Avoiding “Embarrassment”: Aesthetic Reason and Aporetic Critique in Dialectic of Enlightenment

Habermas charges that by equating a deformed instrumental reason with reason itself in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno err twice. Not only do they fail to lead us to the path holding the greatest promise for understanding reason in modernity, they destroy all rational grounds for normative justification. Leaving themselves without a claim to reason, they suffer the embarrassment of becoming implicated in an aporia undermining their critique of enlightenment. I contest Habermas's argument, first by showing that they identify a differentiated form of aesthetic reason, and then by fleshing it out conceptually and developing its significance. With the concept of aesthetic reason Horkheimer and Adorno justify their critique and establish the basis for an alternative idea of enlightenment. By so doing, they illuminate the theoretical path allowing us to consider how the rational content of modernity can be recovered, and they preserve Habermas's theme of modernity as an unfinished project.