Myth and Myth Criticism following the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Abstract

Until the publication of the Dialectic of Enlightenment it was possible to place the controversy regarding myth in the framework of the general rivalry between enlightenment and rationalism on the one hand and Romanticism on the other. However, Horkheimer and Adorno's joint work rendered this controversy irrelevant and anachronistic. This essay presents this theoretical shift by analyzing the conceptual problems it raises. The basic question addressed is whether in our poststrucuralist and postmodernist age the distinction between critical and mythical thought is still possible and appropriate. I believe that our answer to this question has fundamental significance for our personal and public life, and as such also determines the role and meaning of our current philosophical discourse.

Notes

Notes

1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969), 10–11; Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 4–5; Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (London: Macmillan Press, 1990), 1–2, 8–10; Dorina Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12. The concept of enlightenment is quite controversial. According to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and within the framework of the philosophical discussion which developed following its publication, enlightenment refers to the homogeneous movement that is identified with a distinctive set of ideas and stances (rationalism, criticism, progress, social and political involvement, etc.). However, nowadays many scholars argue that as a historical and social phenomenon Enlightenment was heterogeneous and thus its characterization by the prevailing generalizations is simplistic and doomed to overlook its complexity. Be that as it may, the present essay is focused on the Dialectic of Enlightenment's criticism of the affinity of enlightenment on the one hand and instrumental reason and conceptual thought on the other. The essay does not discuss enlightenment as a historical movement but as a particular philosophical and political ideal.

2. Philiph Stambovsky, Myth and the Limits of Reason (Dallas, TX: University Press of America, 2004), 2–3, 7, 11; William G. Dotty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (London: The University of Alabama Press, 2000), 11; Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 49–50; Milton Scarborough, Myth and Modernity, Postcritical Reflections (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 13, 106; Porter, The Enlightenment, 1–5, 11, 70–71, 75; Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946), 82–83.

3. Edward Bennet Taylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper, 1958); James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1922); William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series, The Fundamental Institutions (Edinburgh: Adam and C. Black, 1899); Jane Harrison, Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921); Max F. Muller, Comparative Mythology (New York: Arno Press, 1977).

4. Friedrich W. J. von Schelling; Einlietungin die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Saemmtliche Werke (Stutgart: J. Verlag, 1856); Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit (Riga: J. F. Hartknoch, 1786–92); Carl Gustav Jung, The Psychology of the Unconsciousness: A Study of the Transformation and Symbols of Libido, A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1916); Rudolf Bultmann: “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald (London: SPCK, 1953).

5. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 38–43, 45, 67, 189–90, 199–207; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 31–36, 38–39, 60, 180–81, 189–97; Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 320; Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. W. Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 9, 60, 64; J. Bernstein, “Art against Enlightenment: Adorno's Critique of Habermas,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. A. Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), 52.

6. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 17–18, 32–34, 74–76; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11–12, 26–28, 67–68.

7. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 31, 37, 40, 65, 66, 77, 81; The Differend, Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 74, 75; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965); Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 40–42, 47.

8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 196; here I don’t use Cumming's English translation as I prefer Michael Cahn's translation in “Subversive Mimesis: Theodore W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique,” in Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Mihai Spariosu (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamin's Publishing Co., 1984), vol. 1, 31.

9. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 138; Cahn, “Subversive Mimesis,” 34.

10. Cahn, “Subversive Mimesis,” 35, 45.

11. Cahn, “Subversive Mimesis,” 33–34.

12. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 20, 37–38; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 14, 31.

13. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984–1987), 382, 384, 390.

14. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1.383–85, 389; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 119; “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (1982): 22, 28–29.

15. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity, 7; Seyla Benhabib, “Critical Theory and Postmodernism: On the Interplay of Ethics, Aesthetics, and Utopia in Critical Theory,” in Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. D. M. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 333; Bernstein, “Art against Enlightenment: Adorno's Critique of Habermas,” 53, 55, 65.

16. Peter Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 15–16; Finn Bowring, “A Lifeworld without a Subject: Habermas and the Pathologies of Modernity,” Telos 106 (1966): 77–78; Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norms and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 329.

17. Stephen K. White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 90–91.

18. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.220.

19. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975), 3–4; The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984–87), 117; Outhwaite, Habermas, 64, 92; Benhabib, Critique, Norms and Utopia, 230, 231.

20. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2.27ff; Outhwaite, Habermas, 92; Benhabib, Critique, Norms and Utopia, 231.

21. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.61–72, 141, 186ff, 198, 340, 399; 2.125–6, 145–6, 153–4, 169; The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 127, 129; “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” 18, 20; Outhwaite, Habermas, 87, 88; White, The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas, 97–99.

22. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, eds., Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 258; Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.386, 387, 389, 390, 399; Bowring, “A Lifeworld without a Subject,” 80.

23. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.69–70, 86, 94–95, 286.

24. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.337,396–98; 2.117–18, 141, 330; “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” 30.

25. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.389, 390.

26. Agnes Heller, “Habermas and Marxism,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 32–41; Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 49–54.

27. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147–49.

28. Eric Csapo, Theories of Mythology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 292–93.

29. Ibid., 316.

30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, 17–18; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11–12.

31. Csapo, Theories of Mythology, 278–79; Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 147–49.

32. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), 9–10, 191–247.

33. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1. 44–46; Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 126; Dotty, Mythography, 11, 29, 32, 68–69; Hatab, Myth and Philosophy, 8, 10, 12, 42–44; Scarborough, Myth and Modernity, 109; Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 43–48; Stambovsky, Myth and the Limits of Reason, 4–9, 45; Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live by (London: Routledge, 2003), 1, 4–5.

34. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1.382–83.