus, the argumentation follows the same course with regard to science, morality, and art: already the separation of the cultural spheres and the decay of the substantive reason still embodied in religion and metaphysics so extensively debilitates the isolated moments of reason, robbing them of their coherence, that they regress into a purposive


18 Jiirgen Habermas

rationality at the service of a self-preservation gone wild. In cultural modernity, reason is stripped of its validity claims and is assimilated to sheer power. The critical ability to take a 'yes' or 'no' stand, to be able to distinguish between what is valid and invalid, is undercut by the unfortunate fusion of power and validity claims. If one reduces the critique of instrumental reason to this core it becomes clear why the Dialectic of Enlightenment flattens out the view of modernity in such an astonishing manner. The dignity specific to cultural modernity consists in what Max Weber has called the stubborn differentiation of value-spheres. In fact, the Dialectic ofEnlightenment does not do justice to the elements of reason in cultural modernity which are contained in what Marx and the Marxist tradition call the bourgeois ideals (and became instrumentalized along with them): I mean the internal theoretical dynamic which constantly propels the sciences - and the self-reflexion of the sciences as well - beyond the creation of merely technologically ex- ploitable knowledge; furthermore, I mean the universalist foundations of law and morality which have also been embodied (in no matter how distorted and imperfect a form) in the institutions of con- stitutional states, in the forms of democratic decision-making, and in individualistic patterns of identity formation; finally, I mean the productivity and the liberating force of an aesthetic experience with a subjectivity set free from the imperatives of purposive activity and from the conventions of everyday perception. Contained in the works of avant-garde art, in the discourses of art criticism, and in the innova- tions of our vocabularies of values, such aesthetic experiences do have somewhat of an illuminating effect or at least provide an instructive contrast.

If these suggestions were sufficiently elaborated for the purpose of my argument, they would substantiate the intuitive impression which a reading of this book affords at first glance: cautiously put, the presentation is at least incomplete and one-sided. The readerjustifiably gets the feeling that the global pessimism of the Dialectic of Enlightenment ignores significant aspects of cultural modernity. This leads to the question of the motives and reasons which could have prompted Hork- heimer and Adorno to make their critique sofar-reaching that the very project of Enlightenment itself was threatened: indeed the Dialectic of Enlightenment offers hardly any prospect of escape from the constraints of instrumental rationality. In attempting to provide a preliminary answer let me first a) locate the Marxian type of critique of ideology within the process of enlightenment and then b) give some of the reasons why Horkheimer and Adorno abandoned this kind of analysis in favor of a totalizing critique.



III. Up till now we have examined the mythical mentality only in terms

of the ambiguous attitude of the subjects towards the primal powers, that is, in terms of the emancipation which is central to the formation of identity. Horkheimer and Adorno conceive Enlightenment as the unsuccessful attempt to escape from the powers of fate. The desolate emptiness of emancipation is the form in which the curse of the mythical figures does in the end overtake those attempting to flee. A different aspect of the description of mythical as well as enlightened thinking is only mentioned in the few places where the demythologization is characterized as a transformation and differentiation offundamental concepts. The totalizing force of myth incorporates all phenomena into a network of correspondences, similarities, and contrasts. Myth owes this force to fundamental concepts which categorically hold together that which the modern understanding of the world can no longer syn- thesize. Language, for example, as the medium of representation in mythical narrative, is not so far removed from reality that the conven- tional sign is completely divorced from its semantic content and from its referent; speech and world view remain in some way interwoven with the order of the world. Mythical traditions cannot be revised without endangering the order of things and the identity of the tribe which is embedded in them. Categories of validity such as 'true' and 'false', 'good' and 'evil', are still linked to empirical concepts such as exchange, causality, health, substance, and wealth. Magical thinking allows for no fundamental distinction between things and people, between the inanimate and the animate, between objects which can be manipulated and agents to which we ascribe actions and spoken expressions. Only demythologization breaks that spell which appears to us today as a confusion between nature and culture. The process of Enlightenment leads to the desocialization of nature and to the de- naturalization of the human world; Piaget describes this as the decenter- ing of the world view.

