Declinations of the ‘Aufklärung’ in Horkheimer and Adorno

The concept of Aufklärung occupies a prominent position in the works, university courses and seminars of Horkheimer and Adorno within the Institute for Social Research. The significance the two authors attribute to the Aufklärung in Dialectics of the Enlightenment (1947) is well known. Here the concept designates the way in which a certain trans-secular rationality, that is a tendentially totalitarian form of subjective reason, interprets the world (both physical nature and the human sphere) and appropriates it. Nevertheless, the reflection on the Aufklärung in the two authors is multifaceted. Horkheimer reflects on this concept on various occasions, before and after Dialectics of the Enlightenment, particularly in a lecture course on modern philosophy of 1927 and in a lecture course of 1959/60, entitled Die Aufklärung. He highlights at least two meanings of the concept of the Aufklärung, one broader (transecular, apparently de-historicised) and the other more circumscribed and traditional. This paper aims to reconstruct the broad outlines of Horkheimer’s reflection on the Aufklärung in his courses, texts and seminars with Adorno from 1927 up to 1970.