The Promise of Enlightenment and the Incalculability of Freedom: A Consideration of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critique of Enlightenment in Relation to Ratzinger’s Notion of Freedom

In contemporary minds, reason and freedom distinguish the modern period from its predecessors.¹ The modern Enlightenment’s development of reason is credited with the West’s technological advancement, and, the associated material progress has established the technological-scientific era as superior to prior periods of thought. Likewise, the Enlightenment’s development of the idea of freedom as the freedom of the individual is understood to be progress as against the perceived constraints of what came before. Notwithstanding the positive light in which the Enlightenment’s notions of reason and freedom are viewed today, significant problems and contradictions with these notions are evident. This article seeks to offer some lines of thought on elements of the ambiguous outcomes of Enlightenment thought on reason and freedom and on how the promise of the Enlightenment can become a lived experience. I do so through a consideration of the critique of Enlightenment reason offered by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that holds that thought contracted to simply a tool that systemizes what is immediately to hand. This critique is then evaluated in the light of Joseph Ratzinger’s (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s) notion of freedom and his assertion that freedom, as revealed through God’s self-Revelation in Jesus Christ, is the structural form of all being. Needless to say, only a limited consideration of their respective thought can be under taken here, which cannot do full justice to the breadth of the arguments made. The analysis demonstrates that the additional element of love—God’s self-Revelation—shows us a part of reality not available through philosophical reflection and orients reason and freedom away from power to the truly human: love means freedom truly is freedom and not ultimately power.

Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: Thought in Relation to Pragmatism and Truth

Enlightenment Promise and Outcome

In Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno set out to explain why humanity is engaged in a new kind of barbarism in contradiction to the Enlightenment promise of delivering, through the advancement of thought, “a truly human state.”² The paradox of the outcome of Enlightenment thinking, as Horkheimer and Adorno see it, is that while it enables humanity to provide for itself in a manner never before achieved, at the same time “the individual is entirely nullified” by the overwhelming nature of the same economic forces that both provide for it and that humanity in fact serves. A more just world is made possible by the same forces that place power over the many in the hands of the very few. Progress and regress occur in parallel. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Jewish heritage meant that they could not ignore the destructive element of Enlightenment thought no matter how blinding the material progress produced.³ The fragility Horkheimer and Adorno identified within modern enlightenment is that technologically advanced, educated societies, which viewed themselves as enlightened, were nonetheless vulnerable to and did fall “under the spell” of despots and their incomprehensible senselessness.⁴

Importantly, Horkheimer and Adorno did not give up on the promise of the Enlightenment. Rather, they sought instead to identify how the hope can be fulfilled. A positive concept of enlightenment was their ultimate goal. The promise of the Enlightenment, based on the advancement in thought, is, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, on the one hand to free humanity from fear of the unknown, from myth and fantasy, and on the other hand to make humanity masters of nature. To achieve the fullness of the promise of Enlightenment thought patterns, they sought to heal its blindness to its own actions. That healing required the untying of the knots created by Enlightenment pursuit of the mastery and domination of nature which, they argued, had received its high point with Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche: with them, Horkheimer and Adorno contend, the subjugation of everything natural to the subject culminates in the subject’s “domination of what is blindly objective and natural.”^5...