(2018. I’m gonna apologize in advance for all the big words in here. Fall 2018, junior fall, was a crazy fertile time for me intellectually. In order to convince myself not to drop out of Harvard to start work on the Great American Novel Project, I took 6 classes instead of the normal 4. One of them was German Social Thought, which was a kickass class that built a lot on Social Studies 10b. My final papers period from the end of the fall term, during which I wrote I don’t know how many pages, produced what can only be described as mania. This is a relic of that time.)
The central question underlying the intellectual history traced by German social thought is this: “In the absence of conventional (religious-metaphysical) norms, by what grounds can we secure a non-coercive social consensus?” The reactions to this “urgent question” have ranged across degrees of pessimism and messianism. Much of the social thought addressing this question sought answers in the form of a “whodunnit?” That is, given that God is dead, what killed Him? If it was us, how exactly did we do so? The whole Enlightenment project of the West, as well as the social conditions of modernity, became targets for critical scrutiny given the magnitude of the crime. Nietzsche traced the advent of nihilism back to the basic values and ideas that underlaid “the West,” beginning a tradition of antimodernity. The sociologist Max Weber provides the classic sociological view of the case, that the culprit is nothing less than rationality itself, the instrumental rationality which disenchanted the world and allowed the systems of modernity to form. In Weber’s view, the power of rationalization was irreversible, which would only lead to increasing loss of meaning and freedom in individual life under the “iron cage.” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer inherited Weber’s pessimism and, in effect, gave in to hopelessness for the future of modernity. The tragedies and dominations of the first half of the 20th century loomed large, and it seemed to them that all Enlightenment had done was create more barbarity; all instrumental rationality had done was irrationality; there seemed to be no hope of creating a rationally grounded social consensus from critical rationality, since rationality itself self-destructs. However, Jurgen Habermas, with his 1981 Theory of Communicative Action, points hopefully to a possible way out of this nihilism about rationality and social consensus. He does this by a paradigm shift from subject-centered reason to intersubjective reason based on communication, and by de-totalizing instrumental rationality by employing a combination of a lifeworld perspective and a systems perspective to analyses of society. Ultimately, I believe in the validity of Habermas’ arguments for communicative rationality and a two-level conception of society, which restored critical and emancipatory powers to reason, because they reflect the intersubjective nature of the human condition and, more importantly, they provide workable hope for the future of modernity.
Firstly, what is instrumental reason? Instrumental reason refers to reason applied as a tool, used as a means to accomplish a given end. These ends are typically given, limited self-interests as manifested in the material pursuit of pleasure, wealth, and self-preservation. Instrumental rationality, given its “tool” character, has the inherent aim of mastering the world and subjugating it to human interests. That could mean using reason as a tool to subjugate brute nature or other human beings. Max Weber’s sociology identified this totalitarian, purposive, or instrumental rationality, Zweckrationalitat, as the dominant power in “modernity.” It tended to disenchant the world from inherited superstitions and prejudices, but failed to replace these mythological structures with anything that could fulfill the human need for meaning and unity in life; the disenchanted world was simply “devalued and objectified as the material and setting for purposive-rational pursuit of interests” (TCA xvii). Instrumental reason is useful for large systems like those of state bureaucracies and capital exchanges; it has a natural affinity for the world of capital, industry, and machines, since it is so intimately intertwined with the concept of property ownership. Instrumental rationality is based on ideas of power, control, domination, and mastery, and thus wielded by a godlike subject, a master.
Critical reason, on the other hand, is an inherently interactive and self-negating force. It does not posit a subject; rather, it negates a subject. Its means/ends orientation is different from that of instrumental rationality in that its ends are unknown. With instrumental reason, the end is given, and instrumental reason will devise any means to make the end happen. With critical reason, the mean of critical dialectic is given, but the end will only be known when it is created in the synthesis; all that is known is that the end will be more “true” than what was first available due to negation and sublation. The concept of critical reason has a long Marxist tradition; Marx called for a “Radical Critique of Everything Existing” in one of his early philosophical manuscripts. Critical rationality implies the active interaction of a mind with a given existence, in search of justification for that existence, or information on contradictions in that concept or existence which could point out the path to emancipation. Critical reason is dialectical; it negates the thesis in order to bring about a higher sublation. Critical reason takes nothing for granted, and questions everything; instrumental reason takes everything for granted, and questions nothing beyond the fulfillment of its known desires. Critical reason questions the unknown in search of understanding; instrumental reason exists as a violent response to human fear of the unknown. Ultimately, critical reason has been invoked by a long tradition of people who seek higher truths through the immanent kritik of existence around them. It has also been used to attempt to criticize aspects of the social world in which we live by various social theorists in hopes of emancipation; by midcentury, it was hard to prove that this has worked. Many have doubted the validity of critical reason for a long time.
