The Myth of Science

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42526072

Is Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment still relevant? It was written in the midst of the second world war and aiming to explain why “humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”[1] Is its prognosis of how “thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth”[2] still accurate?

The Calamity of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment has been heralded as a triumph of reason over faith, where human beings are freed from fearing what they did not understand through knowledge and in that way mastering themselves and the world. However, Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment saw “calamity”[3] in this triumph since the discarded myths of theology has now simply been replaced by a new myth. They posit that newly gained knowledge in the Enlightenment was used to conquer nature, setting the stage for the new mythology of the natural sciences and its reification, technology.

Science and technology (S&T) made possible a new economic system that created a new class of masters, where entrepreneurs and merchants reign alongside kings in a democratic market system. In stark contrast to Aristotle’s notion of the highest form of knowledge being precisely one devoid of utility,[4] in this modern capitalistic age knowledge is not sought for its own sake but for its instrumental usefulness. “Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labour of others, capital,”[5] write Horkheimer and Adorno. However, technology is not the villain in their story but simply a set of tools which man wields to dominate nature and more demonically, other human beings. We are the villains but possibly also the heroes of their tale.

In this pursuit of scientific knowledge, “there shall be neither mystery nor any desire to reveal mystery,”[6] writes Horkheimer and Adorno. The use of reason to lessen our fears through knowledge is now focused squarely on industrial efficiency and profit to feed the mill of capitalism. “For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion,”[7] leading us to lose sight of what is important; “On their way towards modern science, human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability,”[8] they write. Objectivity is considered a merit of science but facts in themselves do not convey value and meaning.[9] Human subjectivity and judgement is what imparts value and meaning to facts. As a fact, water boiling at 100˚C is neither good nor bad but what makes it good or bad is an agent deciding whether to scald his enemies or to cook for them.

However, subjectivity is an enemy of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno elaborates: “Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the project of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth,”[10] and myth is what Enlightenment is combating. “Enlightenment is totalitarian”[11] because everything has to be reducible to a unity; “its ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows [… where] the multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter.”[12] According to such enlightenment thinking, numbers capture all relations, mathematizing them into equations. Numbers make “dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities,”[13] such as monetary value to represent the value of things, an IQ score as intelligence or performance metrics as the worth of an employee. What cannot be measured is deemed irrelevant – in the eternal words of Wilde, everyone now knows the “price of everything and the value of nothing.”[14]

Enlightenment according to Horkheimer and Adorno is totalising because “nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear.”[15] In this way, Enlightenment creates its own myths, where anything not grasped by science is outside and hence considered mythical and illusory. Contrary to this, Horkheimer and Adorno sees a Hegelian dialectic where Enlightenment is the antithesis to the thesis of myth, with Enlightenment retaining elements of myth, the myth of the dogma of science as the revealer of all truths. This needs sublation if humanity is to progress.

They lament but also hint at a solution:



“To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning – this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned.”[16]



They point out the irony that in us trying to understand the world by mathematising phenomena into spatio-temporal relationships, we instead retard our ability to understand things in themselves. We have reduced our understanding to “mere tautology”[17] where we may acknowledge the existence of things but our knowing is unable to go beyond repeating this validation to penetrate to its deeper social, historical and human meaning. Through this process of scientific reduction and mathematization, “the more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape.” For Horkheimer and Adorno, to believe in myth is to believe blindly in what myth tells us about the world whether this myth is superstitious or scientific. To think that a scientific formula can capture essential relationships is a kind of blindness. To be satisfied by such abstractions or simplifications is to give up hope of grasping the meaning of things.

In this way, we estranged ourselves from the things of the world since we are unable to see them as things ‘in themselves’ but only as ‘for us.’[18] This estrangement extends to other people since they are also beings in the world. “The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardised behaviour on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, success or failures,”[19] observes Horkheimer and Adorno. Is a single death a tragedy while a million deaths merely a statistic?[20] The fact, the statistic, masks what must feel like bottomless pits of grief for those mourning their dead.



The Calamity of Scientism

Technological advancement has been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution. Mankind entered the Space Age when Sputnik reached orbit in 1957. This was shortly followed by the Information Age with the advent of the personal computer in the 1970s. Today, armies of office workers are bent over at their desks working on their computers. Even when they get up, they bury their faces in their mobile communication devices. Tablets have become the new pacifiers as children sit entranced staring into them at restaurants so that the parents are able to have a peaceful meal. ‘Parental control,’ previously comprised of noisy scolding, nagging and even hitting, has been reinvented as a setting on these devices.