In modern times, traditions become temporalized; the changing interpretations are clearly distinguished from the world itself. This external world divides into the objective world of entities and the social world of norms (or normatively governed inter-personal relationships): both are in turn silhouetted against the inner world of subjective experiences. When, as is the case in the course of the Western tradition, rationalization does not stop before the fundamental theological and metaphysical concepts, the sphere of meaning and validity is not only purged of empirical admixtures but is also differentiated in terms of propositions, the rightness of norms, and the veracity of subjective expressions or the authenticity of works of art.6

6. Jiirgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981).


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If one describes the process of Enlightenment from this point of reference as the development of a decentered understanding of the world, this allows one to also identify the moment in the drama at which the critique of ideology can make its entrance. The suspicion that the autonomous validity claimed by theory is an illusion because hidden interests have crept into its pores - such a suspicion cannot occur unless semantic and empirical, internal and external relations are segregated; it cannot occur unless science, morality and art each specialize on one validity claim, each follow a logic of their own and are each purged of cosmological, theological, and cultic residues. The critique inspired by such a suspicion attempts to prove that the propositions for which thesuspected theory claims validity in fact express an a tergo dependency which the theory could not admit without losing its credibility. The critique of ideology wants to demonstrate that the validity of a theory under investigation has not freed itself sufficiently from the context of its genesis. It wants to demonstrate that hidden behind the back of this theory is an inadmissiblefusion of power and validity and that it is moreover to this fusion that it owes its recognition. Semantic and empirical relations become confused on precisely that level at which the explicit differentiation between such internal and external relationships is constitutive. For modern thought, the critique of ideology is not itself a theory which competes against others; but it relies on certain theoretical assumptions. Thus armed, it challenges the truth of a suspicious theory by exposing its untruthfulness, its lack of veracity. The critique of ideology furthers the process of Enlighten- ment by unearthing a category mistake which stems from the fusion of declared validity claims with hidden power claims.

With this type of critique Enlightenment becomes reflexive for the first time; it now carries out its project on its own products, i.e., its theories. But the drama of Enlightenment only reaches its peripeteia or turning point when the critique of ideology itself is suspected of no longer producing truths - it is only then that Enlightenment becomes reflexive for a second time. Let us find out why Horkheimer and Adorno made this move.

In one of the appended 'notes' on "Philosophy and the (Scientific) Division of Labor" there is a section which reads like an intrusion from the earlier period of Critical Theory. The passage claims that philosophy's "immunity to the influence of the status quo is due to the fact that it accepts the bourgeois ideals without further examination. These ideals may be those still proclaimed, though in distorted form, by the rep- resentatives of the status quo; or those which, despite all manipulation, are still recognizable as the objective meaning of existing institutions, whether technical or cultural" (DoE, p. 243, emphasis added; trans. modified). Here Horkheimer and Adorno recall the notion proper to Marx's critique of ideology which presupposed that there were two



sides to the potential for reason articulated in the "bourgeois ideals" and in the "objective meaning of existing institutions": on the one hand this potential gives the ideologies of the ruling classes the decep- tive appearance of persuasive theories while on the other hand it provides a point of departure for an immanent critique of these ideas which claim to be in the interest of the general public when in fact they only serve a dominating segment of society. In these instrumentalized and abused ideas, the critique of ideology discovered a piece of existing reason hidden to itself. It read these ideas like a directive which would be carried out through social movements to the extent that the forces of production developed sufficient excess.

During the 1930s the critical theorists had retained some trust in bourgeois culture's potential for reason which would be released by the pressure of the developing forces of production. The interdis- ciplinary research program documented in the nine volumes of the Zeitschriftfiir Sozialforschung (1932-41) was also based on this confidence. In an analysis of the development of early critical theory, Helmut Dubiel, a young German sociologist, has described why the stock of trust was depleted to such an extent at the beginning of the 1940s7 that Horkheimer and Adorno felt that the Marxist critique of ideology had definitely exhausted itself; they no longer believed that they could fulfill the promises of a critical social theory with the methods of the social sciences. Instead they attempted a radicalization and totaliza- tion of their critique of ideology in order to enlighten the Enlighten- ment about itself. The preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment begins with the following confession: "Even though we had known for many years that the great discoveries of applied science are paid for with an increasing diminution of theoretical awareness, we still thought that in regard to scientific activity our contribution could be restricted to the criticism or extension of specialist contributions. Thematically, at any rate, we were to keep to the traditional disciplines: to sociology, psy- chologyand epistemology. However, the fragments united in this volume show that we were forced to abandon this conviction" (DoE, p. XI).