Two of the most famous doubters of critical reason are, ironically, the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who believed in the dominance of instrumental rationality. In their 1947 work Dialectic of Enlightenment, they explain how enlightenment, the processes of reason intended to emancipate humanity from the ignorance and fear associated with myth-creation, inherently reverts to mere mythology. It is clear from the beginning that Adorno and Horkheimer are working under a Weberian paradigm, wherein “reason” or “rationality” is understood as instrumental reason or rationality: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters” (DoE 1), they write. “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge,” in order to “rule over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters” (DoE 2). The patriarchal language of mastery, of power, and of ruthless disenchantment exhibited here is all representative of instrumental rationality. Furthermore, “what human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings” (DoE 2). Here we see the seeds of barbarism, of Nazi science used to exterminate 10 million lives. Knowledge is power and power is to be used by the subject to dominate nature and dominate humanity. “Reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus. Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculation. Reason’s old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has been fulfilled” (DoE 25). They see this as an inherent quality of reason itself, not just a historically contingent alignment. Capital and technology are its natural allies, and provide institutional groundings for its expanding domination of humanity. The power of instrumental reason is dedicated to subject-centered principles of self-preservation, and the institutions it endows (money, states) receive this self-preservationist impulse. Rationalization’s tendency to evacuate meaning, create self-preservationist institutions separated from man, and assimilate all into its apparatus has dire consequences. “The more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul. Enlightened thinking has an answer for this, too: finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order, which therefore run all the more smoothly” (DoE 23). Modernity’s “progress” can be seen as the ascension of instrumental reason over human beings, which eventually negates the very subjectivity that enabled it through total individual subsumption into processes of reproduction.“Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital,” (DoE 2), write Adorno and Horkheimer; we will later see how their rejection of “the joy of understanding” puts their conception of reason at direct odds with Habermas.
This world of Horkheimer and Adorno’s, in which instrumental reason is the dominant ideology of enlightenment, leads to the conclusion that critical reason is doomed due to the inherent regression of enlightenment back into myth. This is due to the totalizing effects of instrumental reason and the elimination of negativity. Whereas critical reason negates the actual, instrumental reason simply recognizes the actual as a tool at a surface level, and is content with reproducing it. The difference is analogous to the difference between enlightenment and myth; enlightenment is the momentary emancipatory knowledge that frees us from myths, but in the instrumental-rationality world of Weber and the Frankfurters, that enlightenment knowledge immediately becomes a story of that knowledge, a known and subjugated narrative of what was once unknown, yet another tool to use, a myth. It’s like John Stuart Mill’s ideas about live versus dead ideas: live ideas are true, fully and actively, in the moment of dialectical engagement with other competing ideas; dead ideas are now dogmas, ossified and hollowed-out word buckets which once contained meaning, mere myths. “But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products,” write Horkheimer and Adorno. “The scientific calculation of events annuls the account of them which thought had once given in myth. Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins— but therefore also to narrate, record, explain. This tendency was reinforced by the recording and collecting of myths. From a record, they soon became a teaching” (DoE 5). Enlightenment is mythologized in a way that is reminiscent of the way in which ritualistic participation made ancient peoples feel that they somehow controlled magical forces; the illusion of control is key, as well as the repetition. “What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the subordination of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought with the obedient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand… Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape” (DoE 20). Instrumental reason subordinates, classifies, and validates the actual; in other words, it stops at surfaces, it objectifies, it “arrests thought at mere immediacy” and is comfortable believing that it now owns a repeatable known, which never suspects that it is a self-deception. Real knowledge, real enlightenment, takes critical reason; it takes a full engagement or interaction with the object of knowledge; it needs to spring out of a “determining negation.” This critical dialectic never takes place, however, in the reproductive enlightenment driven by totalitarian instrumental reason which evacuates negativity.
