Reason and Self-Reflection in Dialectic of Enlightenment

This essay addresses two influential interpretations of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Habermas’s charge of ‘performative contradiction’ is shown to rely on a particular understanding of the exercise of reason. The alternative interpretation of Dialectic as a disclosive critique by Honneth and others avoids the charge of self-contradiction but renders obscure first, how exactly it fulfills Horkheimer and Adorno’s repeated injunction that reason must undergo “self-reflection,” and second – as Honneth acknowledges – how the results of disclosive critique are to be expressed in rational judgments, truth claims, and so on. Drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between two praxis-oriented forms of thought, the essay enriches the notion of rational activity beyond Habermas’s characterization and suggests, in answer to Honneth, how we can speak logically about our rational activity as way of being that results from disclosive critique.

Duke Scholars

Author Henry Pickford German Studies