Materialism and its Discontents

What Horkheimer and Adorno called 'the dialectic of Enlightenment' might also be called 'the revenge of the thing-in-itself'. The peak of the Enlightenment was probably the Kantian system, the construction of which was accomplished by its delimitation to the appearance of things, i. e. by its exclusion of what they might be independent of their being perceived, which for Kant amounts to their unknowability. Schopenhauer followed Kant by taking the bold step of characterizing the realm of the in-itself as pure 'Will', a precursor of Nietzsche's 'Dionysus', and then, his 'Will-to-Power', and of Freud's 'Id', each a universal progenitor, which qualifies each as a Material Principle. The problem for Schopenhauer is that while Will multiplies, he treats the products of that multiplication, 'individuals', as not merely, as Kant has it, appearances, but as illusory. Furthermore, insofar as Reason functions only within the locus of appearance, its efficacy, too, is illusory, according to Schopenhauer, which for him is grounds for pessimism. In contrast, Nietzsche affirms the primacy of Will, and takes ironic joy in the realization of the vanity of the ambitions of human Reason. Still, Nietzsche concurs with Schopenhauer in denying the in-itself reality of the individual, or, in other words, in denying that Diversification can have a positive significance. Later, Freud misses that both the Id and 'Civilization' are antagonistic to the 'Ego', as much as Kant misses that both the in-itself and Reason are anatagonistic to selfhood. Only the kind of Materialism proposed here grounds the generation of selfhood that has a positive connotation--even the dynamic of Marxian 'Materialism' is a process of social totalization, as, e. g. Stalin demonstrated.