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

6.1 The dialectic of enlightenment and nature—a negative teleology?
There is no doubt that the main goal of Dialektik der Aufklärung is to find an
explanation for the “neue Art von Barbarei” [the new form of barbarism] that
characterized the historical events of the first half of the twentieth century and that
arguably has characterized history since. 255 It is also beyond question that, for
Horkheimer and Adorno, an adequate explanation must not take this barbarism to be a
mere accidental aberration, but must rather explain how elements internal to
enlightenment developed to the current state of crisis. In this regard, Horkheimer and
Adorno fully endorse Benjamin’s statement in the seventh of his “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” that “Das Staunen darüber, daß die Dinge, die wir erleben, im
zwanzigsten Jahrhundert ‚noch’ möglich sind, ist kein philosophisches. Es steht nicht am
Anfang einer Erkenntnis, es sei denn der, daß die Vorstellung von Geschichte, aus der es
stammt, nicht zu halten ist.” 256 The view that traces Western civilization’s development
along a narrative of increasing progress and rationality is refuted by the violence,
irrationality, and sheer scale of destruction of the last century, and an explanation of the
255 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 16: “Was wir uns vorgesetzt
hatten, war tatsächlich nicht weniger als die Erkenntnis, warum die Menschheit, anstatt in einen wahrhaft
menschlichen Zustand einzutreten, in eine neue Art von Barbarei versinkt.” English translation by Edmund
Jephcott in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xiv: “What we had set
out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking
into a new kind of barbarism.”
256 Benjamin, Walter, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Gesammelte Werke II (Frankfurt am
Main: Zweitausendeins, 2011), 960. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations
(New York: Schocken Books,1969), thesis VII, p. 257: “The current amazement that the things we are
experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the
beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is
untenable.”
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