The Critique of Instrumental Reason: Horkheimer, Marcuse And

Reason after Its Eclipse Jay, Martin Published by University of Wisconsin Press Jay, M.. Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2016. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44706 Access provided by University of California @ Berkeley (30 Jan 2017 19:16 GMT) UWP: Jay: Reason after Its Eclipse page97 5 The Critique of Instrumental Reason Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno In 1941, arguably one of the bleakest years in all of modern history, the Frankfurt School reluctantly acknowledged for the first time the crisis of the emphatic concept of reason that had been a mainstay of its work for much of the previous decade.1 The disillusionment was abrupt. Although in his earliest days Max Horkheimer had in good historical materialist fashion denounced the dualism and idealism he saw in Cartesian rationalist metaphysics, he had come staunchly to defend a dialectical notion of reason against the irrationalist alternative he identified with the threat of fascism.2 While acknowledging that rationality in its liberal, bourgeois form was tied to egoistic self-preservation rather than the general good, he had resisted the conclusion that reason tout court inevi- tably led in this direction. As a result, one commentator has gone so far as to posit a “rationalist turn” in Critical Theory around 1937 in which concrete political hopes were replaced by more philosophical concerns.3 In an essay of that year, “The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,” Horkheimer could still insist, as noted at the end of the previous chapter, that “rationalism uses existing objects as well as the active inner strivings and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism.”4 In the same year, Herbert Marcuse could add in the pages of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung: Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny. Philosophy wanted to discover the ultimate and most general grounds of Being. Under 97 UWP: Jay: Reason after Its Eclipse page98 98 Part II. Reason’s Eclipse and Return the name of reason it conceived the idea of authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled.5 Four years later, Marcuse’s spirited defense of Hegel against his alleged support for statist authoritarianism, Reason and Revolution, could even more vigorously celebrate the critical energy of universal reason. In its dialectical guise, which emphasized the power of negation, reason had resisted the affirma- tive implications of positivism in all of its forms. Going beyond the limits of the analytic understanding (Verstand ) that Kant had posited for cognition, reason (Vernunft ) was a synthetic faculty able to incorporate the moral norms Kant had relegated to practical reason alone. According to Marcuse, Hegel’s idea of reason, with which he clearly identified, “has retained, though in an idealistic form, the material strivings for a free and rational order of life. The core of Hegel’s philosophy is a structure the concepts of which—freedom, subject, mind, notion—are derived from the idea of reason.”6 Capitalist rationalization, tied to commodity fetishism, the domination of exchange value, and what Lukács had called reification, was a pathological distortion of this ideal. As Marx had famously said in 1843, “reason has always existed, but not always in rational form.”7 Despite sub rosa tensions between Marcuse and some of his colleagues at the time, the book was proudly dedicated to “Max Horkheimer and the Institute of Social Research,”8 whose theoretical stance he thought he shared. But in a new essay of 1941 by Horkheimer, “Reason and Self-Preservation,” which first appeared in a private volume to mourn the recently perished Walter Benjamin, a very different note was struck. When it appeared in the final issue of the Institute’s journal, which coincided with Horkheimer’s move from New York to California and the growing importance of his partnership with Adorno, it was retitled in more apocalyptic fashion “The End of Reason.”9 “The fundamental concepts of civilization are in a process of rapid decay,” Horkheimer began ominously. “The decisive concept among them was that of reason, and philosophy knew no higher principle.”10 The decay of reason, Horkheimer then suggested, was due not only to the failure to realize itself in the world but also to a fatal characteristic of the concept itself. Ironically, the inherent connec- tion between reason and critique could ultimately be carried to the point that reason might undermine its own legitimacy. “Rationalism itself had established the criteria of rigidity, clarity and distinctness as the criteria of rational cognition. Skeptical and empirical doctrines opposed rationalism with these selfsame standards. Skepticism purged the idea of reason of so much of its content that scarcely anything is left of it. Reason, in destroying conceptual fetishes, ultimately destroyed itself. None of the categories of rationalism has survived.”11 UWP: Jay: Reason after Its Eclipse page99 The Critique of Instrumental Reason 99 There is a withered residue of reason still left in human behavior, Hork- heimer conceded, but only in its instrumental guise: “its features can be summa- rized as the optimum adaptation of means to ends, thinking as an energy-saving operation. It is a pragmatic instrument oriented to expediency, cold and sober.”12 Was this an aberration or the working out of a sinister potential always lurking in reason? Marcuse had been inclined to blame it on the increased power of technological rationality in the modern world.13 But Horkheimer, at his most pessimistic, asserted that “as close as the bond between reason and efficiency is here revealed to be, in reality so has it always been.”14 To the extent that reason claimed universal, ahistorical validity, it was based, moreover, on a lie, because all previous societies were divided along class lines. As the universality of reason became more frankly formalistic, it resigned itself to the separation of thought and object, the ideal of universality betrayed by the reality of class division. The increasing influence of nominalism, which meant the loss of any hope for a substantive concept of reason as inhering in the actual world, also ratified the separation of facts from values and the hegemony of calculation. “The triumph of nominalism goes hand in hand with the triumph of formalism. In limiting itself to seeing objects as a strange multiplicity, as a chaos, reason becomes a kind of adding machine that manipulates analytical judgments.”15 Along with this decline of reason into the instrumentality that was always lurking under the surface of the substantive concept went a concomitant ero- sion of the individual subject who was supposed to be its bearer. Although in the past a dialectic of self-preservation and self-sacrifice meant that there was some rough balance between individual and community, now the former was in total disarray: The destruction of rationalistic dogmatism through the self-critique of reason, carried out by the ever renewed nominalistic tendencies in philosophy, has now been ratified by historical reality. The substance of individuality itself, to which the idea of autonomy was bound, did not survive the process of industrialization. Reason has degenerated because it was the ideological projection of a false universality which now shows the autonomy of the subject to have been an illusion. The collapse of reason and the collapse of individuality are one and the same.16 The result is the political horror that was now sweeping over Europe, which must be understood as more than an expression of atavistic irrationalism: “the new order of fascism is reason revealing itself as unreason.”17 Holding on to a faint hope that fascism might not have the last word, Horkheimer concluded his jeremiad with a modified evocation of the famous alternative Rosa Luxemburg UWP: Jay: Reason after Its Eclipse page100 100 Part II. Reason’s Eclipse and Return had posed in her World War I Junius Pamphlet: “the progress of reason that leads to its self-destruction has come to an end; there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom.”18 Throughout the 1940s, Horkheimer still desperately attempted to salvage something from the wreckage of reason. But even the end of the war and defeat of fascism did not lessen his dire conclusion in 1946 that reason itself “today seems to suffer from a kind of disease,” the cure of which is uncertain.19 Only digging deep into its past might provide some potential relief: “reason must reconstruct the history of its vicissitudes—try, as it were to recollect its origins and understand its own inherent self-destructive trends and mechanisms. Reason’s ability to render an account of its transformation from the power by which all things are perceived, to a mere instrumentality of self-preservation, is a condition of its recovery.”20 Only by facing the sources of the “self-liquidation of reason” can the process of enlightenment continue, a process, despite its paradoxical implications, needing to be encouraged: “the hope of Reason lies in the emancipation from its own fear of despair.”21 Struggling against that fear while at the same time not flinching from the despair were the motivations behind Horkheimer’s two subsequent works, Eclipse of Reason (1947) and Dialectic of Enlightenment, the latter of which he wrote jointly with Adorno (1947). Together, they represented the summa of the Frankfurt School’s thesis of the self-liquidation of reason.

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