I’ve recently re-read the chapter ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I was prompted to do this ‘in light’ of reading Habermas, which was refreshing after reading so many gloomy critiques of ‘capitalist’ society.  There are two points of interest I’d like to focus on.  The first is the condemnation of reason.  I can understand the criticism of reason as it relates to labour relations and reification; a narrowly focused and perverted reason if you like. However I can’t understand Adorno and Horkheimer’s universal condemntation of reason.  Reason as the deceiver of the Masses?  How does ‘holistic reason’ do this?  Is Marx,  a direct inheritor of the tradition of the enlightenment, and who champions praxis through an application of rational and empirical observation also a target for criticism?  What is it that Horkheimer and Adorno are calling for?  A return to nature? The unthinking satisfaction of animal necessity?  Would either man admit that the way in which they reach their conclusions is through the use of reason?  I think the problem is that neither man, and Adorno in particular, is willing to provide a picture of the world, without the taint of reason.  Their critique is entirely negative: a diagnosis without the cure?  To provide a model or paradigm through which humanity could express itself in a positive sense would smack of utopianism, something which both men seem keen to avoid.

The next point I’d like to discuss is the reason for such pessismism.  Why is European philosophy, particulary German philosophy so bleak. I’m remined of episode of Yes Minister where Humphery Appleby describes Germany’s commitment to the European Union as, “a desire to apply for readmission to the human race”.  This may seem cruel, but I think it goes to the heart of the matter.  The sense of shame many Germans felt and still feel for the actions of Nazi Germany seems to have an even stronger influence of social philosophy, at least in the latter half of the twentieth century, than any concern for class struggle.  In this sense I can see why reason, at least in an instrumental sense, is viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility.  The second World War saw the industrialisation of destruction and genocide on an unprecedented scale.  Reason, in a perverse sense,  made the Holocaust possible.  Indeed reason made the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima possible; not only in an instrumental sense, throught the design and production of atom bombs, but in the their calculated use; the hope that mass destruction would save more lives  continuing to wage war on a conventional scale.  Why is it then, that pessimissim doesn’t seem to have a foothold in Anglo-American philosophy?