Parental guidance now is characterised by its lack thereof, with parental control more like a loss of control. This loss of control extends to adult life. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in 1944 that “the flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.”[21] I doubt they could have realised how prescient they were, where almost anything people want to find out is available literally at their fingertips on their smartphones, with games so immersive that they ‘augment’ reality. Because information is easy, people have become unused to remembering things. Opinions and information posing as facts proliferate on the Internet and without examining them critically, one might be misled, evidenced by the viral spreading of fake news.

Scientists have become the high priest of our age. In America, trust in scientists exceed trust in the military, school principals, religious leaders, news media, business leaders and elected officials, according to a 2019 survey by Pew Research. Six-in-ten Americans think scientists should “play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues”[22] which if brought to its logical extreme would be a technocracy or what Horkheimer and Adorno term the administered world. The covid-19 crisis has turned the spotlight on medical science, with a public expectation that S&T will provide the solution. As I write, the world is in lockdown awaiting a vaccine and a cure, with people willing to give up their privacy to location-monitoring smartphone apps in the hope that it helps slow the infection. Pervasive camera surveillance, previously suspect is now judged useful in contact-tracing. Virologists have become the most recognised face on TV as we watch them first tell us not to wear masks and then to wear masks.[23] Science seems to have all the answers, right down to the decimal point of how far one needs to be socially-distanced from another.[24]

In the midst of these scientific efforts, we may miss the bigger issue: the capitalistic drive to accumulate wealth and flaunt it is what created Wuhan’s wildlife market where the virus originated in the first place. Eating exotic creatures is a status symbol in China. To fulfil this demand in a cost-efficient way, as many animals as possible are cramped into cages from as many stores as possible, with as many patrons as possible all under one giant smelly roof. Such tight conditions allow the virus to emerge. But even before this episode, we have seen such infections before, with SARS and bird-flu.[25] Instead of recognising the root of the problem, that we have an economic system that undermines humanity, governments worldwide have pumped trillions of dollars into their economies to keep them going,[26] with accelerated scientific research programmes focused on tackling the symptoms of the crisis, the virus, but not the disease itself, capitalism.

The public, broadly, is on board with these efforts as there is a general expectation that science will solve the problem since it represents universal and eternal truths, when in fact the history of science provides ample cases of widely accepted but debunked theories. Hughes sums up the problem with the scientistic position:



“Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not [...] Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole.”[27]



Science Envy

The power of science to explain phenomena systematically and create novel technological artefacts has led to ‘science envy’ from other academic disciplines. Modern philosophy’s flirtation with the scientific method saw the logical positivists aspiring to create a “scientific philosophy purged of the endless controversies of traditional metaphysics.”[28] The movement collapsed from its own internal contradictions though its analytical spirit remains. This same desire for rigour and science envy have spread through the other humanities and the social sciences, some examples being the mathematization of economics, the widespread use of statistical methods in the social sciences and the addition of the word ‘science’ to the name of disciplines such as political science, library science and social science. Even theology suffers from science envy.[29]

The world of business in many ways represents the apogee of scientification outside of the natural sciences, where what can be measured is measured and what cannot be measured is ignored. The ‘science’ of business management began with Taylor’s ‘scientific’ principles to optimise planning, coordination and control to maximise efficiency and output.[30] According to Gramsci, scientific management will herald a Marxian nightmare of “the most sophisticated mode of capitalist domination in which the worker would be totally subordinated to machine specialisation and the cult of efficiency.”[31]



The Threat to Action

Arendt distinguishes three fundamental human activities: labour where we produce what is needed to satisfy our biological needs, work when we build things for instrumental purposes and action where we are seen and heard by others, to mutually recognise and be recognised by one another and to win “immortal fame.”[32] Labour may fill our stomachs and work can build a house but both are insufficient to create a home shared by humanity. She explains:



“The man-made world of things, the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men, […] only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use. […] In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for speech and actions, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature […]”[33]



Arendt asserts that to be able to act in such a way requires freedom and plurality, since we need the capacity to start something new and surprising, and we need a plurality of actors who have differing perspectives so that the novel can emerge. In a world where man is reduced to things with standardised behaviours, predictable and homogenous agents will make action unnecessary, hence crippling our joint humanity. Therefore, we need to be wary of the siren-call of Enlightenment. Because the scientistic attitude posits that truth can only be found in science, it will stifle the plurality of social, historical and human meaning that only man is able to give to facts to enliven them.



Conclusion: Sapere Aude

To understand this dialectic of enlightenment, we need to circle back to ask: what is Enlightenment? “Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity,” according to Kant, who was looking back at the Age of Enlightenment. “Sapere aude![34] Have the courage to use your own understanding!”[35] he implores. Enlightenment marks the triumph of reason over superstition with science being the leading light of knowledge, but when science becomes a scientistic dogma, it threatens the sphere of action, crippling our search for meaning and our humanity.