If the now cynical consciousness of those "dark" authors expresses the truth about bourgeois culture, then the critique of ideology has lost its foundations. Moreover, if the forces of production are increasingly merging symbiotically with the relations of production which they at one time were supposed to destroy, then there is also no more driving force on which critique could set its hopes. Horkheimer and Adorno therefore consider the basis of the critique of ideology destroyed; and yet they want to hold on to the basic premise of Enlightenment. So they

7. Helmut Dubiel, Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main, 1978), Teil A.


22 Jiirgen Habermas

take that which Enlightenment did to myth and turn it back onto the process of Enlightenment itself. Critique becomes total: it turns against reason as the foundation of its own analysis. The fact that the suspicion of ideology becomes total means that it opposes not only the ideological function of the bourgeois ideals, but rationality as such, thereby extending critique to the very foundations of an immanent critique of ideology.

Now reason itself has fallen prey to the ill-fated confusion of power and validity claims. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept of "instrumental reason" was not merely meant to denounce the fact that understanding, Verstand in the Kantian sense, had usurped the place of reason or Vernunft.s The concept was at the same time to recall the fact that the purposive-rationality, which had become total, eliminates the difference between that which claims validity and that which only serves the interests of self-preservation. By doing so instrumental reason breaks down the barrier between truth and power and thereby annihi- lates that fundamental differentiation which the modern decentered understanding of the world thought it had gained definitively by over- coming myth. Reason, once instrumentalized, has become assimilated to power and has thereby given up its critical power - this is the final unmasking of a critique of ideology applied to itself.

This critique of ideology describes the self-destruction of the critical faculty, however, in a paradoxical manner, because in performing the analysis it must make use of the same critique which it has declared false. It denounces the totalitarian development of Enlightenment with its own means - a performative contradiction of which Adorno was well aware. Adorno's later work, especially his Negative Dialectics, reads like an explanation of why we should no longer attempt to resolve this unavoidable performative contradiction, and why only the insistent and incessant development of this paradox offers the prospect of that almost magically charmed "remembrance of nature in the subject in whose fulfillment the unacknowledged truth of all culture lies hidden" (DoE, p. 40). In the 25 years since the completion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno has remained faithful to his philosophical impulse and has not evaded the paradoxical structure of thinking engaged in totalized critique. The grandeur of this consistency becomes evident in a comparison with Nietzsche whose Genealogy of Morals was the great model for the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Nietzsche repressed the paradoxical structure and explained the assimilation of reason to power with a theory of power which, instead of truth claims, retains only the rhetorical claim of the aesthetic fragment. The comparison of

8. See esp. Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans, by Matthew J. O'Connell, et al. (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).



Horkheimer and Adorno with Nietzsche demonstrates that a totalized critique does not have its direction inscribed. Among the unswerving theoreticians of a final unmasking, Nietzsche is the one who radi- calizes the counter-Enlightenment.9

IV. Horkheimer and Adorno's opinion of Nietzsche is conflicting. On

the one hand, they acknowledge that he was "one of the few after Hegel who recognized the dialectic of enlightenment" (DoE, p. 44). They accept, naturally, the identity of domination and reason, that is, the basis for a totalizing self-transcendence of the critique of ideology. On the other hand, they cannot overlook the fact that Hegel is also Nietzsche's greatest antipode. Nietzsche's treatment of the critique of reason renders it so affirmative that even determinate negation (i.e., that procedure which Horkheimer and Adorno retain as the only valid methodology once reason itself has become unreliable) loses its sting. Nietzsche's critique consumes the critical impulse itself: "As a protest against civilization, the master's morality conversely represents the oppressed. Hatred of atrophied instincts actually denounces the true nature of the task-masters T which comes to light only in their victims. But as a Great Power or state religion, the masters' morality wholly sub- scribes to the civilizing powers that be, the compact majority, resent- ment and everything that it formerly opposed. The realization of Nietzsche's assertions both refutes them and at the same time reveals their truth, which - despite all his affirmation of life - was inimical to the spirit of reality" (DoE, p. 101).

The conflicting attitude towards Nietzsche is instructive. It indicates that the Dialectic ofEnlightenment owes more to Nietzsche than just the strategy ofa totalizing critique. It is still difficult to understand a certain carelessness in their treatment of, to put it quite blatantly, the achievements of Western rationalism. How can the two advocates of the Enlightenment (which they always claimed to be and still are) so underestimate the rational content of cultural modernity that they observe in its elements only the amalgamation of reason and domination, of power and validity? Is it Nietzsche who inspired them to derive the standards of their cultural criticism from the radical but isolated and somehow totalized experience of aesthetic modernity?

