2012: Martin Jay, “After the Eclipse 01, Reason Eclipsed: The First Generation of the Frankfurt School”

November 11, 2012

Martin Jay, “After the Eclipse: The Light of Reason in Late Critical Theory 01: Reason Eclipsed: The First Generation of the Frankfurt School”

George L. Mosse Distinguished Lectures
https://mosselectures.wisc.edu/program/

Sunday, 11 November 2012, 18:30 IDT

This lecture series was published as Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2017).

2012.11.13-15 - Martin Jay - After the Eclipse

Mishkanot Sha’ananim Conference Center
POB 4572
Jerusalem 9104402
ISRAEL

Chair: Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Department of History

Lecture Overview: During the 1940s, the Frankfurt School lost its confidence in a substantive or emphatic concept of reason, which might survive its degeneration into instrumental, subjective and formal rationality and serve as a vehicle of social emancipation. Attempts were made by Herbert Marcuse to generate an expanded notion of reason by including an “erotic” component and Theodor W. Adorno by combining it with the moment of mimesis in works of art. But the first generation of Critical Theorists was hard pressed to salvage a plausible way to rescue the stronger concept of reason Max Horkheimer had lamented as “eclipsed” in the modern world.

Lecture Series Overview: Martin Jay tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: what is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? Applying the tools of intellectual history, he examines the overlapping, but not fully compatible, meanings that have accrued to the term “reason” over two millennia, homing in on moments of crisis, critique, and defense of reason.

After surveying Western ideas of reason from the ancient Greeks through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay engages at length with the ways leading theorists of the Frankfurt School—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and most extensively Habermas—sought to salvage a viable concept of reason after its apparent eclipse. They despaired, in particular, over the decay in the modern world of reason into mere instrumental rationality. When reason becomes a technical tool of calculation separated from the values and norms central to daily life, then choices become grounded not in careful thought but in emotion and will—a mode of thinking embraced by fascist movements in the twentieth century.

Is there a more robust idea of reason that can be defended as at once a philosophical concept, a ground of critique, and a norm for human emancipation? Jay explores at length the communicative rationality advocated by Habermas and considers the range of arguments, both pro and con, that have greeted his work.

Martin Jay, the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Prof. of History at UC-Berkeley gave the sixth series of George L. Mosse Lectures at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem on November 13, 15, 17, 2012. The well attended lectures, based on Prof. Jay’s current research on the Frankfurt School and its legacy are a continuation of the work he began with his groundbreaking book “The Dialectical Imagination” published in 1973.

Martin Jay is emeritus professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for forty-five years and co-founded (alongside Judith Butler) a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. He received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 1971 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bard College in 2018. His award-winning work on the intellectual history of the Frankfurt School – published in a dozen monographs and translated into as many languages – has been the subject of numerous conferences across three continents as well as a Festshrift and a dedicatory issue of the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics.

His most recent book, Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Reenchantment of the World (University of Chicago Press, 2025), connects the philosophical and aesthetic traditions of the medieval and modern worlds. Focusing on the intellectual movement of the European Middle Ages to reject platonic philosophy in favor of Aristotelian nominalism, Jay’s work demonstrates the “disenchantment” of the visual artistic world as a result of the new theoretical paradigm and positions photography as a medium for “re-enchanting” the modern world.

Steven E. Aschheim is Emeritus Professor of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem where he taught Cultural and Intellectual History in the Department of History since 1982 and held the Vigevani Chair of European Studies. He also acted as the Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German Literature and Cultural History. Apart from academic journals, he has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books and Ha’aretz.

He has spent sabbaticals at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and in 2002-3 was the first Mosse Exchange Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During September-October 2005 he taught at Columbia University as the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Scholar of German Studies. He has also taught at the University of Maryland, Reed College, the Free University in Berlin and the Central European University in Budapest. He taught at the University of Toronto in 0ctober 2008 and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from September-December 2009. He served as a Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in the summer of 2010 and in March-April 2011 was the Stan Gold Visiting Professor of Jewish History at Trinity College, Dublin. In 2013-2014 he was a Fellow of the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at New York University School of Law. In April 2016 he was a Fellow at the Dubnow Institute, Leipzig and in November 2016 was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2017 (September-October), he held the first Menasseh Ben Israel Institute Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and also taught at the University of Antwerp. He is married, has three children – and five grand-daughters and two grandsons.

He is the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) which has been translated into German and Hebrew; Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996); In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), which has also appeared in Italian, and presently being translated into German, and Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton University Press, 2007). He is the editor of the conference volume, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), also translated into Hebrew. His At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German and Jewish History (Palgrave Macmillan) appeared in June 2012. A volume, co-edited with Vivian Liska, entitled The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (Berlin, De Gruyter) appeared in 2015. His volume entitled Fragile Spaces: Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities appeared in 2018.