I decided to read Horkheimer because of his interest in Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher usually not dear to those in the Marxist tradition given his intense personal hatred of Hegel and the association with Nietzsche and the Nazis. His metaphysical pessimism seems to go against the gospel of the inevitable triumph of the workers and the possibility of an end to human misery in the communist society.
But Horkheimer and other western Marxists, especially in the Frankfurt School which he was a founder of, were willing to explore the boundaries of Marxist theory. They were puzzled as to why the working class didn't revolt after World War I. Why didn't the Bolshevik Revolution spread to Western Europe and succeed?
Marxism was considered a scientific theory in the level of Darwin's by its followers, with the triumph of socialism an inevitable result of the laws of nature. Marx thought the Western European nations like British and France were where capitalism had developed to a point where the working class was large enough and self-conscious in urban society to challenge the bourgeoisie. Lenin and others who thought a undeveloped nation like Russia could establish socialism, the revolution would eventually succeed on an international level. Otherwise Russia would be isolated on all sides by hostile powers.
What instead happened was fascism. It could be argued that the ideological wave inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution was fascism, which swept over Europe from the 1920s until after World War II. In an economically advanced and educated Germany came a fanatical regime which in the course of twelve years tried its best to transform the entire world order.
This forced in the west a reexamination of the fundamentals of Marxist theory, from its philosophical foundations. The question of Eclipse of Reason is how in the post-enlightenment west could people be so blind to their interests under capitalism and rationalize the irrational brutality of fascism?
Horkheimer argues that what the Nazis did, barbaric as it was, was nonetheless guided by rationality. The regime used brutal technological efficiency to control and exterminate millions of people.
Approaching the book one must understand that common discourse aside, there are different kinds of rationality, which is the only way to understand how the Nazis could be called rational. Horkheimer argues that this kind of rationality has pervaded western thinking, as not only a German or class phenomenon.
Horkheimer present three kinds of reason: objective, subjective, and instrumental.
Objective reason deals with ends, determining actions by how reasonable their purpose is. Objective reason sees facts as leading to ethical ends, is determining ought. This is the reason used by Plato and Aristotle. Objective reason is connected with religion which has ethical and explanatory dimensions. Philosophy emerges which critiques religion, hoping to replace superstition and prejudice with reason. Horkheimer identified German idealism within this tradition, as against those who accuse the tradition of inspiring relativism.
Subjective reason determines the rationality of ends by the means available. Something is rational if it gets me what I want, even if what I want is immoral or against my actual interests. This kind of reason emerges in the modern era with Machiavelli and Hobbes and is linked towards the hard sciences, which are true without regard to human purposes and morality. Subjective reason separates is and ought, fact and value. The only "universal" value of subjective reason is self-preservation. Subjective reason coincides with the rise of capitalism and individualism, with the breakdown of traditional modes of being.
Instrumental reason is a formalization of subjective reason which dispenses with ends altogether, instead adopting the criterion of usefulness of meaningfulness. If ends cannot be defined from means, they are useless and meaningless. Pragmatism and positivism are representatives of instrumental reason, wanting to emulate the sciences in the experimental method (pragmatism), logical rigor (positivism) and in eliminating metaphysics. Instrumental reason's goal is the unification of reason, the elimination of ordinary folk language, and value free knowledge. This is the product of late capitalism when the individual is subsumed to new technological social organization. As opposed to subjective reason, not all aims are equal. The very notion of the subject and introspection is not formalizable and so useless and meaningless. This kind of reason eliminates the individual for the furtherance of the social system.
Horkheimer prefers objective reason out of the three because it doesn't just seek domination of nature, but also understanding. There is some kind of moral grounding for our actions, a healthy criticism of our ends, and resistance to certainty. Subjective and instrumental reason in contrast see reality foreign and even dangerous in so far as they are out of our control. Sir Francis Bacon's dictum "knowledge is power" is the essence of instrumental reason. Knowledge also becomes a tool of social domination, as human nature becomes demystified and unified with the rest of nature as an object to be controlled.
