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October 22, 2006
In this article in Axess Eric Bonner says that reclaiming Enlightenment has become a matter of importance. Here is the argument:
Many on the left have come to consider the Enlightenment with its commitment to universal values as imperialist in its intent and a form of domination that privileges the white, male, bourgeois scientific, capitalist and imperialist worldview associated with the West. Conservatives have, meanwhile, juxtaposed the Enlightenment against Islam as justifying a "clash of civilisations." Both underestimate the radical and critical character of the Enlightenment. The former does so because it is precisely enlightenment values that ultimately call for recognising the other, including the excluded, and contesting the arbitrary exercise not merely of political but also, in principle, of economic power. As for the neo-conservative defense of western civilisation, unsurprisingly, it is always mixed with anti-modern prejudices. These followers of “enlightenment” bemoan sexual license and the decline of family values, cultural "nihilism" and the loss of tradition, tolerance for divergent life-styles and the erosion of national identity. Their "West" is not the "West" of the Enlightenment.
Bonner says that he enlightenment attack upon received traditions, popular prejudices, and religious superstitions was generally accepted as the foundation for movements concerned with fostering democracy and social justice during the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. It was the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that undermined this.
Bonner acknowledges that Adorno and Horkheimer were primarily concerned with criticising enlightenment generally, and the historical epoch known as the Enlightenment in particular, from the aims of enlightenment itself. An unrealised happiness, a sense of existential security, was the standpoint from which the failings of enlightenment, in both its senses, should be judged. The masterpiece of Horkheimer and Adorno was thus actually meant as the basis for what would later become a more positive appropriation that would carry the title "Rescuing the Enlightenment" (Rettung der Aufklaerung).
According to Bonner this reclamation project was never completed. Horkheimer would ultimately embrace a quasi-religious "yearning for the totally other" while Adorno became ever more interested in a form of aesthetic resistance that was philosophically grounded in "negative dialectics." This tacilty collapses them into, what the fundamentalist strand of the Enlightenment tradtion (neo-positivism?) see as the Romantic tradition's anti-Enlightenment irrationalism. Modern philosophical irrationalism was seen retrospectively by philosophers and historians as the source of the racist and totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.
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First time on this page. In any case, it seems to me that your brief assessment of Bonner's argument at the end of your summary is on point. Bonner sets up enlightenment and myth as instransigent theoretical cateogires which is completely contrary to the geneological analysis deployed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Bonner manages a reductive, myopic reading of this text in failing to see the way in which, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the opposition of myth and enlightenment is only constituted through enlightenment's unreflective conception of itself, that is through the project of unrelenting negative skepticism, which tacitly relies on mythic content, and the corresponding epistimological gesture of a subsumptive asecnt towards increasingly broad causal and universalist accounts of the world, in short, subject-centered cognitive immanence.
Certainly, there is much else wrong with the article. But, what do you expet from one of the Habermafia?