Ultimately, Adorno and Horkheimer’s bad dialectic puts them in an aporia, a performative contradiction, an unconcealing of immanent doubt; after all, they had the nerve to try to perform a critique of reason which declares that all reason is corrupt. It seems as if there is nowhere to go from here; reason is inherently self-destructive, so we might as well all give up. This reminds us of how Nietzsche claimed that nihilism was the inevitable result of the main ideas of “the West” playing themselves out. However, before feeling too stumped, we could critically examine one of the underlying assumptions of the West, and of Adorno and Horkheimer: the idea of the individual, the ego, the solus ipse, the monological subject of reason. Adorno and Horkheimer clearly see their destructive instrumental rationality as the tool of individual subjects: “The single distinction [between self and other] between man’s own existence and reality swallows up all others. Without regard for differences, the world is made subject to man… The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships. In face of the unity of such reason the distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance… Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command” (DoE 5). The elevation of the individual subject means identifying all mythical deities with the modern subject, allowing the individual to feel as a monad against the world, a world he can subjugate with instrumental reason. This philosophy of subjectivity permeates all aspects of “the West,” and it is the result of historical developments. “The distance from subject to object, the presupposition of abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by means of the ruled” (DoE 9). Furthermore, the “self which learned about order and subordination through the subjugation of the world soon equated truth in general with classifying thought, without whose fixed distinctions it cannot exist” (DoE 10). Subjectivity was formed out of a context of hierarchy, subjection to arbitrary power, and distance; furthemore, it was formed in a culture of agriculture which saw the natural world as something to subjugate and mold to individual needs through land-clearing and plowing; it was also formed in societies that believed in the concept of “private property,” in ownership, and this ownership is an essential concept for understanding the nature of the possessed and self-possessed “self,” the subject. It is this possessive impulse that defines the worst pathologies of “the West”; capitalist oppression, feudalist oppression, monarchical oppression; solipsism; patriarchy; war; imperialism; nationalism; empire; slavery; colonialism; perceived ownership of Enlightenment and Culture; hubris; and, of course, instrumental rationality. Instrumental rationality is a self-preservationist tool for individuals; however, Horkheimer and Adorno are not necessarily correct about its monopoly. Jurgen Habermas, in his “Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,” argued that they were the victims of cramped optics which rendered them insensible to the existing traces and forces of communicative rationality.
Habermas provides a viable path forward, escaping the subjectivist aporia of Horkheimer and Adorno. He does not deny the pernicious power of instrumental rationality; he simply presents a new model for looking at society which accounts for two kinds of rationality. He acknowledges “the concept of cognitive-instrumental rationality that has, through empiricism, deeply marked the self-understanding of the modern era. It carries with it connotations of successful self-maintenance made possible by informed disposition over, and intelligent adaptation to, conditions of a contingent environment… On the other hand,” he asserts, “if we start from the communicative employment of propositional knowledge in assertions, we make a prior decision for a wider concept of rationality connected with ancient conceptions of logos. This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, and consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld” (TCA I 10). Communicative rationality is the truly novel development of Habermas’ social theory; he sees rationality as inherently intersubjective, a product of interaction between individuals within a common, taken-as-given “lifeworld” horizon. The intersubjective dialectic that occurs in argumentation moves the locutors towards truth together. They determine “the rationality of an expression on its being susceptible of criticism and grounding” (TCA I 9); both parties strive to come to a mutual understanding based on shared reasons grounded in the lifeworld where communicative action occurs. Instrumental rationality based on means and ends is still present in the form of systems theory; the systemic view of society is overlaid onto the lifeworld view. Systems are developed as the material conditions of life further and further decouple from the lifeworld structures that originally aligned with them in kinship societies, and the sacred determines life rhythms and functions. With the linguistification of the sacred comes the rationalization of the lifeworld; larger and larger social structures are built, and more and more demand is placed on communicative action based on argumentation to figure things out. These structures often use deslinguistified steering media to facilitate large instrumental functions, such as money and state power. However, these systems have the same pernicious effects that Weber and the Frankfurters feared from instrumental rationality; while systems come from the lifeworld in service of it, they have their own self-preservation instincts, and their cold rationality leads to a colonization of the lifeworld, which evacuates meaning and communicative sociation from contexts where they are needed. It is an important distinction to note that for Habermas, communicative rationality and the lifeworld are more essential than instrumental rationality and systems. He developed this based on the idea that the inherent telos behind the very existence of language was this intersubjective force of understanding, the desire to be understood; this idea was partially inspired by Durkheim, who postulated the idea of language as the result of the socio-religious force binding humans together. Thus, intersubjective rationality based in understanding is more authentic and essential than its derivative, which is systemic instrumental rationality, a product of modernity which requires counterintuitive sociological study.
There are many interesting differences between Habermas’ vision of intersubjectivity and the previous tradition of instrumental subjectivity. One is their handling of fear. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, “[h]umans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization… Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of fear” (DoE 11). On the other hand, the intersubjective power of recognition and understanding alleviates this fear; the individual subjects fuse with each “other” within the horizon of their communication, overcoming one source of fear; furthermore, through the understanding they reach, they “assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld,” thus overcoming the fear of the “outside.” There is no “outside” of the lifeworld; we are reminded every time we meet someone else “inside,” and use reason to understand that what was once thought of as “outside” was intelligible all along.
