Did the Holocaust Happen IN SPITE of the Enlightenment or BECAUSE of It?

Last week, I mentioned the German-born philosophers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, all belonging to the Frankfurt School. I briefly talked about their critique of Western Reason and science, and the link they saw between the Enlightenment and totalitarianism.

To understand their position, one has to see it in the context of the Holocaust. Philosophizing in the West after Ausschwitz, they maintained, can never be the same as philosophizing prior to Ausschwitz. Every Western philosophy from 1945 on has to take into account that in the midst of the supposedly enlightened Europe, the most horrible crime against humanity has been committed.

The question that every Western philosopher after Ausschwitz has to confront is: Did this happen in spite of our scientific achievements, our Enlightenment thinking and our philosophy or because of it?

Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s conclusion was that Ausschwitz was not merely a glitch in the system, not just a slip on the road of Enlightenment, but an expression of the “monomania” (to use the term applied to Ahab in Moby Dick, as used by Dreyfus in a metaphorical sense) that had gripped the West ever since Plato. This monomania showed itself particularly in science, which is marked by the desire to bring everything under human control, everything under a unified system. Marcuse called this the breaking of the unity between “Logos” and “Eros”, giving supremacy to the “Logos.” Perhaps this is similar to Nietzsche’s critique of Socrates as having established the “tyranny” of Reason.

Adorno and Horkheimer do not apply this critique so much to religion as to science and technology. Dreyfus, in contrast, takes the same basic thought and includes monotheistic religion in it. It can be argued, however, that the “monomania” of monotheism runs into exactly the opposite direction as the “monomania” of science and technology and can, in fact, serve as a balance to it. Let me explain.

In science and technology, the goal is to gain control over nature. In that way, modern science is the descendent of the ancient idea of magic: finding and using powers in nature to gain control over nature. Religion, in contrast, is something very different from magic. In pretty much all religions, there is a sense not of control, but of surrender to something higher. Hence the religious element in the Western tradition can serve as a counterbalance to the scientific element. The one looks up and surrenders, the other looks down and dominates. Without any kind of surrender, only domination is left.

But this is not what the Frankfurt School maintained. Its proponents did not focus on the religious aspect of the Western tradition as a possible self-correcting contribution to the tradition, but on science as a force of alienation. According to Marcuse, it separates the subject from the object, truth from goodness, technology from ethics. It seeks to control and dominate, no matter the consequences. It is totalitarian.

What do you think? How would you defend science and technology from the charge of totalitarianism?