The similarities in content are striking." In that design which Hork-

9. Like his 'new-conservative' successors, he too behaves like an 'anti-sociologist'. Cf. H. Baier, "Die Gesellschaft - ein langer Schatten des toten Gottes," in Nietzsche- Studien, 10/11 (1982), 6 ff.

10. See also Peter Piitz, "Nietzsche and Critical Theory", in Telos, 50 (Winter 1981- 82), pp. 103-114.


24 Jiirgen Habermas

heimer and Adorno take as a basis for their primal history of subjectivity there are point for point parallels with Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, as soon as people, were robbed of their "most obvious" instincts they had to depend on their "consciousness," that is, on the apparatus which objectifies and makes available external nature: "They were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures."" At the same time the old instincts had to be domesticated and the natural drives which could no longer discharge spontaneously, had to be repressed. Through this process of internalization, of a reversal in the direction of impulses (UmkehrderAntriebsrichtung), the subjectivity of an inner nature develops under the influence of renunciation or of 'bad conscience': "All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul' "(GoM, p. 520). Ultimately, the two elements of the domination over external and internal nature combine and solidify into the institutionalized domination of men over men. "The curse of society and of peace" rests on all institutions because they force men into renunciation: "Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts-of free- dom - punishments belong among these bulwarks - brought about that all these instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself' (GoM, p. 520).

In the same manner, Nietzsche's critique of knowledge and morality anticipates the central idea which Horkheimer and Adorno develop in their critique of instrumental reason: behind the ideals of objectivity and the truth claims of Positivism, behind the ascetic ideals and the normative claims of Christianity and a universalist morality are hidden nothing but imperatives of self-preservation and domination. A pragmatic theory of knowledge and a naturalistic critique of morality unmask both theoretical and practical reason as mere fictions in which claims to power achieve an alibi. This is realized with the help of imagination and with the aid of a "drive to metaphorize" for which external stimuli offer only occasions for projective responses: already for Nietzsche, the text is merely the sum of its interpretations.

Unlike the Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, Nietzsche explicitly states the point of view from which he is observing modernity. And it is only from this point of view that one really understands why objectified nature and moralized society can be perceived as degenerating into corresponding manifestations of the same mythical power -

11. On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. by Walter Kaufman (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 520; hereafter referred to as GoM. Quotes from Beyond Good and Evil are taken from the same edition and will be referred to as BGE.



whether it be a perverted will to power or instrumental reason. This perspective was first established by aesthetic modernity, through ob- stinate self-revelations (imposed by avant-garde art) ofa deconstructed subjectivity freed from all constraints of cognition and morality as well as from all imperatives of work and utility. Nietzsche is not only an intellectual contemporary of Mallarm6;'2 he has not only absorbed the late-romantic spirit of Richard Wagner; he is the first to develop the concepts of aesthetic modernity even before the avant-garde consciousness actually materialized in the literature, painting and music of the 20th century. The heightened appreciation of the transitory, the celebration of dynamism, and the glorification of this spontaneity of the moment and the new - these are all expressions of an aesthetically motivated sense of time and the longing for an immaculate, suspended presence. The anarchical intention of the Surrealists to explode the continuum of history is already effective in Nietzsche. Already in Nietzsche's work, the subversive force of an aesthetic resistance which will later nourish the reflections of Benjamin and even Peter Weiss, originates in the experience of rebellion against everything that is normative. It is this same force which neutralizes the morally good as well as the practically useful, and also expresses itself in the dialectic of mys- tery and scandal, in the pleasure at the fright caused by desecration. As the major opponents, Nietzsche sets up Socrates and Christ, those advocates ofa belief in truth and the ascetic ideal: itis they who "negate the aesthetic values." Nietzsche believes that only art "in which precisely the lie is sanctified, the will to deception" (GoM, p. 589), and the terror of the beautiful are capable of resisting capture by the deceiving world of science and morality.

Nietzsche enthrones taste, "the Yes and No of the palate" (BGE, p. 341) as the sole organ of knowledge beyond Truth and Falsity, beyond Good and Evil. He adopts the pronouncement of taste by the artjudge as the model ofvaluejudgment, or "value estimation" (Wertschitzung). For Nietzsche the only legitimate meaning of critique is that of the value judgment which establishes a hierarchy, weighs things, and measures the powers with which they are endowed. All interpretation is valuation: the "Yes" expresses esteem, the "No" expresses con- tempt. According to Nietzsche "High" and "Low" is what we mean when we respond 'Yes' or 'No' to claims of validity.