Another important difference is in the idea of force. As demonstrated earlier, the reason of Horkheimer and Adorno is pure force, pure power, wielded purposively and dominatingly against nature and man. However, Habermas proposes a radical idea as part of his communicative action: an unforced force. “Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all force— whether it arises from within the process of reaching understanding itself or influences it from the outside— except the force of the better argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that of a cooperative search for the truth)” (TCA 25). Understanding engenders change in disposition within another agent; they take a different action willfully from the inside out, rather than due to an external force applied by instrumental rationality. This idea of an unforced force, of progress towards mutual enlightenment through understanding and the dialectical power of argumentation, which embodies the essence of critical reason, is the main reason why I believe Habermas’ idea of communicative rationality is more valuable than Horkheimer and Adorno’s self-destructive instrumental reason. Habermas revives the very potential for critique from the abyss that Horkheimer and Adorno jumped into with it, resolving the aporia. The interactional nature of intersubjectivity provides the negations necessary to once again believe in the power of language, rather than the language of power; to believe in the potential for emancipatory social change through greater understandings of truth.
Given that these theorists and the ideas they grappled with were all historically conditioned, there are interesting inquiries to be made into the possible relationships of their thought to their social conditions. Discussing Durkheim, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that “[j]ust as the first categories represented the organized tribe and its power over the individual, the entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor (DoE 16). This “social character of intellectual forms” is a broadly applicable concept, if we accept the interconnected and social nature of language as representative of social conditions. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this language is all about domination and power, reflecting the bloody history of the West in the first half of the 20th century, and the totalitarian conditions of fascism that were fresh on their minds. Indeed, they write that “[h]uman beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them… Their ‘in-itself’ becomes ‘for him.’ In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination” (DoE 6). This way of the subject orienting themself to the world, an orientation of estrangement and domination, is clearly unproductive for true enlightenment, and leads to a nihilistic trap. It reminds one of the famous master/slave dialectic of Hegel, in which the very separation of domination between the master and the slave leads both subjects to miss out on the recognition from equals that they truly desire. Man’s relationship to nature and to fellow men can be seen in this way, and this reveals why instrumental rationality is so barren when it comes to other human beings. They can’t intersubjectively merge in mutual understanding because of the power in the way. However, in Jurgen Habermas’ view of communicative reason, two subjects can truly meet and merge intersubjectively because they meet as equals, bound only by the pure power of argument. This leads me to believe that Habermas’ ability to conceive of the primacy of communicative reason has something to do with his historical situation; he came to intellectual maturity, after all, in a liberal democracy.
All of these comparisons have hopefully made it clear why I think communicative reason offers a preferable paradigm to one of limited instrumental reason. One final reason to ground this value claim is based on the concept of “self-preservation.” Self preservation is “the true maxim of all Western civilization, in which the religious and philosophical differences of the bourgeoisie are laid to rest” (DoE 22). It’s the basis of all selfishness, of all subject-centered thinking, and all instrumental rationality. But, as a concept, it is incomplete. Life does contain a self-preservationist will; however, this is not only an individual will. The survival of the species, while not as actively and oftenly called into saliency as individual survival, is the higher dedication of our self-preservationist impulses. The individual wants to survive partially so the species survives; furthermore, if it comes down to it, the male monkey will die so that the mother and child can escape. There is a species-being self-preservation force, a force that is not as obviously expressed in modern society, but does still have rational grounding. The communicative rationality paradigm acknowledges this truth, that we are inherently social before we are individual, whereas the limited instrumental paradigm ignores this. The basic truth is that humans are intersubjective beings, far more deeply than most of us realize, given our egos. But it is something that we realize when we feel that force of understanding, when we’re talking with someone who just gets it, and we feel absolutely energized and recognized and greater together. In an expression of a sincere subjective value-assertion from experience, I would even go so far as to say that Habermas is proved more legitimate than Horkheimer and Adorno regarding the problem of reason every single time you look into someone’s eyes, deeply, right in the pupils, for more than five seconds. This is why I believe in communicative rationality, and I am grateful to Habermas for restoring our potential for critical reason. While criticizing the West, he doesn’t sacrifice its accomplishments. Ultimately, out from hopelessness he gave us a reason to hope, and to keep striving forward towards a better, more wholly enlightened world, which is more important than the choice of any single path.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 