The Evaluation Of A Misunderstanding Of Reason

In Dialectics of Enlightment, Horkheimer and Adorno, by deeply analyzing the enlightment and myth, drew an astonished conclusion that enlightment had degenerated to the level of myth. The enlightment which claimed to release human beings from blindness stands into the opposite field now. This conclusion deeply revealed the crisis of modernity, and announced the corruption of enlightment. However, is it reasonable to accept Horkheimer and Adorno's critique?Starting from this question, the dissertation tries to illuminate the thinking of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique, and point out that the failure of their critique lied in the misunderstanding of the concept of reason. They expanded the using of concept of subject-centred reason to the using of reason in all fields. In order to resolve the crisis of reason, I'd like to use platonic doctrine of recollection to retest the subject-centred reason and Odysseus' dilemma mentioned by Horkheimer and Adorno. In this process, the dissertation goes on towards two directions: 1, Revealing the crisis of subject-centred reason by describing the process from Hegel to Dialectics of Enlightment. 2, After the discussion of natural right, reflecting the dilemma of subject-centred reason with Platonic recollection doctrine. To sum up, this dissertation aims to find some new ways to response to the crisis of subject-centred reason in modern society.The first part of this dissertation is to analyze the modern reason's denial to myth by hegelian point of view, and then to find the crisis of reason which occured when modern reason began to identify itself, then to analyze and estimate Horkheimer and Adorno's thinking about the crisis of reason. The second part is to ascribe the cause of crisis to the confliction between subject-centred reason and natural right. After analyzing these two concepts, I distinguish platonic reason from subject-centred reason. The third part is to evaluate the Platonic reason by analyzing the concept of natural right. The last part is to analyze Platonic doctrine of recollection, through which try to find the solution to the crisis caused by subject-centred reason.