Instrumental reason
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Instrumental reason is the Critical Theory term for reason narrowed to calculating the most efficient means to a given end, without asking whether the end itself is right. Max Horkheimer made it the key concept of his 1944 lectures at Columbia University, published in 1947 as Eclipse of Reason (German edition Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft). Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947), which he wrote with Theodor W. Adorno, argued that a reason bent on dominating nature extends into the domination of people, so that enlightenment reverts to myth and a 'new barbarism'. The concept is close to Max Weber's purposive rationality and György Lukács's reification.
In depth
What is instrumental reason?
A comparison with a tool helps. A hammer is good for driving nails, but it cannot tell you where or why a nail should go. Instrumental reason asks only 'how', never 'what for'. German Wikipedia defines it as a reason that reflects on the means of action but not on its ends. It is also called 'means–end rationality': the technical fitness of means to an end chosen arbitrarily.
An extreme case shows why the distinction matters. An end may be irrational and inhuman, as the Holocaust was, while the means used to carry it out work rationally and with technical efficiency. The critique of instrumental reason aims at this gap: a society with highly developed calculation and efficiency loses the capacity to judge its ends.
The concept is also a critique of the relation to nature. Since Francis Bacon modern people have been interested in conquering and subjugating nature through technology. Horkheimer wrote that nature, animals included, is now treated as 'a mere tool of man' and has become 'the object of total exploitation'. The history of subduing nature is also the history of people subduing people, and so he concluded:
In the process of his emancipation man shares the fate of the rest of his world.
What kind of book is Dialectic of Enlightenment?
The critique of instrumental reason is worked out most fully in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno. They wrote it in exile in Los Angeles between 1939 and 1944, with Gretel Adorno recording their conversations. It first appeared in 1944 as a mimeographed typescript titled Philosophical Fragments, dedicated to Pollock on his fiftieth birthday, and was published in 1947 by Querido in Amsterdam.
In the book edition Marxist terms were softened: 'capital' became 'economy' and 'relations of production' became 'forms of the economy'. In the 1960s the text circulated among German students in pirate editions and was read intensively; an official German reissue appeared only in 1969.
| Chapter | Subject |
|---|---|
| The Concept of Enlightenment | The domination of nature and the dialectic of myth and enlightenment; the book's theoretical basis |
| Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment | The Odyssey read as the prototype of the bourgeois individual |
| Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality | Kant, Sade and Nietzsche show that formalised reason cannot ground morality |
| The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception | Critique of commodified mass culture |
| Elements of Antisemitism: Limits of Enlightenment | How the irrationality inside ruling reason broke out as fascism |
| Notes and Sketches | Unfinished fragments |
The book opens:
Enlightenment, in the widest sense of advancing thought, has always aimed at taking fear away from human beings and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.
The preface sums up the theme in one sentence: 'Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.' Myth was already an attempt to explain and control the world, and so a kind of enlightenment; but the enlightenment that clears myth away turns into a domination as blind as myth.
Why is Odysseus the prototype of the bourgeois individual?
The authors read Homer's Odyssey as 'the basic text of European civilisation'. Odysseus wanders among mythical monsters and forces of nature and survives by cunning. He resists the lures of Circe and the Sirens and returns home. In their reading he preserves himself by denying himself, and from this restraint and calculation the 'instrumental mind' arises.
The cunning loner is already homo oeconomicus, whom all reasonable people will one day resemble.
Homo oeconomicus is the self-interested calculator that economics assumes. The authors stated the price of this self-preservation:
Humanity had to do terrible things to itself before the self, the identical, purposive, masculine character of human beings, was created, and something of this is repeated in every childhood.
Why does reason turn into barbarism?
The argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment runs as follows. At the very start of human history, as the subject asserted itself against a threatening nature, instrumental reason took hold. It hardened first into domination over outer and inner nature and finally into the institutional domination of people by people. Instead of freeing people, reason was used to control the dominated more tightly and to measure every part of life by use and efficiency.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, means–end calculation came to dominate with modern science and technology, as the kind of reasoning that capitalist production and efficient bureaucracy require. Hence the authors' claim that 'enlightenment is totalitarian'. Horkheimer saw in fascism 'a satanic synthesis of reason and nature', the exact opposite of the reconciliation of the two that philosophy had always dreamed of.
An economic analysis lay underneath. Pollock argued that nineteenth-century liberal capitalism had given way to 'state capitalism', with the state deeply involved in the economy, so that the primacy of politics replaced the primacy of the economy that Marx had posited. This supported the book's focus on 'totally administered lives' under the state apparatus.
What did Eclipse of Reason add?
In February and March 1944 Horkheimer gave five public lectures at Columbia University under the title 'Society and Reason'. These lectures restated the ideas of Dialectic of Enlightenment, with instrumental reason as their key concept. They were published in 1947 as Eclipse of Reason. The German edition appeared in 1967 as Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Critique of Instrumental Reason), the title the Korean edition also follows. In five chapters it analyses how traditional philosophical concepts such as reason, truth, nature and the individual turn into categories of means–end rationality, the domination of nature and self-preservation.
How does it differ from Weber, Lukács and Habermas?
Instrumental reason overlaps with several related concepts but stresses different things.
| Thinker | Concept | Emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| Max Weber | Purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität) | The decisive element in the success of the modern West; distinguished from value rationality |
| György Lukács | Reification | The commodity form makes relations between people appear as relations between things; the workers' class consciousness can break through it |
| Horkheimer and Adorno | Instrumental reason | The failure of enlightenment is built into instrumental reason from the start; positivism ends in affirming what exists |
| Jürgen Habermas | Instrumental and communicative rationality | Instrumental rationality is only one side of reason; another reason lives in communication aimed at mutual understanding |
For Weber purposive rationality was the key to the success of modern reason. For Horkheimer and Adorno the failure of enlightenment was already contained in instrumental reason.
How has it been criticised?
The most influential criticism came from Habermas. For him the concept of instrumental reason evokes 'purposive rationality inflated into a totality'. In it the difference between what claims validity and what serves self-preservation disappears. As a result, he argued, the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment saw in everything 'only an alloy of reason and domination, power and validity'.
Habermas also wrote that the two authors had 'abandoned themselves to an unrestrained scepticism about reason instead of weighing the grounds that cast doubt on that scepticism itself'. They overlooked the rational gains of the Enlightenment, such as the differentiation of law, morality and science and the institutionalisation of democracy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that many critics have wondered what the 'positive concept of enlightenment' promised in the book's preface was supposed to be.
More recent readings differ. Some treat the book as a 'world-disclosive' critique that makes the familiar social world appear pathological. Others read it not as a simple story of decline but as a dialectical idea of progress, meant to make us aware of how reason is entangled with power.