Critical theorists of the early 20th century were concerned with the disjuncture between the promises of the Enlightenment, hedged upon a symbiotic relationship between freedom and rationality, and the material conditions they observed. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on a teleological progression towards human freedom via the use of reason, science, and technology, promised emancipation from the perceived irrationality of ‘mystical’ or metaphysical understandings of the world. However, it was apparent that the Enlightenment did not entirely deliver on these promises. Rather than emancipating humans from domination by religion and mysticism, it produced new problems and forms of domination that merely appeared more ‘free’. Preeminent amongst
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These scholars were vehement critics of the idea that science, reason, and technological development are inherently emancipatory and progressive. They wondered how it was possible for reason to fall so far short of these ideals, and proposed that “reason [...] has become irrational” (Zuidervaart), and that previous forms of domination have been supplanted by new ones under the guise of human ‘liberation’. I will describe here the Frankfurt School critique of capitalism and modernity, and contextualize these within their more all-encompassing critique of rationality and domination. I will then address Habermas’s critique of Horkheimer and Adorno, and provide a rebuttal to this critique that I believe Horkheimer and Adorno would likely have found …show more content…
If one stops for a moment and considers what it means to say that something is ‘modern’, one discovers that it essentially means ‘distant from nature’. While this has been advantageous to human quality of life in numerous ways, in many respects it takes with one hand what it has given with the other. The Frankfurt School sought to draw attention to the dialectical character of the processes of modernity - while they have liberated us from the chaos and unpredictability of nature, they have also divorced us from something of which we are inherently a part, and have been used to justify myriad forms of oppression, domination, and destruction. Marcuse describes the contradictory character of
These scholars were vehement critics of the idea that science, reason, and technological development are inherently emancipatory and progressive. They wondered how it was possible for reason to fall so far short of these ideals, and proposed that “reason [...] has become irrational” (Zuidervaart), and that previous forms of domination have been supplanted by new ones under the guise of human ‘liberation’. I will describe here the Frankfurt School critique of capitalism and modernity, and contextualize these within their more all-encompassing critique of rationality and domination. I will then address Habermas’s critique of Horkheimer and Adorno, and provide a rebuttal to this critique that I believe Horkheimer and Adorno would likely have found …show more content…
If one stops for a moment and considers what it means to say that something is ‘modern’, one discovers that it essentially means ‘distant from nature’. While this has been advantageous to human quality of life in numerous ways, in many respects it takes with one hand what it has given with the other. The Frankfurt School sought to draw attention to the dialectical character of the processes of modernity - while they have liberated us from the chaos and unpredictability of nature, they have also divorced us from something of which we are inherently a part, and have been used to justify myriad forms of oppression, domination, and destruction. Marcuse describes the contradictory character of