Horkheimer and Adorno writes: “Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend.”[36] They declare that there is a “necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed.”[37] We need the courage to challenge the dogma of scientism and overthrow this myth of science which Enlightenment has created. We need to think critically, questioning even what seems to be solid ground such as the enterprise of science, without falling prey to complete scepticism which will then be yet another dogma.



Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by William David Ross. Oxford: Clarendon, 1970.

Friedman, Michael. “Logical Positivism.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2016. doi: 10.4324/9780415249126-Q061-1.

Funk, Cary, Meg Hefferon, Brian Kennedy, and Courtney Johnson. “Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts.” Pew Research Centre Science & Society, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mistrust-in-americans-views-of-scientific-experts/.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Concept of Enlightenment.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 1–34. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Horowitz, Julia. “The Bill for Saving the World Economy Is $7 Trillion and Rising.” CNN, March 27, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/26/economy/global-economy-coronavirus-bailout/index.html.

Hughes, Aaron W. “Science Envy in Theories of Religion.” In Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 22:293–303, 2010. doi: 10.1163/157006810X531085.

Kant, Immanuel. “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Political Writings, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Taska, Lucy. “Scientific Management.” In The Oxford Handbook of Management, 2017. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198708612.013.2.

Westcott, Ben, and Shawn Deng. “China Has Banned Eating Wild Animals after the Coronavirus Outbreak. Ending the Trade Will Be Hard.” CNN, March 6, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildlife-consumption-ban-intl-hnk/index.html.

Wetsman, Nicole. “Masks May Be Good, but the Messaging around Them Has Been Very Bad.” The Verge, April 3, 2020. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206728/cloth-face-masks-white-house-coronavirus-covid-cdc-messaging.

Wilde, Oscar. “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” In The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. London: Penguin, 1940.




[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xiv.


[2] Ibid., xvi.


[3] Ibid., 1.


[4] Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. William David Ross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), A sec. 2.


[5] Horkheimer and Adorno, “Concept of Enlightenment,” 2.


[6] Ibid.


[7] Ibid., 3.


[8] Ibid.


[9] Even what can be considered facts have been questioned since facts are theory-laden and not devoid of theory. See Okasha, Samir. Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 32.


[10] Horkheimer and Adorno, “Concept of Enlightenment,” 4.


[11] Ibid.


[12] Ibid.


[13] Ibid.


[14] Oscar Wilde, “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (London: Penguin, 1940), Act 3.


[15] Horkheimer and Adorno, “Concept of Enlightenment,” 11.


[16] Ibid., 20.


[17] Ibid.


[18] Ibid., 6.


[19] Ibid., 21.


[20] This idea is often attributed to Stalin.


[21] Horkheimer and Adorno, “Concept of Enlightenment,” xvii.


[22] Cary Funk et al., “Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts,” Pew Research Centre Science & Society, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mistrust-in-americans-views-of-scientific-experts/.


[23] Nicole Wetsman, “Masks May Be Good, but the Messaging around Them Has Been Very Bad,” The Verge, April 3, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/3/21206728/cloth-face-masks-white-house-coronavirus-covid-cdc-messaging.


[24] 1.5 meters


[25] Ben Westcott and Shawn Deng, “China Has Banned Eating Wild Animals after the Coronavirus Outbreak. Ending the Trade Will Be Hard,” CNN, March 6, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildlife-consumption-ban-intl-hnk/index.html.


[26] Julia Horowitz, “The Bill for Saving the World Economy Is $7 Trillion and Rising,” CNN, March 27, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/26/economy/global-economy-coronavirus-bailout/index.html. According to the article, “the total includes government spending, loan guarantees and tax breaks, as well as money printing by central banks to buy assets such as bonds and stock funds,” that is, mostly capitalistic activities.


[27] Horkheimer and Adorno, “Concept of Enlightenment,” 50.


[28] Michael Friedman, “Logical Positivism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), doi: 10.4324/9780415249126-Q061-1.


[29] Aaron W. Hughes, “Science Envy in Theories of Religion,” in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 22, 2010, 293–303, doi: 10.1163/157006810X531085.


[30] Lucy Taska, “Scientific Management,” in The Oxford Handbook of Management, 2017, 6, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198708612.013.2.


[31] Ibid., 3.


[32] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 193.


[33] Ibid. 173–74.


[34] Translates as “dare to be wise.”


[35] Immanuel Kant, “Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.


[36] Horkheimer and Adorno, “Concept of Enlightenment,” xi.


[37] Ibid., xvii.