Against disenchantment

Against disenchantment

Jason Josephson Storm

The single most important work produced by the Frankfurt School was the book that Horkheimer and Adorno co-authored, the monumental Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), an attempt to diagnose the maladies of modernity by understanding how modernity could have produced the horrors of fascism and Stalinism alike.

To risk a broad overview for the uninitiated, Horkheimer and Adorno construct their text around the unfolding dialectical opposition between ‘enlightenment’ (Aufklärung) and ‘myth’ (Mythos). The roots of this antagonism can be found in a dilemma that could as easily be psychological as historical. Humans, who see nature as outside of ourselves, are presented with a choice: either we can elect to submit to a mysterious, mythological world full of magic and frighteningly capricious spirits; or we can elect to subdue nature. By choosing the second option and turning nature into an object to control, humanity was caught in its own trap. Chasing the domination of nature, humans began to dominate each other. Rather than being liberated into a new kind of autonomy as they had hoped, people were instead turned into objects or, more properly, into abstractions, mere numbers and statistics, leading to a new backlash of irrational forces. As Horkheimer and Adorno summarised it, ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’. The objectification of nature had directly led toward the objectification of humanity; the concentration camps and Gulag followed.

Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate ‘science’ from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living philosopher of science, has shown, ‘there are no epistemic features which all and only the disciplines we accept as “scientific” share in common’ and, moreover there is no unitary scientific method. Thus, the line between science and pseudoscience is harder to maintain a priori than most of us would like. Space prohibits a full elaboration, but suffice it to say that, without a scientific mode of rationality or monolithic method, it is impossible to claim that ‘science’ as a whole is necessarily disenchanting.

But neither being a magician or a disenchanter is necessarily redemptive. Power – both liberating and dominating, potentia and potestas – can be actualised by way of enchantment or disenchantment. Hegemonic ideologies cloak themselves in both. There have been both empires of reason and empires of magic. There have been attempts to justify genocides as promoting or attacking enlightenment or as promoting or attacking myth. Thinking in terms of myth – and, further, pursuing it; making a programme of either re-enchantment or mythopoesis – is distorting. And yet thinking in terms of disenchantment – pursuing it, fetishising the real, and aggressively demythologising – is also distorting. Neither enchantment nor disenchantment on their own can be emancipatory.

And yet thinking in terms of disenchantment – pursuing it, fetishising the real, and aggressively demythologising – is also distorting.

Seems to me that is the phase we have witnessed with the rise of scientism.