Dialectic Of Enlightenment Analysis

Reason has failed to be the social locus of the human species. Instead, the psychological mechanism of social grouping has become the predominant means of social intercourse. John Teehan, in his article entitled “Islam, Violence and the Religious Mind”, clarifies the meaning of social grouping by making a distinction between ingroups and outgroups; the social capacity to create mental categories (groups) has evolved as an adaptive trait to ensure social bondage, to the effect that the human species becomes dominant. An equally important feature of social grouping is that placement of people within these categories is preconscious (false consciousness), meaning that the process is not a product of reason. Moreover, a contained set of these mental categories is nothing other than ideology, by which a mental category and criteria for membership into that group …show more content…
The promulgation of ideology is what leads the social state to irrational barbarism. The Enlightenment project has failed because reason (being used for organization) services social grouping; therefore, the paradoxical phrases in Dialectic of Enlightenment are used to create relational tension between reason, truth (valid belief), and social grouping (ideological belief). Through this conflict, rationality becomes irrational, and truth becomes false, as reason itself becomes ideological. Dialectic of Enlightenment gives a fragmentary account of how reason is being infected by its use for domination. In the chapter on Odysseus, Adorno and Horkheimer make an important distinction between the self and the other, namely, that a hierarchical structure is imposed on nature that allows for its domination by Odysseus (35-62). In