Avoiding "embarrassment": aesthetic reason and aporetic critique in dialectic of enlightenment *.

Polity, July, 2005 by Schoolman, Morton

Introduction

At the root of Jurgen Habermas's objections to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's critique of enlightenment lies his Weberian conception of the development of Western reason through societal rationalization. As Habermas argues in The Theory of Communicative Action, "the thesis developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment"

   does not direct our attention to the path that is nearest at hand, a 
   path which leads through the inner logics of the different complexes 
   of rationality and through processes of rationalization divided up 
   according to aspects of validity, and which suggests a unity of 
   rationality beneath the husk of an everyday practice that has been 
   simultaneously rationalized and reified. (1) 

Horkheimer and...

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