Now, however, we come to the point of an interesting divergence between the two philosophies.
26-27)įor Adorno and Horkheimer, as for Heidegger, the mathematical and abstract logical form of modern science and philosophy take their origin from power, the drive to make all things manageable and calculable. 26) leads to a situation in which ".what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve." (Ibid. Enframing as ".the unconcealment in accordance with which nature presents itself as a calculable complex of the effects of forces." ( The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, p. Objects become simply standing-reserve, raw materials or ultimately pure power in the form of energy, available for manipulation and organization while subjects eventually themselves dissolve into the complex of forces to be managed. Most striking, perhaps, is Heidegger's own sense that technological enframing, having grown out of the modern subject/object distinction, eventually leads to the dissolution of this distinction. 20)Īnyone hearing in these passages similarities to Heidegger's critic of calculative thinking in the "Memorial Address" and enframing in "The Question Concerning Technology" would be in tune with precisely what struck me. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out." (p. The abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by nothing but abstract material, which has no other property than to be the substrate of that right. Animism had endowed things with souls industrialism makes souls into things." (p. "Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expect of them. This process, in turn, serves first to utterly objectify the self and the mind and then to negate both subject and object into the flow of power management: Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping machines it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine." (p. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. "As a means of reinforcing the social power of language, ideas became more superfulous the more that power increased, and the language of science put an end to them altogether. This leveling manifests as well in destructive limitations placed upon thought and language: The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals." (p. But because that self never quite fitted the mold, enlightenment throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same. "The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market. Ultimately the official concern for increased freedom leads dialectically to its opposite: This leveling, a concern that both Heidegger and the authors are no doubt drawing heavily from the work of Nietzsche, manifests as an aspect of enlightenment's concerns for equality and freedom. Within the Dialectic of the Enlightenment the authors critique enlightenment as ultimately manifesting in a leveling of all reality to the standards of the market as expressed through power, specifically the power of managing, organizing and technology. I would like to take the time to note some of these similarities and the even more striking differences, in connection with Hegel and Marx, these aspects make apparent. This, in turn, will connect in the future to certain reflections on Vattimo and Zabala's Hermeneutic Communism. In the course of working through it I have been struck as never before by certain similarities between this work and Heidegger's concerns in the 1950s. I have been rereading the Dialectic of the Enlightenment in Edmund Jephcott's fairly new translation.
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