It is interesting to observe how consistently Nietzsche undercuts the rationality of Yes/No positions. To begin with, he devalues the truth of assertive sentences and the validity of normative sentences by tracing validity and invalidity back to positive and negative value judgments.

12. Pointed out by Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche und die Philosophie (Munich, 1976), p. 38ff.


26 Jiirgen Habermas

He reduces sentences like "x is true" or "y is right" (complex propositions with which we claim validity for descriptive or normative statements) to simple evaluations with which we express our estimations, that is, that we would like to prefer true over false and good over evil. Thus Nietzsche first redefines validity claims like truth as pre- ferences and then poses the question: "Suppose that we prefer truth (andjustice): why not rather untruth (and injustice)?" (BGE, p. 199). So, in the final analysis the value of truth and justice is determined by judgments of taste.

Of course, there could still be a rational structure behind these fundamental value estimations. Nietzsche can only realize his goal of a complete assimilation of reason to power by also depriving value judgments of their cognitive status and by demonstrating that the Yes/ No reactions to value-judgments no longer express claims of validity; they must be exposed as sheer manifestations of subjective will, of interest, and of power.

In terms of linguistic analysis the next step in the argument therefore attempts to assimilate judgments of taste to imperatives, and value judgments to expressions of will. Nietzsche deals with Kant's analysis of the judgment of taste (GoM, p. 539f.) in order to substantiate the thesis that evaluations are necessarily subjective and cannot be con- nected with a claim to intersubjective validity. He maintains that the semblance of disinterested satisfaction as well as of the impersonality and universality of the aesthetic judgment can only be established from the perspective of the spectator; however, from the standpoint of the producing artist we recognize that value-judgments and estimations are induced by the producers of value. The aesthetics of production unfolds the experience of the artist as genius who creates values: from his point of view, all estimations are dictated by his "value- positing eye" (GoM, p. 472). Value-positing productivity lays down the laws of estimation. Thus, the validity claimed by thejudgment of taste is merely an expression of "the excitement of the will by the beautiful." One will responds to anotherwill, one power conquers another. This is how Nietzsche can get from the Yes and No of estimations - once he has cleansed them of all their cognitive claims ofvalue-judgments - to the concept of the will to power. The beautiful is the "stimulant of the will to power." The aesthetic core of the will to power is thus the ability of a sensibility which allows itself to be affected in as many different ways as possible.'

13. The mediating function of the judgment of taste is revealed in the reduction of the yes/no positions in criticizable validity claims to the'yes' and the 'no' of imperative expressions ofwill. This is also demonstrated by the way Nietzsche revises the concept of propositional truth along with the concept of the world built into our grammar: "In-



I will leave this as it stands and concentrate on the performative contradiction which results from all that. If thought can no longer operate in the realms of truth and validity claims, then analysis and critique lose their meaning. Contradiction and negation can henceforth only mean "wanting to be different." For Nietzsche to implement his critique of culture, however, this just will not do. His critique was not supposed to be a piece of propaganda, but was rather intended to demonstrate why it is wrong, incorrect, or bad to accept the domination of the ideals of science and morality which threaten life. If, however, all proper claims to validity are devalued and if the underlying value-judgments are mere expressions of claims to power rather than validity, according to what standards should critique then differentiate? It must at least be able to discriminate between a power which deserves to be esteemed and a power which deserves to be disparaged. Nietzsche's theory ofpower is intended to provide a way out of this aporia. Nietzsche cannot, however, allow this theory of power to be a theory that can be true or false. According to his own analysis, he himself operates in a world of appearance in which one can distinguish between lighter and darker shadows but not between reason and irrationality. This is a world which has more or less intentionally relapsed into mythology, in which various powers exert influence upon each other and where there is no element left that could transcend the struggle between the powers.

This is the point in Nietzsche's work where the totalized critique of ideology turns into that which he calls "genealogical critique." Once the critical sense of negation has been suspended and the practice of negation has been abolished, Nietzsche returns to the one dimension of mythical thinking which permits a distinction that extends over all other dimensions; that which is older is earlier in the chain of generations and thus closer to the origins: therefore it is considered to be better. That which is more originary is considered more venerable, respectable, natural and pure. Ancestry and origin serve simultaneously as the criteria of rank in the social as well as in the logical sense.

