The philosophical reception of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment has been overshadowed by Habermas’s objection that in their ‘totalizing’ critique of reason the authors commit the cardinal sin of a performative contradiction, and that therefore their argument is aporetic, paradoxical, a dead end, whereby the “way out” according to Habermas is to complement their notion of instrumental reason with that of communicative rationality. By contrast, according to Honneth, Horkheimer and Adorno undertake a disclosive critique of the enlightenment and its social-cultural context rather than prosecuting a deductive argument that ends in contradiction and paradox. While this seems a promising answer to Habermas’s objection, the disclosive critique approach faces two challenges: first, it seems at odds with the persistent language in Dialectic of Enlightenment of ‘self-reflection’; second is Honneth’s open question of how the result of disclosive critique relates to validity (truth) claims, that is, how we can reason about or with that result. To start to answer these concerns, I’ll consider Horkheimer and Adorno’s stated aim of the book – the self-reflection of reason – and how to understand this aim as motivating some of the authors’ textual strategies. In doing so I’ll try to connect that aim to a picture of thinking and understanding that is congruent with a form of self-knowledge in Aristotle.