Fascism is rational in the instrumental sense. Their ideologies of the race and nation are vague and mythological, but the means towards these ends become ends in themselves. Humans, seeking collective fulfillment in the nation, a race, or leader, become objects of domination. Their needs become something in of themselves, reaching toward nothing more than gratification, by means of control. Fascism imposed order on capitalism which was facing serious challenges by suppressing dissidents in the population, defending the social order at all costs, subordinating reason to will.
Horkheimer explores the psychology behind fascism through mimicry. We aim to control nature by becoming like it. We find freedom through blind brute force. Unfortunately nature is out of control and will destroy us if we do not act in our interests.
Unfortunately for conservatives we can't just go back to older forms of objective reason like Thomism. A critical point of Horkheimer is that ideas are rooted in culture and society. Subjective and instrumental reason rise with the capitalist society. Thomism was made to reconcile Christian doctrine with Aristotle, one of the few authorities available on science. In today's world of quantum physics, Thomism is of no help. Today's secularized and individualized world has little need for scrutiny of arcane Christian dogma.
The best chapter of the book is The Rise and Decline of the Individual. Here he defines individuality in historical consciousness, not just spatial temporal and sensual existence. The development of the self is determined by external factors, which we must gain knowledge of to be free and not have our identity be determined from without. The western individual Horkheimer says comes from Greek tragedy. "The tragic hero originates in the conflict between the tribe and its members, a conflict in which the individual is always defeated." The individual is defined by its conflict with external forces and circumstances to eliminate that division is to eliminate the individual. Resistance to irrationality is the core of true individuality. Formalized reason eliminates irrationality by control of nature, and in the process comes to eliminate the individual.
The resistance to instrumental reason can only come from a philosophy devoted to criticism from outside the inner rationality of the system, using philosophical dialectics. Horkheimer however rejects the higher synthesis that Marx and Hegel's dialectic offered, the end point of human social development which resolves the fundamental contradiction between the individual and society. There is no teleology to history as consciousness is developed under historical conditions for certain needs. There isn't an end point for philosophy; what philosophers and intellectuals should do is to highlight those who struggled against formalization and push history forward. History and the positive data of science is a record domination to be criticized. Ideology is always aimed at some kind of control, an overcoming of difference by denying to consciousness certain aspects of reality. This totally undermines objective reason and the German idealist tradition he looks favorably on and creates a new kind of reasoning: critical theory.
Critical theory treats ideas as inherently social and therefore political. There is no distinction between fact or value and in keeping with Marx the dominant ideas of society are impositions of the ruling class. In the hands of critical theory however the ruling base of society is cultural as well as economic. Race and gender as well as class are sources of oppression and so reason ignoring such realities accepts the status quo. There isn't as in classical Marxism an objective reason for inequality, which makes critical theory purely negative and disdainful of science. In essence, what has become known as political correctness.
To forward Marxism, one has to relentlessly criticize western culture which gave rise to capitalism but also to objective reason which Horkheimer and the Frankfurt school undermined. This for me seriously undermines Horkheimer's own critique of instrumental reason, which now seems like a demand for science to be in service of political correctness, as defined by the Marxists.
This is the first time I read Horkheimer or any of the Frankfurt School directly, and I can already see how pessimistic their worldview is. Which is where I suspect where Horkheimer's interest in Schopenhauer came from. The rest of the school were heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and inherited Schopenhauer's pessimism that way.
Unfortunately in the hands of Marxists, such pessimism turns into defeatism and the regressive ideology of political correctness aka cultural Marxism which the Frankfurt school helped found. If one does not believe in such a thing as a human nature or transcendent moral truth, the world becomes completely intolerable, science politicized, and any weakness is to be obsessed over and any greatness condemned. Marxists should have been pessimistic since World War I seeing how their ideas failed over the 20th century, but should have realized the fault is socialism itself and not western civilization.
Despite the awfulness of the ideas Horkheimer's work helped found, the book is not bad. Given the unintellectual nature of the cultural Marxists today, this book is of interest for conservatives to find out where western thought went wrong, for the fascists and the Marxists.
No comments:
Post a Comment