CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

case, the development of rational abilities requires the repression of instincts driven by
the pleasure principle so that the ego’s activities of reality-testing can direct practical
activity in a way that ensures the survival of the self. So, the development of rationality
and civilization necessitated a concomitant increase in the repression of instinctual drives.
Rationality and civilization thus developed in an antagonistic relation of domination
against the instincts, which constitute the “internal nature” of the self.
The problem according to Horkheimer and Adorno is that the mechanisms of
repression have gone far beyond their necessity to ensure survival and, as they grow ever
more demanding of self-renunciation in the modern capitalist order, they are actually
turning against the goal for which they developed. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s view,
the degree of repression enforced in modernity is no longer necessary for the sake of
survival, but repression nonetheless continues to grow, seemingly for its own sake. 143
Specifically, the repression demanded of individuals in advanced capitalist societies is
neither necessary for survival nor conducive to happiness but rather seems aimed at the
reproduction of the capitalist structure for its sake alone. Thus, the very process that
initially led to the development of rationality and aided humanity’s survival now enforces
143 Horkheimer explains the point most clearly in Eclipse of Reason—a book that he wrote around
the same time as he co-authored Dialektik der Aufklärung with Adorno, and which was strongly influenced
by ideas that they shared. See Eclipse of Reason (New York and London: Continuum, 1974), 64:
Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the
subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in
himself. Domination becomes ‘internalized’ for domination’s sake. What is usually indicated as a
goal—the happiness of the individual, health, and wealth—gains its significance exclusively from
its functional potentiality. These terms designate favorable conditions for intellectual and material
production. Therefore self-renunciation of the individual in industrialist society has no goal
transcending industrialist society. Such abnegation brings about rationality with reference to means
and irrationality with reference to human existence. Society and its institutions, no less than the
individual himself, bear the mark of this discrepancy. Since the subjugation of nature, in and
outside of man, goes on without a meaningful motive, nature is not really transcended or reconciled
but merely repressed.
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