Forms of rationality

The path from Marx’s theories of commodity fetishism and alienation through Lukács’s theory of reification to the Frankfurt School’s critique of domination is a winding one but it must be followed to understand the fate of the philosophy of praxis. Marx’s theories of commodity fetishism and alienation depend on each other in important ways. They intersect in the concept of wage labor, the transformation of work into a market good. This transformation awaits the generalization of commodity exchange that is sharply restricted in precapitalist societies to exclude most land and labor. The wage system sets in motion the process leading to the deskilling and mechanization of labor. Through that process capitalism develops a technology uniquely suited to its requirements. That technology reduces the worker to an appendage of the machine.

I have shown earlier that Lukács’s metacritique of reified rationality invokes both components of Marx’s theory. He argues that the commodity form is the model of all forms of subjectivity and objectivity in capitalist society, and also claims that the relation of the worker to the machine realizes that form in the technical subject–object relation. Accordingly, reified rationality has two aspects: the quantitative or formal laws under which things are grasped, and the reduction of the subject of action to a manipulator of things in accordance with those laws. Each aspect derives from one or the other component of Marx’s theory, abstraction from commodity fetishism and technical subjectivity from alienation. Lukács’s metacritique of reified rationality grounds a dialectical alternative.

Under the influence of Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, the philosophers of the Frankfurt School develop a similar conception of dialectics. However, their emphasis is different. Marx and Lukács were primarily interested in the domination of human beings by the capitalist system. But neither realized that insofar as the dominated human being is reduced to a natural object, all of nature is implicated in the social critique. This is the chiasmus through which the Frankfurt School transforms Marxism into a critique of the domination of nature. Its reformulation of Marxism thus goes beyond the critique of capitalism to take in the very concept of progress, understood as the “conquest of nature.”

There are some subtle and some not-so-subtle differences in the formulations of this theme in the Frankfurt School. This is not an obstacle to broad-brush treatments, but it makes for difficulties in characterizing its position with precision. To begin, here is a sketch of some of the commonalities based primarily on Horkheimer’s early book, Eclipse of Reason.⁷

Horkheimer’s metacritique of rationality resembles Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality. Reason is not “pure” but is always socially embedded in one of two ways. Substantive rationality, which Horkheimer calls “objective reason,” incorporates a goal in its structure. It is not merely a means but also includes an “objectively” valid end. At the origin, that end is simple self-preservation. Later, religion and culture supply premodern societies with a variety of such ends, but their claims are no longer convincing. In modern society rational means are value-free. All that remains to guide their application is the struggle for existence, which eliminates all restraint on competition and on the exploitation of nature. And since human beings are natural beings, they, too, fall victim to their own technology. Horkheimer introduces the concept of “subjective reason” to describe the instrumental rationality of a system of pure means, without a substantive end beyond the increase in its own power and range.

Modernity is characterized by the complete triumph of subjective rationality and the consequent “catastrophe of Enlightenment,” the disappointed hope in reason. The conflicts of human beings and societies pursuing their individual and national self-preservation with the tools of modern technology now threaten their survival as much as raw nature ever did. Furthermore, technical progress goes along with increasing psychological repression. Control of inner nature is the condition of effective control of outer nature. Under the conditions of class society both forms of control overshoot their mark, producing individual and social pathologies.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno protest the untrammeled pursuit of technical power, which they regard as the irrational core of rationalism.

In class history, the enmity of the self to sacrifice implied a sacrifice of the self, inasmuch as it was paid for by a denial of nature in man for the sake of domination over non-human nature and over other men. This very denial, the nucleus of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of a proliferating mythic irrationality: with the denial of nature in man not merely the telos of outward control of nature but the telos of man’s own life is distorted and befogged. As soon as man discards his awareness that he himself is nature, all the aims for which he keeps himself alive—social progress, the intensification of all his material and spiritual powers, even consciousness itself—are nullified, and the enthronement of the means as an end, which under late capitalism is tantamount to open insanity, is already perceptible in the prehistory of subjectivity.⁸

Horkheimer argues that only a generalization of the will to self-preservation can save humanity from self-destruction. This requires a reflective recovery of the original meaning and purpose of rationality. Reason is not truly value-free but has always included a reference to self-preservation that it can now achieve only as a human goal. Control of the natural world must be guided by respect for human nature and greater reliance on the intrinsically life-affirming aspects of natural growth.

Dialectic of Enlightenment develops this argument. The solution the authors propose is obscurely hinted at in scattered passages throughout the book. In one such passage, they remark: “By virtue of this mindfulness [Eingedenken] of nature in the subject, in whose fulfillment the acknowledged truth of all culture lies hidden, enlightenment is universally opposed to domination.”⁹ And they go on to suggest that domination can only be dissolved when it is recognized as “unreconciled nature.”¹⁰ This unreconciled nature cannot be conquered and absorbed but must be accepted through a process of reflection. It is such reflective acceptance that really challenges power. “Dominant practice and its inescapable alternatives are not threatened by nature, which tends rather to coincide with them, but by the fact that nature is remembered [erinnert]” ¹¹