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

current state of things demands a re-examination of the history of enlightenment
civilization.
As we have seen in chapter 5, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that enlightenment
always contained the possibility of, and tendencies toward, its own regression into
barbarism. These tendencies became more and more radicalized with the advancement of
enlightenment as an ever-growing domination of nature. Horkheimer and Adorno
interpret the advancement of enlightenment as a descent into pathology through various
stages beginning with the breakdown of primary mimesis in animism, proceeding through
a gradual distancing from nature in mythology, and culminating with the sharp paranoid
separation of mind from nature that in their view characterizes the present. The question
of how enlightenment descended into “the new barbarism” is thus answered by the
authors of Dialektik der Aufklärung through an interpretation of Western civilization in
terms of a pathological development culminating in paranoia.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s answer to the problem of why enlightenment failed and
became pathological has often and rightly been interpreted as marking a turn in the
tradition of critical theory from the view that the social ills of modern society are
grounded in the structure of capitalism alone to the view that the wider context of
society’s relation to nature must be taken into account too. However, this change has
often been misinterpreted as replacing the critique of capitalism with a one-sided account
of a single root-problem to be found in the dialectic of civilization and nature. Rolf
Wiggerhaus, for instance, says that the project of the dialectic of enlightenment assumed
that it was possible to show that the contemporary cultural crisis was a crisis of
the fundamental principle of all human culture up till then, and that this
fundamental principle was sovereignty over nature. The thesis lying behind this
was that the decisive event in the history of human culture was not the
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