It is in this sense that Nietzsche bases his critiques of morality on genealogy. Moral value estimation, which places a person or a mode of conduct in a hierarchy based on criteria of validity, is attributed by

deed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance - different 'values' to use the language of painters? Why couldn't the world that concerns us be a fiction? And if somebody asks: 'but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?' - couldn't one answer be simply: why? Doesn't this 'belongs' perhaps belong to the fiction too? By now is one not permitted to be a bit ironic about the subject no less than about the predicate and object? Shouldn't the philosopher be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?" (BGE, p. 236).


28 Jiirgen Habermas

Nietzsche to the origin and thereby to the social status of the moral judge him/herself: "The signpost to the right road was for me the question: what was the real etymological significance of the designations for 'good' coined in the various languages? I found that they all led back to the same conceptual transformation - that everywhere 'noble,' 'aristocratic' in the social sense, is the basic concept from which 'good' in the sense of 'with aristocratic soul,' 'noble,' 'with a soul of high order,' 'with a privileged soul' necessarily developed: a development which always runs parallel with that other in which 'common,' 'plebeian,' 'low' are finally transformed into the concept 'bad' " (GoM, p. 463f.). The genealogical localization of the powers has a critical purpose: the powers of an earlier and more distinguished ancestry are the active and creative ones, whereas the reactive powers of later and lower descent express a perverted will to power. With this Nietzsche has in his hands the conceptual means with which he can denounce the accidental suc- cess of the belief in truth and the ascetic ideal, as well as the belief in science and morality. Although decisive for the fate of modernity, Nietzsche considered this a contingent and reversible victory of the lower and the reactive powers. The latter, as is well known, are supposed to have emerged out of the Ressentiment, "from the protective instinct of a degenerating life" (GoM, p. 556).'4

V. We have followed two variants of the totalizing, self-referential criti-

que. Horkheimer and Adorno find themselves in the same predicament as Nietzsche: if they do not want to give up the goal of an ultimate unmasking and want to carry on their critique, then they must preserve at least one standard for their explanation of the corruption of all reason- able standards. In the face of this paradox, the totalizing critique loses its direction. It has two options.

Nietzsche seeks refuge in a theory of power - a consistent step insofar as the function of reason and power which is disclosed by his critique surrenders the world - as if it were mythical - to the irreconcilable struggle between the powers. In structuralist France, Nietzsche has justifiably become influential as a theoretician of power through

14. The structure of the argument interests me here. Once Nietzsche has destroyed the foundations of the critique of ideology through a self-referential application of this critique, he retains the position of the exposing critic only by recourse to a notion of mythical-originary thinking. The ideological content of the Genealogy of Morals, however, is something altogether different, as is Nietzsche's battle against modern ideas in general, for which the educated among those contemptuous of society continue to demonstrate an unusual interest: R. Maurer, "Nietzsche und die Kritische Theorie"; G. Rohrmoser, "Nietzsches Kritik der Moral," in Nietzsche Studien, 10/11 (1982), pp. 34ff and 323ff.



the work of Gilles Deleuze. In his later work, Foucault also replaced the model of repression and emancipation developed by Marx and Freud with a pluralism of power/discourse formations. These formations intersect and succeed one another and can be differentiated according to their style and intensity. They cannot, however, bejudged in terms of validity which was possible in the case of the repression and emancipation of conscious as opposed to unconscious conflict resolutions.'5

Clearly Nietzsche's doctrine of the active and the merely reactive powers also does not offer a way out of the predicament of a critique which attacks the validity of its own premises: at best it prepares the way for an escape from the horizon of modernity. As a theory it is without foundation if the categorical distinction between claims of power and validity is the basis on which every theoretical work must take place. As a result, the meaning of unmasking changes as well: the shock which in an almost surrealist manner Nietzsche produces again and again is not caused by the flash of insight into a confusion which threatens identity (in the way that 'getting' the punch line of ajoke causes cathartic laugh- ter). Instead, the shock is caused by the affirmed de-differentiation and by the affirmed collapse of those categories which alone can account for category mistakes of existential relevance. This regressive turn enlists the powers of emancipation in the service of counter- enlightenment.

