“Means and Ends” (Eclipse of Reason)

Horkheimer never refers to the man by name, but does refer to projects of resuscitating medieval ontologies that have no place under modern conditions, which is to say: we understand what he is speaking about, but we deny its validity or relevance, and we want no part of it; we conjure it away. The shift of such concerns onto art facilitates a recognition of the origins of the West in religious doing and doings while maintaining the separate sphere of today as distinct from the past, into which it could otherwise be collapsed. Reference to art as autonomous from religion is a recapitulation of the Kantian theme of human autonomy from conditioning by outer circumstances, and in both cases, there is a connotation of liberation from constraint that is at issue, a certain experience of freedom. This is an erotically self-destructive escapism, a will to be free of the body consummated in spasmodic joy. (The moment of conception is of one’s own gravediggers.) Horkheimer wants to say that the Platonic framework of mind on top is a recapitulation of the social and economic hierarchy of his time and place, and this bodilessness on which mind is conditioned is of course integrated into the experience of freedom that is at issue for him and the more celebrated Adorno. The critique is, in a way, the will to be liberated of the guilt in which it is implicated by virtue of the conditions of its own possibility, compounded by its class betrayal. It bites the hand of the social conditions that feed it, and wants moreover to be admired by those in whose name it does so, whom it doubts equal to the task of adequately understanding its sacrifice of their blissful ignorance.