The Enlightenment and Its Social and Ideological Consequences Worldwide Essay Example for Free

The Enlightenment and Its Social and Ideological Consequences Worldwide Essay The Enlightenment in Europe, roughly from 1600 to the French Revolution in 1789, was an era that stressed, most of all, the rationalistic basis of science, and its application to all element of life. This essay argues that much of this rhetoric, such as from Bacon or Kant, is a mystification, and that the basic structure of the Enlightenment was about the rationalization of power and domination. This paper will begin its discussion on the Enlightenment with Immanuel Kant’s â€Å"What is Enlightenment? † move to the critique of this view from Adorno and Horkheimer, and see the more empirical approach of the Enlightenment worldwide through an analysis of some recent works on colonialism and the post-colonial ideology. Immanuel Kant wrote a very short piece on â€Å"What is Enlightenment? † in 1784. It is the chief work in this mystification. This is a piece that is easily accessible for the laymen–rare for Kant–and lays out the basic concepts of Enlightenment in the â€Å"freeing† of the mind from the shackles of tradition and religion. Kant holds that such shackles are created by the self from the motivation of laziness or complacency. It is easier to accept conventional truths than to struggle to find one’s own. Kant then holds that moral virtue, particularly courage, is necessary for true Enlightenment, since that courage is needed to go against received opinion. The truly enlightened individual needs to think for himself, develop their own conclusions, and hence, take nothing from authority. This movement is little more than a move from immaturity to adulthood; from the infantile life of the middle ages to the adult life of modern times. The formal properties of this motion is the release of the understanding from the prison of authority and received opinion. Hence, from this view of Kant, the Enlightenment and its scientific consequences have been associated with the rhetoric of liberation. The Enlightenment defines itself in the negative terms of the destruction of feudal relations based on religion and received opinion. The positive side (derive largely from Bacon and Descartes) is based on the concept that the release of the understanding can be done through the rigorous application of scientific methods to all areas of life, reaching an era of complete and true knowledge based on rational methods and principles. Hence, from Kant, science and its resultant technology is seen as liberation, and the creation of a new, utopian social order based on mechanization of all labor and the love of knowledge deriving from true principles. This rhetoric still dominates discourses about the Enlightenment and its negation of the â€Å"barbaric middle ages. † II. Adorno and Horkheimer on the Dialectics of Enlightenment It does not take long to get from Kant to Nietzsche. In fact, the amoral world of the infamous German is a mere brief step from the hyper individualism of Kant and his followers. Nietzsche took the Baconian dictum seriously that knowledge is power and of course, power is domination. The Kantian mystification of the Enlightenment had been exposed for generations in European letters from the conservative reaction against modern science to the leftist agitation of the above authors. In their 1944 work, Adorno and Horkheimer seek to eliminate the mystification that Kant had ushered in as the basic sense of Enlightenment self-definition. Their argument is a complex one, but it can easily be taken apart into eight specific movements or moments. 1. The Enlightenment, with its stress on science and hence technology, has not led to liberation, but to a hyper-centralization of power and technical authority. The knowledge necessary for specialized science and its administration are, by definition, available only to a few specialists. This means that Enlightenment individualism has led to a Nietzschian stress on the will to power of science. This will to power has resolved itself into a fetishization with central power and authority, and an esoteric sense of science as the new priesthood, available only to a few specialist and the moneyed powers who finance them. 2. This centralization of power and the domination of a scientific and technocratic elite has led to the creation of a uniform ideology: a sense of the power of science and the moneyed powers who control them. The issue here is that the scientific ideology is the only one, and that all problems can be solved by the judicious application of the scientific method, only if they receive enough money and power to do it. Science, at first a limited method of solving problem, has resolved itself into the domination of materialism and the creation of a scientific establishment, a set of institutions that identifies itself with â€Å"science† proper. In other words, the scientific establishment has taken the name of science and pinned it to themselves. 3. The domination of science and enlightenment capital relations has led to new forms of scientific consciousness like sociology, which has led to the standardization of society, and this standardization of social life has taken the form of labeling consumers. Creating consuming pockets of people who are seen not as people but as machines that buy the products that the capitalist technocracy has created. Citizenship has been replaced by consumption and being a part of the great chain of capitalist relations. 4. Even more than this, not only has political and economic power been tightly centralized, but even the very ideas of the population and their perceptions of the world are created and maintained by the â€Å"culture industry† that complex of capital and modern science that has sought to entertain the masses for profit, but have also replaced their own perceptions with that of the â€Å"cultural elite. † From the individualism of Kant, science and Enlightenment has created a new kind of human being: the slave that does not know he’s a slave. The entertainment industry that is so often a target of both left and right has taken upon itself, in the name of both profit and Enlightenment, to recreate the very perceptual matrix of the population as a whole. Replacing actual perception with their own, and hence, dictating music, dress, even cuisine according to its taste, quickly adopted by the masses who think they are thinking for themselves. 5. The movies, as well as the mass production entertainment industry of the technocracy, has recreated the person according to its own will. Reality itself is the creation of the â€Å"illusion industry† and has destroyed the last vestiges of individuality. Kant is exposed as a naive writer at best. 6. The creation of genre is part of the cultural domination of the technocracy. Genre is a pseudo-intellectual method of both standardizing production, but more importantly, the standardization of consumer taste. Genre is the destruction of culture for this reason. 7. This destruction of culture by forcing it into the standardization of genre means that art has been taken from the realm of the individual or the culture and placed into the realm of the machine: the culture machine that seeks to standardize art so as to make it amenable to scientifically planned consumption and production. Art is merely another commodity. 8. Finally, the culture itself becomes a single, commodified and standardized reality: the creation of the scientific technique as applied to film, entertainment and art. What has begun as a drive to liberate consciousness and the intellect has led to a scientific dystopia of enslavement to a series of media illusions, themselves based around profit and a centralized technocratic apparatus that has stamped out all free thought and has even commodified dissent from its own order.