Horkheimer and Adorno took not only a different but an opposite route: no longer desiring to overcome the performative contradiction of a totalizing critique of ideology, they intensified the contradiction instead and left it unresolved. At the level of reflexion achieved by Horkheimer and Adorno, every attempt to set up a theory was bound to lead into an abyss: as a result, they abandoned any theoretical approach and practiced ad hoc determinate negation, thereby opposing that fusion of reason and power which fills in all the cracks. The praxis of negation is what remains of the "spirit of... unrelenting theory." And this praxis is like a vow to "turn back even as it reaches its goal" (DoE, p. 42; trans, modified), the demon of merciless progress.

If a position which philosophy once held occupied with its ultimate principles now leads to a paradox, then to hold this position is not only uncomfortable, but can only be done if one can plausibly demonstrate that there is no way out. Even the retreat from such an aporia must be barred because otherwise there is a way out - that is, to go back. In the issue here at hand, however, I believe that this latter alternative is possible.

15. H. Fink-Eitel, "Michel Foucaults Analytik der Macht," in F.A. Kittler, ed., Aus- treibungdes Geistes aus den Geisteswissenschaften (Paderborn, 1980), p. 38ff.; A. Honneth, H. Joas, Soziales Handeln und menschliche Natur (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), p. 123ff.


30 Jiirgen Habermas

The comparison with Nietzsche is instructive insofar as he calls attention to the aesthetic horizon of experience which both guides and motivates cultural diagnosis. Nietzsche refashions judgment into a capacity for distinction which is beyond true and false, beyond good and evil. In this way, Nietzsche gains standards for a critique of culture which unmasks science and morality as ideological expressions of a perverted will to power in a manner similar to that of the Dialectic of Enlightenment which considers them as embodiments of instrumental reason. This fact makes it highly probable that Horkheimer and Adorno perceived cultural modernity from a similar horizon of experience, with the same heightened sensibility, and also with the same myopic perspective which made them insensitive to the traces and the existing forms of communicative rationality. This is also indicated by the structure ofAdorno's late philosophy in which Negative Dialectics and Aesthe- tic Theory support each other, the former which develops the paradoxical concept of non-identity, referring to the latter which deciphers the concealed mimetic content in the most advanced works of art.

In one respect, the critique of ideology has inconspicuously con- tinued the undialectical enlightenment of ontological thinking. It remained caught in the purist belief that the devil resides in the internal relationships between genesis and validity, and that this devil must be exorcized so that theory, once cleansed of all empirical admixtures, could operate in its own pure element. It is in the objective of a final unmasking - to pull back with one swift motion the veil concealing the confusion of reason and power - that the purist intention betrays itself even more clearly. This purism is similar to the attempt of ontol- ogy to categorically separate essence and appearance with one blow. However, as is the case with the 'context of discovery' and the 'context ofjustification' in the growth of theories, both spheres of power and validity are so interwoven that they can be separated only procedurally and step by step through the mediation of thought. In the realm of rational discourse, critique and theory, Enlightenment and justifica- tion are rightly intertwined even if the participants in the discourse must assume that in the inescapable pragmatic presuppositions of rational discourse only the non-coercive coercion of the better argument gets a chance. But they know, or at least they are able to know, that even that presupposition of an ideal speech situation is only necessary because convictions are formed and contested in a medium which is not 'pure' nor removed from the world of appearances in the manner of the platonic ideals. Only a discourse which admits this everlasting impurity can perhaps escape from myth, thus freeing itself, as it were, from the entwinement of myth and Enlightenment.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin


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Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 26 (Spring - Summer, 1982) pp. 1-228Front Matter [pp. 1-118]Introduction [pp. 3-11]The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment [pp. 13-30]Work and Instrumental Action [pp. 31-54]The Illusion of Politics: Politics and Rationalization in Max Weber and Georg Lukcs[pp. 55-79]Cultural Surplus in America [pp. 81-117]Trying to Understand Endgame [pp. 119-150]Beckett in Germany/Germany in Beckett [pp. 151-158]Beckett, Benjamin and the Modern Crisis in Communication [pp. 159-171]Review EssaysFeenberg on Lukcs[pp. 173-183]Schoolman on Marcuse [pp. 185-201]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 203-206]Review: untitled [pp. 206-208]Review: untitled [pp. 209-210]Review: untitled [pp. 211-213]Review: untitled [pp. 213-217]Review: untitled [pp. 217-228]

Back Matter [pp. 172-202]

Documents

Habermas - Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment