DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
for tendencies toward true humanism, even if these seem powerless in regard to the main course of history. The development toward total integration recognized in this book is interrupted, but not abrogated. It threatens to advance beyond dictatorships and wars. The prognosis of the related conversion of enlightenment into positivism, the myth of things as they actually are, and finally the identification of intellect and that which is inimical to the spirit, has been overwhelmingly confirmed. Our conception of history does not presume any dispensation from it; nor does it imply a positivistic search for information. It is a critique of philosophy, and therefore refuses to abandon philosophy.
The book was written in America, whence we returned to Germany, convinced that there we could achieve more, in practice as well as in theory, than elsewhere. Together with Friedrich Pollock (to whom this book was originally dedicated on his fiftieth, and now his sixty-fifth, birthday), we have once again built up the Institut fur Sozialforschung in an attempt to develop the conception formulated in the Dialectic. In the extension of our theory and the accompanying mutual experiences, Gretel Adorno has been a precious helper.
We have been far more sparing with alterations to the text than is usual with new editions of works published some decades before. We did not want to retouch what we had written not even the obviously inadequate places. To have brought the text up to date would, ultimately, have demanded nothing less than a new book. That today it is more a question of preserving freedom, and of extending and developing it, instead - however indirectly - of accelerating the advance toward an administered world, is something that we have also emphasized in our later writings. Essentially, we have restricted our revision to the correction of printer's errors and the like. Such restraint tends to afford the book the status of documentation; yet we hope that it has more than that to offer.
Frankfurt am Main April 1969
MAX HORKHEIMER THEODOR W. ADORNO
INTRODUCTION
WHEN we began this work, the first samples of which we dedicate to Friedrich Pollock, we had hoped to be able to have the finished whole ready for his fiftieth birthday. But the more intensively we pursued our task, the clearer it became that our own powers were disproportionate to it. It turned out, in fact, that we had set ourselves nothing less Than the discovery of why mankind, instead of entering into a fully human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. We underestimated the difficulties of interpretation, because we still trusted too much in the modem consciousness. Even though we had known for many years that the great discoveries of applied science are paid for with an increasing diminution of theoretical awareness, we still thought that in regard to scientific activity our contribution could be restricted to the criticism or extension of specialist axioms. Thematically, at any rate, we were to keep to the traditional disciplines: to sociology, psychology, and epistemology.
However, the fragments united in this volume show that we were forced to abandon this conviction. If the assiduous maintenance and verification of the scientific heritage are an essential part of knowledge ( especially where zealous positivists have treated it as useless ballast and consigned it to oblivion), in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization not only the pursuit but the meaning of science has become problematical in that regard. What the brazen Fascists hypocritically laud and pliable humanist experts naively put into practice-the indefatigable, self-destructiveness of enlightenment requires philosophy to discard even the last vestiges of innocence in regard to the habits and tendencies of the spirit of the age. When public opinion has reached a state in which thought inevitably
xi
becomes a commodity, and language the means of promoting that commodity, then the attempt to trace the course of such , depravation has to' deny any allegiance to current linguistic and conceptual conventions, lest their world-historical consequences thwart it entirely.
If it were only a question of the obstacles resulting from the self-oblivious instrumentalization of science, then a critique of social problems could at least attach itself to … opposed to the accepted scientific mode; yet even these are affected by the total process of production. They have changed no less than the ideology to which they referred. They suffer what triumphant thought has always suffered. If it willingly emerges from its critical element to become a mere means at the disposal of an existing order, then despite itself it tends to convert the positive it elected to defend into something negative and destructive. The philosophy which put the fear of death into infamy in the eighteenth century, despite all the book-burnings and piles of corpses, was to serve that very infamy under Napoleon. Ultimately, Comte's school of apologetic usurped the succession to the inflexible Encyclopedists, and joining hands with everything that the latter had formerly rejected. The metamorphoses of criticism into affirmation do not leave the theoretical content untouched, for its truth evaporates. Now, of course, a mechanized history outstrips such intellectual developments, and the official apologists—who have other concerns—liquidate the history that helped them to their place in the sun, before it can prostitute itself.
When examining its own guilty conscience, thought has to…not only the affirmative use of scientific and everyday… language, it must … that of the opposition. There is no longer any available form of linguistic expression which has not tended toward accommodation to dominant currents of thought; and what a devalued language does not do automatically is proficiently executed by societal mechanisms.
There are analogies in all areas for the … maintained by companies faced otherwise with the threat of increased overheads. The process which a literary text has to undergo, if not in the anticipatory maneuvers of its author,
xii
then certainly in … efforts of …editors, …ghost writers in and outside publishing houses, exceeds any censorship in thoroughness. To make its functions wholly superfluous would seem to be the ambition of the educational system, despite all salutary reforms. Believing that, without strict limitation to the verification of facts and probability theory, the cognitive spirit would prove all too susceptible to charlatanism and superstition, it makes a parched ground ready and avid for charlatanism and superstition. Just as prohibition has always offered access to the poisonous product, so the obstruction of the theoretical faculty paved the way for political error and madness. And even so far as men have not yet succumbed to political delusion, the mechanisms of censorship—both internal and external—will deprive them of the means of resistance.
The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenomenon for investigation: the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. We are wholly convinced—and therein lies our petitio principii—that … is inseparable from enlightened, thought. Nevertheless, we believe that we have just as dearly recognized that the notion of this … way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms—the social institutions—with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed cline.. reversal universal apparent today. If …eriment does not accommodate reflection on this recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. If consideration of the destructive aspect of progress is left to its enemies, blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and its relation to truth. In the enigmatic readiness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the sway of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to popular paranoia, and in all uncomprehended absurdity, the weakness of the modern theoretical faculty is apparent.
We believe that these fragments will contribute to the health of that theoretical understanding, insofar as we show that the crime can … enlighte … gy not to be sought so much in the nationalist, pagan and other modern mythologies manufactured precisely in order to contrive such a reversal, but in the Enlightenment itself when paralyzed … truth. In this respect, both concepts are to be understood not merely as historico-cultural (geistesgeschichtlich) but as real. Just as the Enlightenment expresses the actual movement of civil society as a whole in the aspect of its idea as embodied in individuals and institutions, so truth... not merely … consciousness but equally the form that consciousness assumes in actual life. The dutiful child of modem civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which…perception. The dominant conventions of … Politics—cliché-like—have already …olded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation. The same conventions define the notion of linguistic and conceptual clarity which the art, literature and philosophy of the present have to satisfy. Since that notion declares any negative treatment of the facts or of the dominant forms of thought to be obscurantist formalism or—preferably—alien, and therefore taboo, it condemns the spirit to increasing darkness. It is characteristic of the sickness that even, the best-intentioned re…ished and debased language to… renewal, by his adoption of the insidious mode of categorization and the bad philosophy it conceals, strengthens the very power of the established order he is trying to break. False clarity is only another name for myth; and myth has always been obscure and enlightening at one and the same time: always using the devices of familiarity and straightforward dismissal to avoid the labor of conceptualization. The fallen nature of modem man cannot be separated from social progress. On the one hand the growth of economic productivity furnishes the conditions for a world of greater justice; on the other hand it allows the technical apparatus and the social groups which administer it a disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population. The individual is wholly devalued in relation to the economic powers, which at the same time press the control of society over nature to hitherto unsuspected heights…disappear. …the apparatus …that apparatus provides for … as never before. In an unjust state of life, the … and
xiv
INTRODUCTION
pliability of the masses grow… quantitative, in … in commodities allow… The materially respectable and socially deplorable rise in the living standard of the lower classes is reflected in the simulated extension of the spirit. Its … concern is the negation of reification; it cannot survive where it is fixed as a cultural commodity and doled out to satisfy consumer needs. The flood of detailed information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind. The issue is not that of culture as a value, which is what the critics of civilization, Huxley, Jaspers, Ortega y Gasset and: others, have in mind. The point is rather that the Enlightenment must consider itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed. The task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past. Today, however, the past is preserved as the destruction of the past. Whereas a worthwhile education was a privilege until the nineteenth century, and one paid for by the increased suffering of the uneducated, in the twentieth century factory space has been purchased by melting down all cultural values in a gigantic crucible. Perhaps that would not be so high a price as the defenders of culture suppose, if the selling-out of culture did not contribute to the conversion of economic triumphs into their opposite.
Under existing conditions the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune. Ip.__!L quantity, in default of a _al subject, operated during the internal economic crises of times past as so-called "surplus production"; today, .because of the enthronement of progress, that social subject, it produces the international threat of Fascism: progress becomes regression. That the hygienic shop-floor and everything that goes with it-the Volkswagen or the sports-drome, leads to an insensitive liquidation of metaphysics, would be irrelevant; but that in the. social whole they themselves become a metaphysics,' an ideological curtain behind which the real evil is concentrated, is not irrelevant. This is the starting-point of our deliberations.
The first study, which provides the theoretical basis for the second is an atfe_t t_J_c_s understanding more clearly upon e 9 !!!i. iJY}l!1.5! reality, and upon what is in alable therefrom, that of nature and J.___IJ? mystery of nature.
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
The accompanying critique of enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.
Broadly speaking, the critical section of the first study concentrates on two theses: myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology. In the two excursuses, these theses are demonstrated in terms of specific phenomena.
The first traces the dialectic of myth and enlightenment. in the Odyssey, as one of the earliest representative testimonies of Western bourgeois civilization. At the midpoint are the notions of sacrifice and renunciation, in which appear the difference as well as the unity of mythic nature and enlightened mastery of nature. The second excursus is concerned with Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche, who mercilessly elicited the implications of the Enlightenment. Here we show how the submission of everything natural to the autocratic subject finally culminates in the mastery of the blindly objective and natural. This tendency evens out all the antinomies of bourgeois thought-even that of moral .. rigor and absolute amorality.
The essay on the !ll!J1}f; will try to demonstrate the regression of enlightenment ideology which finds its typical expression in cinema and radio. Here enlightenment consists above all in the calculation of effectiveness and of the techniques of production and distribution in accordance with its 'content,' ideology expends itself in the ig of all of of given existence and of the how which controls technology. In the treatment of this contradiction the culture industry is taken more seriously than it would implicitly require. But since its appeal to its own properly commercial nature, its acknowledgment of a qualified truth, has long been a subterfuge that it uses to evade responsibility for lies, our analysis keeps to the products' objectively inherent claim to be aesthetic images which accordingly embody truth, and demonstrates the nullity of social being in the nihilism of that claim. The section on the "culture industry" is even more fragmentary than the others.
The argument and thesis of "Elements of Anti-Semitism" is concerned with the actual reversion of enlightened civilization
xvi
xvii
INTRODUCTION
to barbarism. Not merely the ideal but the practical tendency to self-destruction has always been characteristic of rationalism, and not only in the stage in which it appears undisguised. In this sense we offer the main lines of a philosophical prehistory of anti-Semitism. Its "irrationalism" is deduced from the nature of the dominant ratio itself, and the world which corresponds to its image. This chapter is directly related to empirical research carried out at the Institut flir Sozialforschung, the foundation established and maintained by Felix Weil, and without which not merely our studies but a good part of the theoretical work of German emigrants that continued despite Hitler would not have been possible. We wrote the first three theses in conjunction with Leo Lowenthal, with whom we have worked on many scientific problems since our first years together in Frankfurt.
The last part of this book contains sketches and drafts which belong in part to the area of thought of the foregoing essays without being precisely locatable there, and in part offer advance summaries of problems to be treated in forthcoming works. Most of them are concerned with a dialectical anthropology .
May 1944
Los Angeles, California
The book as published contains no important alterations of the text written during the war. All that has been added subsequently is the last thesis of "Elements of Anti-Semitism."
June 1947
MAX HORKHEIMER THEODOR W. ADORNO
THE CONCEPT
OF ENLIGHTENMENT
IN the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy. Bacon, the "father of experimental philosophy," had defined its motives. He looked down on the masters of tradition, the "great reputed authors" who first "believe that others know that which they know not; and after themselves know that which they know not. But indeed facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to answer, glory to know, doubt to contradict, end to gain, sloth to search, seeking things in words, resting in part of nature; these and the like have been the things which have forbidden the happy match between the mind of man and the nature of things; and in place thereof have married it to vain notions and blind experiments': and what the posterity and issue of so honorable a match may be, it is not hard to consider. Printing, a gross invention; artillery, a thing that lay not far out of the way; the needle, a thing partly known before: what a change have these three things made in the world in these times; the one in state of learning, the other in the. state of war, the third in the state of treasure, commodities, and navigation! And those, I say, were but stumbled upon and lighted upon by chance. Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are preserved, which kings with
1 Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, XII, Oeuvres Complètes (Garnier: Paris, 1879), Vol. XXII, p. 118. .
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her by action." 2
Despite his lack of mathematics,. Bacon's vie_ was appropriate to the scientific attitude that prevailed after him. The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that he had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the world's rulers. As with all the ends of bourgeois economy in the factory and on the battlefield, origin is no bar to the dictates of the entrepreneurs: kings, no less directly than businessmen, control technology; it is as democratic as the economic system with which it is bound up. ...ology is the essence of this knowledge. It does not work by concepts and images, of the fortunate insight, but refers to method, the exploitation of others' work, and capital. TE5L,:._!!l._nJ, things which, according to Bacon, are le...d, are themselves no more than instrumental: the radio as a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of artillery, radio control as a more reliable compass. What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other ,men. That is the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. In face of .!he present triumph of the factual mentality, even Bacon's nominalist credo would be suspected of metaphysical bias and come under the same verdict of vanity that he pronounced on scholastic philosophy. Power and knowledge are synonymous. 3
2. Bacon, "In Praise of Human Knowledge" (Miscellaneous Tracts upon Human Knowledge), The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Basil Montagu (London, 1825), Vol. I, pp. 254ff.
3. Cf. Bacon, Novum Organum, Works, Vol. XIV, p. 31.
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
For Bacon as for Luther, "knowledge that tended but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation. Not "satisfaction, which men call truth," but "operation," is to do the "business," is the "right mark": for". . . what is the whole end, scope, or office of knowledge, which I have set down to consist not in any plausible, delectable, reverend or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before, for the better endowment and help of man's life."4 There is to be no mystery - which means, too, no wish to reveal mystery.
...the disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animalism. Xenophanes derides the, multitude of deities because they are but replicas of the men who produced them, together with all that is contingent and evil in mankind; and the most recent school of logic denounces-for the impressions they bear-the words of language, holding them to be false coins better replaced by neutral counters. The world becomes a chaos and synthesizes llYC3tion. There is said to be no difference between the totemic animal, the dreams of the ghost-seer, and the absolute Idea. 9!l., the IQ__L1Q..modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning. They substitute formula, concept, rule and finally . S us drilotjji cause was only the last philosophic concept which served as a yardstick for scientific criticism: so to speak because it alone among the old ideas still seemed to offer itself to scientific criticism, the latest secularization of the creative principle. Substance and quality, activity and suffering, being and existence: to define these concepts in a way appropriate to the-times was a concern of philosophy after Bacon - but science managed without such categories. They left y o ll 9 origin t t of the iold metaphysics, and assessed as... being even then ..!ll._!J:}otal of the elements and power of the prehistory for which life and death disclosed their nature in myths and become interwoven in them. The categories by which Western philosophy defined its everlasting natural order marked the spots once occupied by Qncus and Persephone, Ariadne and Nereus. The pre-Socratic cosmologies pre
4. Bacon, "Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature" (Miscellaneous Tracts upon Human Knowledge), Works, Vol. I, p. 281.
5
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
serve the moment of transition. The moist, the indivisible, air, and fire, which they hold to be the primal matter of nature, are already rationalizations of the mythic mode of apprehension. Just as the images of generation from water and earth, which came from the Nile to the Greeks, became here hylozoistic principles, or elements, so all the equivocal multitude of mythical demons were intellectualized in the pure form of ontological essences. Finally, by means of the Platonic ideas, even the patriarchal gods of Olympus were absorbed in the philosophical logos. The Enlightenment, however, recognized the old powers in the Platonic and Aristotelian aspects of metaphysics, and opposed as superstition the claim that truth is predicable of universals, It asserted that in the authority of universal concepts, there was still discernible fear of the demonic spirits 'which men sought to portray in magic rituals, hoping thus to influence nature, from now on, matter would at last be mastered without any illusion of ruling or inherent powers," of hidden qualities.
For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect. So long as it can develop undisturbed by any outward repression, there is no holding it. In the process, it treats its own ideas of human rights exactly as it does the older universals. Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength. 5 Which means that enlightenment still recognizes itself even in myths.
Dissolvent rationality for which they rep... the ... Enlighten... is totalitarianism. Enlightenment has always taken the basic principle of myth to be anthropomorphism, the projection onto nature. of the subjective. 6 In this view, the supernatural, spirits and demons, are mirror images of men who allow themselves to be frightened by natural phenomena. Consequently the many mythic figures can all be brought to a common denominator, and reduced to the human subject. Oedipus' answer to the Sphinx's riddle: "It is man!" is the Enlightenment stereotype repeatedly offered as information, irrespective of whether it is faced with a piece of objective intelligence, a bare schematization, fear of evil powers, or hope of redemption. In advance, the Enlightenment recognizes as being an occurrence only what can be apprehended
...unity ...its idea is a system from which all and everything follows. Its rationalist and empiricist versions do not part company on that point. Even though the individual schools may interpret the axioms differently, the structure of scientific unity has always been the same. Bacon's postulate o Cuna scientia universalis, 7 whatever the number of fields of research, is as inimical to the unassignable as Leibniz's mathesis universalis is to discontinuity. The multiplicity of forms is reduced to positional arrangement, history to fact, things to matter. According to Bacon, too, degrees of universality provide an unequivocal logical connection between first principles and observational judgments. De Maistre mocks him for harboring "une idole d'echelle." 8 Loxm... was the major school of unified science. It provided the Enlightenment thinkers with the schema of the calculability of the world. The mythologizing equation of Ideas with numbers in Plato's last writings expresses the longing of all demythologization: number became the canon of the Enlightenment. Thus pl equations dominate bourgeois justice and commodity exchange.
"Is not the rule 'Sinaequalibus aequalia addas, omnia erunt inaequalia,' an axiom of justice as well as of the mathematics? And is there not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and arithmetical and geometrical proportion ?
"9l_g_____.. Scie!Y-._ is fueled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, thaVi. hi_b. does not J!td q___ to numbers; and ultimately to the one, come_ Jtd e !"p - positivism 'Y!___.!L 2:tI -_..!!!__ll!'e .
5. Cf. Hegel, Phaenomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Spirit), Werke, Vol. II, pp. 410 ff.
6. Xenophanes, Montaigne, Hume, Feuerbach, and Salomon Reinach are at one here. See, for Reinach: Orpheus, trans, F. Simmons (London & New York, 1909), pp. 9ff.
7. Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum. Works, Vol. VIII, p. 152.
8. Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg (5ieme entretien), Oeuvres Completes (Lyon, 1891), Vol. IV, p. 256.
9. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Works, Vol. TI, p. 126.
10. Genesis I. 26 (AV).
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
6
Unity is the slogan from Parmenides to Russell. The destruction of gods and qualities alike is insisted upon.
Yet the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were its own products. In the scientific calculation of occurrence, the computation is annulled which thought had once transferred from occurrence into myths. Myth intended report, naming, the narration of the Beginning; but also presentation, confirmation, explanation: a tendency that grew stronger with the recording and collection of myths. Narrative became didactic at an early stage. Every ritual includes the idea of activity as a determined process which magic can nevertheless influence. This theoretical element in ritual won independence in the earliest national epics. The myths, as the tragedians came upon them, are already characterized by the discipline and power that Bacon celebrated as the "right mark." In place of the local spirits and demons there appeared heaven and its hierarchy; in place of the invocations of the magician and the tribe the distinct gradation of sacrifice and the labor of the unfree mediated through the word of command. The Olympic deities are no longer directly identical with elements, but signify them. In Homer, Zeus represents the sky and the weather, Apollo controls the sun, and Helios and Eos are already shifting to an allegorical function. The gods are distinguished from material elements as their
quintessential concepts. From now on, being divides into the logos (which with the progress of philosophy contracts to the monad, to a mere point of reference), and sunt Llh. f, mass ol all things JI.J),d__.J__t!lJeL.without. This single distinction between existence proper and reality engulfs all others. Wim nt ing ct lo...oisitions, the world becomes subject to _ma_-,)__ - this the Jewish creation narrative and the religion of Olympia are - one that would let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." 10 "O Zeus, Father Zeus, yours is the dominion of the heavens, and you oversee the works of man, both wicked and just, and even the wantonness of the beasts; and righteousness
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
is your concern." 11 "For so it is that one atones straightaway, and another later; but should one escape and the threatening decree of the gods not reach him, yet it will certainly be visited at last, if not upon him then upon his children or another generation. "12 Only he who always submits survives in the face of the gods. The awakening of the self is paid for by the acknowledgement of power as the principle of all relations. In view of the unity of this ratio, the divorcement between God and man dwindles to the degree of irrelevancy to which unswervable reason has drawn attention since even the earliest critique of Homer. The creative god and the systematic spirit are alike as rulers of nature. Man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the countenance of the lord and master, and in command.
Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase Q!JlJ,_iL power with aH_nJ;I,tion from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward all things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned to his own ends. In the metamorphosis of the ?_ of living, ...bstract lJJL of c{otllinatioib is ley as always th_, __I1]&J his identity constitutes the unity of nature.
It is a presupposition of the magical invocation as little as the unity of the subject. The shaman's rites were directed to the wind, the rain, the serpent without, or the demon in the sick man, but not to materials or specimens. Magic was not ordered by one, identical spirit: it changed like the cultic masks which were supposed to accord with the various spirits. Magic is utterly untrue, yet in it domination is not yet negated by transforming itself into the pure truth and acting as the very ground
,of the world that has become subject to it. The magician imitates demons; in order to frighten them or to appease them, he behaves frighteningly or makes gestures of appeasement. Even though his task is impersonation, he never conceives of himself
11. Archilochos, fro 87; quoted by Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosoph ie, Vol. n, Pt. 1 (Leipzig, 1911), p. 18.
12. Solon, fro 13.25 et seq., quoted by Deussen, p. 20.
9
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
as does the civilized man for whom the unpretentious preserves of the happy hunting-grounds become the unified cosmos, the inclusive concept for all possibilities of plunder. The magician never interprets himself as the image of the invisible power; yet this is the very image in which man attains to the identity of self that cannot disappear through identification with another, but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrable mask. It is the identity of the spirit and its correlate, the unity of nature, to which the m_licity of qualities falls victim. Disqualified nature becomes the chaotic matter of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes mere possession-abstract identity. In magic there is specific representation. What happens to the enemy's spear, hair or name, also happens to the individual; the sacrificial animal is massacred instead of the god. Substitution in the course of sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind offered up for the daughter, and the lamb for the first-born, still had to have specific qualities, they already represented tnp_rpcies. They already exhibited the non-specificity of the example. But the holiness of the hic et nunc, the uniqueness of the chosen one into which the representative enters, radically marks it off, and makes it unfit for exchange. Science prepares the end of this state of affairs. In science there is no specific representation: and if there are no sacrificial animals, there is no god. But presentation is exchanged for the fungible, universal interchangeability. An atom is smashed not in representation but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit does not represent but, as a mere example, is virtually ignored by the zeal of the laboratory. Because the gl tinct n LI? functional science are so fluid that, everything is gibst !I!l and in the same matter, the "scientific object is petrified and the fixed ritual of former times appears flexible because it aUribJltP.o the other to the one. The world of magic retained distinctions whose traces have disappeared even in linguistic form. 13 The multitudinous affinities Qe1We_!L_J{.j_1_nts are oppressed by the single relation between the subject who bestows meaning and the meaning of ...subject, between rational significance and the chance vehicle of significance.
13. See, for example: Robert H. Lowie, An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1940), pp. 344ff.
10
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
On the magical plane, dream, and image were not mere signs for the thing in question, but were bound up with it by similarity or names.
The relation is one not of intention but of relatedness. Like scienti... ;= i :% slH1 'ir f - l: grounded in the "sovereignty of ideas," which the primitive, like the neurotic, is said to ascribe to himself; 14 there can be no roy... evaluation of mental processes. as against reality where there is no radical distinction between thoughts and reality. The unshakable. confidence in the 'possibility of world domination' 15 which Freud anachronistically ascribes to magic, corresponds to realistic world domination only in terms of a more skilled science. The replacement of the milieu-bound practices.' of the medicine man by all-inclusive industrial technology required first of all the autonomy of ideas in regard to objects that was achieved in the reality-adjusted ego.
As a linguistically expressed totality, whose claim to truth suppresses the older mythic belief, the national religion or patriarchal solar myth is itself an Enlightenment. with which the philosophic form can compare itself on the same level. And now it has its requital. Mythology itself set off the unending process of _I}light_Ilm.entJiL which ever and again, with the inevitability of necessity, every specific theoretic view succumbs to ill d structiv . criticism that it j_.J?!yY. 3..,.b.f!.liet until even the very notions of spirit, of truth and, indeed, enlightenment itself, have become animistic magic. The principle of fatal necessity, which brings low the heroes of myth and derives as a logical consequence from the pronouncement of the oracle, does not merely, when refined to the stringency of formal logic, rule in every rationalistic system of Western philosophy, but itself dominates the series of systems which begins with the hierarchy of the gods and, in a permanent twilight of the idols, hands down an identical content: anger against insufficient righteousness.
14. Cf. Freud, Totem und Tabu (Totem and Taboo), Gesammelte Werke, Vol. IX, pp. 106 ff.
15. Totem und Tabu, p. 110.
11
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
Just realize euruent so enlightenment with yvery ste12 becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology; it receives all its matter from the myths, in order to destroy them; and even as a judge it comes under the mythic curse. It wishes to extricate itself from the process of fate and retribution, while exercising retribution on that process. On the myths everything that happens must atone for having happened. And so it is in enlightenment: the fact becomes null and void, and might as well not have happened. The doctrine of the equivalence of action and reaction asserted the power of repetition over reality, long after men had renounced the illusion that by repetition they could identify themselves with the repeated reality and thus escape its power. But as the magical illusion fades away, the more relentlessly in the name of law repetition imprisons man in the cycle:=that cycle whose objectification in the form of natural law he imagines will ensure his action as a free Elythi.
That and wisdom that holds there is nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played, and all the great thoughts have already been thought, and because all possible discoveries can be construed !I!.. advance and all men are decided on adaptation as the means to self-preservation that dry sagacity merely reproduces the fantastic wisdom that it supposedly rejects: the sanction of fate that in retribution relentlessly remakes what has already been. j:YJ1 .L difference is equalized. That is the verdict which critically determines the limits of possible experience. The identity o eve bin with K is i. that nothing may al the said elimil ical within Enlightenment dissolves the injustice of the old inequality-unmediated lordship and mastery-but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation, in the relation of anyone existent to any other. It does what Kierkegaard praises his Protestant ethic for, and what in the Heraclean epic cycle is one of the primal images of mythic power; it excises the incommensurable. Not only are qualities dissolved in Thought, but men are Drought to actual conformity. The blessing that the market does not enquire after one's birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of the commodities that can be bought in the market.
12
M__,.__r:._.&i__!!)l1_,4" individuality as uniq__ ..il!. ___h case- <li1I__rent to all others, so that it might. all the more surely be made the same as any other. But because the unique self never wholly disappeared, even after the liberalistic epoch, the Enlightenment has always sympathized with the social impulse. .Q__I1ity of the manipulated collective consists in the n_g_Ji.<?!l__u of each individual: for individuality makes a mockery of the kind of society which would turn all individuals into the One collectivity. The horde which so assuredly appears in ' the organization of the Hitler Youth is not a return to barbarism but the triumph of repressive equality, the disclosure through peers of the parity of the right to injustice. The phony Fascist mythology is shown to be the genuine myth of antiquity, insofar as the genuine one saw retribution, whereas the false one blindly doles it out to the sacrifices. Every attempt to break the' natural thralldom, because nature is broken, enters all the more deeply into that natural enslavement. Hence the course of European civilization, Abstraction, the tool of enlightenment, _ats its objects as di ai , the motion of which J!____ it"_ Jiq!1_g_J_u.bem. Under the leveling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), the freed themselves finally came to form that "herd" which Hegel 16 has declared to be the result of the Enlightenment.
The tancenelwe subject and object presupposition, 01.. f J \ t abstraction, is gr opo Vl1J_e Al science from h ihIDgJ1 self y > _'. .' /e -_J!!£!L the idaster itc bie ed, through thein t . The lyrics of Homer and the hymns of the Rig-Veda date from the time of territorial dominion and the secure locations in which a dominant warlike race established themselves over the mass of vanquished natives. 17 The first god among the gods arose with this civil society in which the king, as chieftain of the arms
16. Phanomenologie des Geistes, p. 424.
17. Cf. W. Kirfe!, Geschichte Indiens, in: Propyliienweltgeschichte, Vol. ill, pp: 261ff; and G. Glotz, Histoire Grecque, Vol. I, in: Histoire Ancienne (Paris, 1938), pp. 137 ff.
13
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
the earliest known stages of humanity, lives on in the radiant world of Greek religion. Everything unknown and alien is primary and undifferentiated: that which transcends the confines of experience; whatever in things is more than their previously known reality. What the primitive experiences in this regard is not a spiritual as opposed to a material substance, but the intricacy of the Natural in contrast to the individual. The gasp of surprise which accompanies the experience of the unusual becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, and therefore terror as sacredness. The dualization of nature as appearance and sequence, effort and power, which first makes possible both myth and science, originates in human fear, the expression of which becomes explanation. It is not the, soul which is transposed to nature, as psychologism would have it; mana, the moving spirit, is no projection, but the echo of the real supremacy of nature in the weak souls of primitive men. The separation of the animate and the inanimate, the occupation of certain places by demons and deities, first arises from this pre-animism, which contains the first lines of the separation of subject and object. When the tree is no longer approached merely as tree, but as evidence for an Other, as the location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at one and the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical as through the deity, language is transformed, from technology to language. The concept, which some would see as the sign-unit for whatever is comprised under it, has from the beginning been instead the product of dialectical thinking is w_co__ everything _;;:r:;5: is _hY_y's tha_- _hi_p. itJ-s, only because it becomes that which it is not. That was the original form of objectifying definition, in which concept and thing are separated. The same form which is already far advanced in the Homeric epic and confounds itself in modem positivist science. But this dialectic remains impotent to the extent that it develops from the cry of terror bearing nobility, holds down the conquered to the earth, whereas physicians, soothsayers, craftsmen and merchants see to social intercourse. With the end of a nomadic existence, the social order is created on a basis of fixed property. Mastery and labor are divided. A proprietor like Odysseus manages from a distance a numerous, carefully gradated staff of cowherds, shepherds, swineherds and servants. In the evening, when he has seen from his castle that the countryside is illumined by a thousand fires, he can compose himself for sleep with a quiet mind: he knows that his upright servants are keeping watch lest wild animals approach, and to chase thieves from the preserves which they are there to protect."18 The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the basis of actual domination: the dissolution of the magical heritage, of the old diffuse ideas, by conceptual unity, expresses the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free. The individuality that learned order and subordination in the subjection of the world, soon wholly equated truth with the regulative thought without whose fixed distinctions universal truth cannot exist. Together with mimetic magic, it tabooed the knowledge which really concerned the object. Its hatred was extended to the image of the vanquished former age and its imaginary happiness. The chthonic gods of the original inhabitants are banished to the hell to which, according to the sun and light religion of Indra and Zeus, the earth is transformed.
Heaven and hell, however, hang together. Just as the name of Zeus, in non-exclusive cults, was given to a god of the underworld as well as to a god of light;19 just as the Olympian gods had every kind of commerce with the chthonic deities: so the good and evil powers, salvation and disaster, were not unequivocally distinct. They were linked together like coming up and passing away, life and death, summer and winter. The gloomy and indistinct religious principle that was honored as mana in
20. This is how Hubert and Mauss interpret "sympathy," or mimesis: "L'un est Ie tout, est dans I'un, la nature triomphe de la nature.') H. Hubert and M. Mauss, "Theone generale de la Magie," in: L'Annee, Sociologique, 1902-3, p. 100.
18. Glotz, p. 140.
19. See Kurt Eckermann, lahrbuch der Religionsgeschichte und Mythologie (Halle, 1845), Vol. I, p. 241; and O. Kern, Die Religion der Griechen (Berlin, 1926), Vol. I, pp. 181 ff.
14
15
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
which is the duplication, the tautology, of terror itself. The gods cannot take fear away from man, for they bear its petrified sound with them as they bear their names. Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown.
That determines the course of demythologization, of enlightenment, which compounds the animate with the inanimate just as myth compounds the inanimate with the animate. Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is no more than a so to speak universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear. The revenge of the primitive for death, when visited upon one of his kin, was sometimes appeased by reception of the murderer into his own family;21 this, too, signified the infusion of alien blood into one's own, the generation of immanence. The mythic dualism does not extend beyond the environs of existence. The world permeated by mana and even the world of Indian and Greek myth know no exits, and are eternally the same. Every birth is paid for with death, every fortune with misfortune. Men and gods may try in their short space to assess fate in other terms than the blind course of destiny, but in the end existence triumphs over them. Even their justice, which is wrested from fatality, bears the marks of fatality: it corresponds to the look which men-primitives, Greeks and barbarians alike-cast from a society of pressure and misery on the circumambient world. Hence, for mythic and enlightened justice, guilt and atonement, happiness and unhappiness were sides of an equation. Justice is subsumed in law. The shaman wards off danger. _Y_IE:__ of its image. Equty ef __is his instrument; and ,_!:!ival_JJ.oe regulates punishment and r_w__!p:}Il___i'Y!zation.
The mythic representations can also be traced back in their entirety to natural conditions. J u_t as the Gemini-the constellation of Castor and Pollux-and all other symbols of duality refer to the inevitable cycle of nature, which itself has its ancient sign in the symbol of the egg from which they came, so the balance held by Zeus, which symbolizes the justice of the
21. Cf. Westermarck, Ursprung del Moralbegriffe (Leipzig 1913) Vol. 2 p. 402.
16
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
entire patriarchal world, refers back to mere nature. The step from chaos to civilization, in which nature-conditions exert their power no longer directly but through the medium of the _' '1iU_a_ consciousness, has not changed the principle of equivalence. Indeed, men paid for this very step by worshipping what they were once in thrall to only in the same way as all", other creatures. Before, the fetishes were subject to the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself has become a_tish. The blindfold over Justitia's eyes does not only mean that there should be no assault upon justice, but that justice gge L noL
The doctrine of the priests was symbolic in the sense that in it sign and image were one. Just as hieroglyphs bear witness, so the word too originally had a pictorial function, which was transferred to myths. Like magical rites, _)'1.l,1s si_r self-repetitive nature, which is the core of the symbolic: a state of being or a process that is presented as eternal, because it incessantly becomes actual once more by being realized in symbolic form. Inexhaustibility, unending renewal and the permanence of the signified are not mere attributes of all symbols, but their essential content. The representations of creation in which the world comes forth from the primal mother, the cow, or the egg, are symbolic-unlike the Jewish Genesis. The elders' mockery of the all-too-human gods left the core untouched. The gods were not wholly individual. They _,._h______ tling..5)I mana in them, for they embodied natural ._l:1ni_eJ__L power. With their pre-animistic characteristics they became prominent in the Enlightenment. Beneath the coy veil of the Olympian chronique scandaleuse, there was already apparent the doctrine of the mixture, pressure, and impact at the elements which presently _.f?_!___E_.c;u__lf as science, and. turned the myths into fantastic images. With the clean separation of science and poetry, the division of labor it had already helped to effect was extended to language. For science the word is a sign: as sound, image, and word proper it is distributed among the different arts, and is not permitted to reconstitute itself by their addition, by synesthesia, or in the composition of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
17
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
As a system of signs, language is required to resign itself to calculation in order to know nature, and must discard the claim to be like her. As image _i_regYir to resign itself to mirror L. X:\ \ j_ _agery n q_e(!2J?tt nature entire and DJ1J_L_i_t§:£liiIi!l t_._£___.!:.. With the progress of enlightenment, only authentic works of art were able to avoid the mere imitation of that which already is. The practicable antithesis of art and science, which tears them apart as separate areas of culture in order to make them both manageable as areas of culture ultimately allows them, by dint of their own tendencies, to blend with one another even as exact contraries. In its neo-positivist version, science becomes aestheticism, a system of detached signs devoid of any intention that would transcend the system: it becomes the game which mathematicians have for long proudly asserted is their concern. JJ!l!.lh_ art of integral representability, even in its techniques, subscribed to positive science, and in fact adapts to the world yet again, becoming jciological duplication, partisan reproduction. Th_ separation of si_--_n_ image J. (,/ _is J____edi__!_. __?-1!ld _.unf9_n.$cioiis_ self-satisfaction Cau__.J_ once again J?__._2!E___ __r-?_t_ti:__,-_h_-i!_L<?f t9__tWQ-J Isolated principles tends toward the destruction of truth _'tn the relationship-of mtuifionT[e.-dITectp_;ception) and concept, philosophy already discerned the gulf which opened with that separation, and again tries in vain to close it: philosophy, indeed, is defined by this very attempt. For the most part it has stood on the side from which it derives its name. Plato banned poetry with the same gesture that positivism used against the theory of ideas (I deenlehre) . With his muchrenowned art, Homer carried out no public or private reforms, and neither won a war nor made any discovery. We know of no multitude of followers who might have honored or adored him. Art must first prove its utility.22 For art. as for the Jews, imitation is proscribed Reason to religion imprecate and conJ!_rp.Q-t1}LRr.i].s._p-.k...J)Cmagic-.e!!9bantmen. Even in resigned self-distancing from real existence, as art, it remains dishonest; its practitioners become travelers, latter-day nomads who find no
22. Cf. Plato, Republic, Book X. 18
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
abiding home under the established what-has-come-to-be. ._ature must no longer be _uenced by. approximation, but mastered .bJ 1__i:I!J._e" work of art still has something -in common with 'jID__bantnIent:.jt ,posits. its own,_..sel{-encIosed,area, .which is .withdr__J.Lfrqm,Jhe- context of profane existence,",_nd in w.bi9-Jt
"special laws.. apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality. .ThJs very renuncia.tion of influence, which distinguishes art from magical sympathy, .!_t_ins the.. magic- heritage all the more surely It .places- the pure. image in co_trastJo- ani!p-_!e. - existence__.the_elements of whic;h itabs_rbs. It is in t__"" principle of the work of art)-5)ra_,§-c"7 t__!__=,__!I!!>J_ce_'-cj:CL."bec what the new, terrifying occurrence became in the primitive's magic: the appearance of the whole in the particular. In the-work-of.art that duplication still occurs .Qy which_the thing_appealed-as spiritual, .as-the--'expression-of mana._J'hi_Lc;onstitutes jts_.aura. As _ .__r___i'?I!__>_f_,__<?_a1ity. aI!)'!Ys claim to the dignity of the absolute. This sometimes causes philosophy to allow it precedence to conceptual knowledge. According to Schelling, art comes into play where knowledge forsakes mankind. For him it is "the prototype of science, and only where there is art may science enter in. "23 In his theory, the separation of image and sign is "wholly canceled by every single artistic representation. "24 The bourgeois world was but rarely open to such confidence in art. Where it restricted knowledge, it usually did so not for the sake of art, but m order to make room for faith. Through faith the militant religiousness of the new age hoped to reconcile Torquemada, Luther, Mohammed, spirit and -real life. But faith is a privative concept: it is destroyed as faith if it does not continually display its contradistinction to, or conformity with, knowledge. Since it is always set upon the restriction of knowledge, it is itself restricted. :!'he a_pt 01. Protestant faith to find, as in prehistory, !!!e trans__J}denjalE!i!l___ which
23. Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, S. 5, Werke, Abt. 1, Vol. II, p. 623. '
24. Ibid., p. 626.
19
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
belief cannot exist) - direc!ly in t!!___.!__!!_. and to reinvest this with symbolic power, qhas b__E_P.aJdJor:__viJE__1?_di_I.!__.t_ the word, and not to th._" _ac;red,-_long as fattl! .reII!_s un J?._srfatm.gly tied" -_- as., frlendor foe-"..,-to knowledge, it. perpetuates the separatioIl in",Jhe_very cours_ , of the .stplggl_ Jo
.Qy_rcome it: its fanaticism is the occasion of its untruth, the objective admission that he who only has faith, for that very reason no longer has it. Bad conscience is its second nature. In the secret consciousness of the deficiency-necessarily inherent in faith-of its immanent contradiction in making reconciliation a vocation, lies the reason why the integrity of all believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous thing. The atrocities 91jjr_- _I).d sword,£QlJnter:-.R_.fQrm,atiQnand, R_f. Qrmati(:m".bay__ occurred not as exaggerations J:>u_ as realizatiQIlS,.oCthe prin'Cfp!_:or troth itself. Faith constantly reveals it_,_lf_!___=QfJ]1e _ame_ cuL asfue _orfd:@Story...wPIcn:-if-woutd_,dictate ,.,tQ;-,in modem times, indeed, it becomes its favorite instrument, its particular stratagem. .ItJ__.:not merely. the En1igh__@l_I!!_,_f the eighteenth century that, as Hegef confurn:ec4 'is relentless but= as no one knew better than he-:!ge".advaJ1..ce_pf though_ it__lf. The lowest and the highest insight alike manifest that distance from truth which makes apologists liars. __!_____xical nature ",01. faith ultimately degenerating tJLs\\Tip. eL and 6ec§__s. the v' mYtb,.Qtthe..tw.entieth century; and its irrationality turns it into an instruIJ?ent of rational ad,!!lJni__I_!!PI).".by_,th___h..9!lY_,_!ilig_!: ed _, tl)e}: stee__soc..i_JY_lQ)Y!!_.HJ?_¥.l>arism. .
When language enters history its masters are priests and sorcerers. Whoever harms the symbols is, in the name of the supernatural powers, subject to their earthly counterparts, whose representatives are those chosen organs of society. What happened previously is hid in darkness. The dread which gives to mana, wherever it is met with in ethnology, is always sanctioned-at least by the tribal elders. Unidentified, volatile mana was rendered consistent by men and forcibly materialized. Soon the magicians peopled every spot with emanations and made a multiplicity of sacred rites concordant with the variety of sacred places. They expanded their professional knowledge and their influence with the expansion of the spirit world and
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
its characteristics. The nature of the sacred being transferred itself to the magicians who were privy to it. In the first stages of nomadic life the members of the tribe still took an individual part in the process of influencing the course of nature. Men hunted game, while women did the work which could be produced without strict command. It is impossible to determine to what extent habit contributed to so simple an arrangement. In it, the world is already divided into the territory of power and the profane area; as the emanation of mana, the course of nature is elevated to become the norm, and submission to it is required. But even though, despite all submission, the savage nomad still participated in the magic which determined the lines of that submission, and clothed himself as his quarry in order to stalk it, in later times intercourse with spirits and submission were assigned to different classes: the power is on the one side, and obedience on the other. For the vanquished (whether by alien tribes or by their own cliques), the recurrent, eternally similarla.tJJ,_a1,_proces.ses. become. the. rhythgL9.t lalJoraccoJding to the. !:>eat of cudgel and whip, which resgunds in every barbaric 4ru.IIl'and every monotonous ritu_.. The symbols undertake a J_!ishistic function. In the process, the recurrence of nature _Pic_jh_y . sigmfy 'is"always the permanence of the -'social pres=r-;rt sure which they represent.-Ihe dread_objectified. as ...a fixed"'-'s _age becomes the sign of the established domination of the .privileged. Such is the fate of universal con_epts, even when",; they have discarded everything pictorial. Even the deductive _-2_-___!lc_-.-!_fle2ts _hi_Jarc;b,y- a.nd_.c;Q_r.d.Ql1-J us_tb._ :; firsL_aJ_go ries_Iepres ente(LthfL_organize4-tribe.._ _ _Lj!.§_ ,po Vf_ r er the 1}d___d__ also the while }?g___!.:_:peI!__n_!, , £onn_£@.n,-P!Qgf_.s._19.n",.anrumon_,of.concepts IS- grounded,m ; !II e.__CP!!:'_§RQJ]..ding,-co ndi tio__of. .so.ciaL.rea1it.y_tha.t J_, .,9_ - t4_ ; .divisioJJ...ptlabOI:.,25 But of course this social character of categories of thought is not, as Durkheim asserts, an expression of social solidarity, but _vidence of the in_crutable-unity-ef-society and domination. Domination lends increased consistency and force tatoo Asocial whole in which it establishes itself. The
25. See E. Durkheim, "De Quelques Formes Primitives de Classification," in: L'Annie Sociologique, Vol. IV, 1903, pp. 66 ff.
21
division of labor to which domination tends serves the dominated whole for the end of self-preservation. But then the whole as whole, the manifestation of its immanent reason, necessarily leads to the execution of the particular. To the individual,cI.5.?}!lJ_ation appears to be the universal: reason in actuality, Through the' divIsIon of labor imposed on them, the power of all the members of society-for whom as such there is no other _ourse-:-amounts over and over again to the realization of the whole, whose rationality is reproduced in this way. What is done to all by the few, always occurs as the subjection of individuals by the many: social repression always exhibits the masks of repression by a collective. It is this unity of the collectivity and domination, and not direct social universality, solidarity, which is expressed in thought forms._.yirtue, of the c__im !Q universal. Y.P.li._ty, th_"philosophic concepts with which Plato anci Aristotle represented the world, elevated the conditIOn__!heJ,.wei_jised, to substantiate .to the level of' true reality. These concepts originated, as Vico puts it,26 in the marketplace of Athens; they reflected with equal clarity the laws of physics, the equality of full citizens and the inferiority of women, children and slaves. _nguage itself g_ve wh_-!_____rte_ the conditions of .40mination, _$- u!Ji__r§fllit-y", that they had assumed as the means of intercourse of a bourgeois society. The __hX_!_'!L_I!lEhasi._,._. an_L_-_1:?:£!!2P, ,J:>Y-!!1.___ _.o_ ideas., and n.orm&,_were..no_more_th_. a.c,hypostatization- otthe. rigidity and exclu_iYeness_w.hich. conC;:,_pt_,- wef(_, generally compelled to, assume where_e.Ll_guage...unitedJhe.,coriununity-,.oLrulers with _iving of_<?rders. As a mere means of reinforcinK.. the social power of lang1J__Ljq_!S..jJ_f_!lle ,,_L!_e more superfluous.
