The move away from myth and toward reason is an ancient human impulse. But must enchantment be the enemy of enlightenment?
Saint George and the Dragon (c1909-10), by Odilon Redon. Courtesy the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Jason Josephson Storm
is chair and associate professor in the department of religion at Williams College in New England. His latest book is The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017).
Edited by Sam Dresser
Enlightenment’s programme was the disenchantment of the world… The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism… the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Frankfurt School – a group of German sociologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, psychoanalysts and their students – whose work is now synonymous with critical theory. Most of the initial members of the Frankfurt School came together in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research in the German city of Frankfurt. Because most of the early members were Jews, many either perished or fled Germany when the Nazis came to power. The cross-fertilisation of critical social science with philosophy was particularly fertile ground. Today, their studies of ‘the Authoritarian Personality’ and Right-wing populism, and their denunciations of the ‘poverty’ of consumer culture, have come to look downright prescient.
Two of the Frankfurt School’s most important members were the philosophers Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903-69). They initially met in 1921 in a seminar on gestalt psychology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt where Adorno was an undergraduate and Horkheimer a PhD student. But their intellectual relationship really blossomed under their shared experiences as German émigrés in the United States during the Second World War years, leading to some of the sustained critiques of late-capitalist society that have made the Frankfurt School famous. As Alex Ross recently put it in The New Yorker: ‘If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the 21st century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realised.’
The single most important work produced by the Frankfurt School was the book that Horkheimer and Adorno co-authored, the monumental Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), an attempt to diagnose the maladies of modernity by understanding how modernity could have produced the horrors of fascism and Stalinism alike.
To risk a broad overview for the uninitiated, Horkheimer and Adorno construct their text around the unfolding dialectical opposition between ‘enlightenment’ (Aufklärung) and ‘myth’ (Mythos). The roots of this antagonism can be found in a dilemma that could as easily be psychological as historical. Humans, who see nature as outside of ourselves, are presented with a choice: either we can elect to submit to a mysterious, mythological world full of magic and frighteningly capricious spirits; or we can elect to subdue nature. By choosing the second option and turning nature into an object to control, humanity was caught in its own trap. Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. Rather than being liberated into a new kind of autonomy as they had hoped, people were instead turned into objects or, more properly, into abstractions, mere numbers and statistics, leading to a new backlash of irrational forces. As Horkheimer and Adorno summarised it, ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’. The objectification of nature had directly led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed.
To make sense of this narrative trajectory, we need to know that, despite a whole crowd of scholars who see themselves as defending the historical Enlightenment from Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique, the Dialectic of Enlightenment portrays ‘enlightenment’ not primarily as a particular historical period, but as an ancient human impulse ‘aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters’ over nature. They identify its modern patriarch as the 17th-century empiricist Sir Francis Bacon, evoking the scientific revolution.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an account of the ascendancy of enlightenment explicitly keyed to the ‘disenchantment of the world’, which they suggest first and foremost meant ‘the extirpation of animism’ and the end of belief in magic, spirits and demons. As Horkheimer and Adorno argue, ‘the mind, conquering superstition, [was supposed] to rule over disenchanted nature’. Magic and spirits had to go if the world was to be amenable to systematic and rational interpretation. To be sure, they also described what they saw as a contemporary ‘regression’ to myth and magic in capitalistic commodification and fascist politics as a kind of backlash to enlightenment, but they generally presumed disenchantment as the return’s precondition
The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Frankfurt School – a group of German sociologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, psychoanalysts and their students – whose work is now synonymous with critical theory. Most of the initial members of the Frankfurt School came together in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research in the German city of Frankfurt. Because most of the early members were Jews, many either perished or fled Germany when the Nazis came to power. The cross-fertilisation of critical social science with philosophy was particularly fertile ground. Today, their studies of ‘the Authoritarian Personality’ and Right-wing populism, and their denunciations of the ‘poverty’ of consumer culture, have come to look downright prescient.
Two of the Frankfurt School’s most important members were the philosophers Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903-69). They initially met in 1921 in a seminar on gestalt psychology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt where Adorno was an undergraduate and Horkheimer a PhD student. But their intellectual relationship really blossomed under their shared experiences as German émigrés in the United States during the Second World War years, leading to some of the sustained critiques of late-capitalist society that have made the Frankfurt School famous. As Alex Ross recently put it in The New Yorker: ‘If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the 21st century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realised.’
The single most important work produced by the Frankfurt School was the book that Horkheimer and Adorno co-authored, the monumental Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), an attempt to diagnose the maladies of modernity by understanding how modernity could have produced the horrors of fascism and Stalinism alike.
To risk a broad overview for the uninitiated, Horkheimer and Adorno construct their text around the unfolding dialectical opposition between ‘enlightenment’ (Aufklärung) and ‘myth’ (Mythos). The roots of this antagonism can be found in a dilemma that could as easily be psychological as historical. Humans, who see nature as outside of ourselves, are presented with a choice: either we can elect to submit to a mysterious, mythological world full of magic and frighteningly capricious spirits; or we can elect to subdue nature. By choosing the second option and turning nature into an object to control, humanity was caught in its own trap. Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. Rather than being liberated into a new kind of autonomy as they had hoped, people were instead turned into objects or, more properly, into abstractions, mere numbers and statistics, leading to a new backlash of irrational forces. As Horkheimer and Adorno summarised it, ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’. The objectification of nature had directly led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed.
To make sense of this narrative trajectory, we need to know that, despite a whole crowd of scholars who see themselves as defending the historical Enlightenment from Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique, the Dialectic of Enlightenment portrays ‘enlightenment’ not primarily as a particular historical period, but as an ancient human impulse ‘aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters’ over nature. They identify its modern patriarch as the 17th-century empiricist Sir Francis Bacon, evoking the scientific revolution.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an account of the ascendancy of enlightenment explicitly keyed to the ‘disenchantment of the world’, which they suggest first and foremost meant ‘the extirpation of animism’ and the end of belief in magic, spirits and demons. As Horkheimer and Adorno argue, ‘the mind, conquering superstition, [was supposed] to rule over disenchanted nature’. Magic and spirits had to go if the world was to be amenable to systematic and rational interpretation. To be sure, they also described what they saw as a contemporary ‘regression’ to myth and magic in capitalistic commodification and fascist politics as a kind of backlash to enlightenment, but they generally presumed disenchantment as the return’s precondition
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