This power grew and the language of science prepared the way for their ultimate desuetude. The suggestion of something still akin to the _ did not inhere in conscious justification; instead the unity of collectivity and domination is revealed in the universality necessarily assumed by the bad' content of language, both metaphysical and scientific. Metaphysi_al apology betrayed the injustiCe of the status quo least
26. Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova (Principles of a New Science of the Common Nature of Nations).
22
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
of all in the incongruence of concept and actuality. In the impartiality of scientific language, that which is powerless has wholly lost any means of expression, and only the given finds its neutral sign. This kind of neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics. Ultimately, the Enlightenment consumed not just the symbols but their successors, universal concepts, and spared no remnant of metaphysics apart from the abstract fear of the collective from which it arose. The situation of concepts in the face of the Enlightenment is like that of men of private means in regard to industrial trusts: none can feel safe. Even if logical positivism still allowed leeway to probability, ethnological positivism puts it in its place: "Our vague ideas of chance and quintessence are pale shadows of this much richer notion"27 that is, of magical substance.
As a nominalist movement, the Enlightenment calls a halt before the' nomen, the exclusive, . precise concept, the proper name. Whether-as some assert28_proper names were originally species names as well, can no longer be ascertained, yet the former have not shared the fate of the latter. The substantial ego refuted by Hume and Mach is not synonymous with the name. In Jewish religi°I!, in which.!h__i__a ..of _th_.,patriarchate culminates.lILthe_destruction..oLmy.th, the. bond between .name amL beingjs stHL1:_,c..ogp.g_d. in th_J:)Ji.1! on pronou!1.,_il!g__h_ name of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism conciliates magic J?y negating li}n_i __ ) __.a:_§f._G:9_cJ..-JeWiSli religion allows no word that would alleviate the despair of all that is mortal. It associates. hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite lies as truth. __arantee of salv_ti°E... lies in the rejection of any belief that would replace it: it is knowledge obtained in the denlluciation Df i11ll_i(m Admittedly, the-negation-is not abstract. The only ___ing of every position without distinction, the
stereotype formula of vanIty, as used .2Y__ud_s_tS"itself !Lbove the prohibition _g_inst nami_j; the AbsohIte with names: /'
just as far above as its contra:ry_.E:nthe.ism; or itLcaric.atUl'4
27. Hubert and Mauss, op. cit., p. 118.
., 28. See Tonnies, "Philosophische Terminologie," in: Psychologisch
Soziologische A nsicht (Leipzig, 1908), p. 31.
23
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
_geois skepticism. Explanations of the world as all or nothing are mythologies, and .guanillte_d3padsj_redempJion __e
sublimated magic p-ractices.::. The self-satisfaction of knowing
in advance and the transfiguration of negativity into redemption are untrue forms of resistance against deception. The justness Q! the im_g_}_,p_eservedin- the faithful pursuit of its prohi_i_.
- tiqn.. This pursuit, -"'determinate negativity"29 does not' receive from the sovereigritYof'the abstract concept any immunity against corrupting intuition, as does skepticism, to which both true and false are equally vain. Determinate negation rejects ,the- defective ideas of the absolute, the idols, differently-than J1oes .rigorism" which confronts them with the Idea that they
, caDl1Qtmatch up to. P!alec__c, _o_ the _ontrary, interprets every image a_ writing._!_shows how the .admission of its falsity is to be read in the lines of its features_a confession that deprives ltofl__p,£_er-___- appr_p'n____s)t _<?r truth. With the notion '0£
determinate negativitY,JI_el- revealed an dement that distin, guishes the Enlightenment from the positivist degeneracy to 1 which he attributes it. By ultimately making the conscious. re; suIt of the, wh.ole process of 'negatio1k-:totaljty jn system _nd
in history---:-Jnto an. absolute, he of course contravened the / prohibition and himself _P!_d }__.2,.._.Y!!I9Jogy.
This did not happen merely to his philosophy as the apotheosis of progressive thought, but to the Enlightenment itself, as the sobriety whiph it thought distinguished it from Hegel and from metaphysics. \for _nlightenme.nLis. :i_ t()t_litarhm __ _ny systemL Its untruth does not consist in what its romantic enemies have always reproached it for: analytical method, return to elements, dissolution through reflective thought; but instead in the fact that f<?r enlightenment thJLp-roc_ssjLalW__Y-_
de_cid_,dJrom the -_t:irt}When in mathematical proced!1J__1bL
!1!!!rn-IDYI1-becomes-1he__unknown..,quantity _of_.an ,.equation,-this mgks it m_ the wellJrnown...e¥.en-before-any-value..is,inserted. Y_atl!E_, before and after the quantum theory, is that which is )0 be com£___nd_it!TIJ!!!1el!!_!!£_J_Y; even what cannot be made to agree, indissolubility and irrationality, is converted by means 29. Phiinomenologie des Geistes, p. 65.
24
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
of mathematical theorems. In the anticipatory iidentip.cation of the whol!Y___E.ce!ved andmaiijematized world with truth, en
1ig',bte_eI1t intends to secure itself against the return of the
mythic. It confounds thought and mathematics. In this way the litter IS, so to speak, released and made into an absolute instance. "An infinite world, in this case a world of idealities, is conceived as one whose objects do not accede singly, imperfectly, and as if by chance to our cognition, but are attained
by a rational, systematically unified method-in a process of
infinite progression-so that each object is ultimately apparent according to its full inherent being. . . In the Galilean mathematization of the world, however, this selfness is idealized under the guidance of the new mathematics: in modern terms, it becomes itself a mathematical multiplicity."3O Thinking objectifies itself to become an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it. _n1ight,_p.me_31 , has put
aside the classic requirement of thinking about thoughJ._'Flchie
IS its extremeH manifestation-b-ecause ii-wants 'to avoid the
precept of dictating practice that Fichte himself wished to obey.
M_t1!_p1ati_al procedure. became, so to speak, _._._!.itual 9f
.tbinkp1"g._ In 's'pite of the axiomatic self-restriction, it establishes itself as necessary and objective: Jt!'Hms..thcmght into a thing, an" instrument_-.which.js its,.oWlL.termJor.jt. But this kind of mimesis, in which universal thought is equalized, so turns the actual into the unique, that even atheism itself is subjected to the ban on metaphysics. .For...Rosi!ivis!!!____!1!c!I_!_P!__en!_._!l1e
fo,urt, _fjudgm_nt ofenligp,(e.I!e.d reason, to digres_J!!__2!!tel
Jlg!blt?__o_lds is no longer merely f'?_bidden, but meaningless -PIattIe. It does' not need_forlunately-fo he atheistic, because
objectified thinking cannot even raise the problem. The, posi
\tivisL.censor--lets-the.established cultescape.as_wm
,,as a cognjJion-free special _,<?f socia1____;,,!»!_._4_L)Yil!
30. Edmund Husserl, "Die Krisis der europliischen Wissenschaften una die transzendentale Phiinomenologie," in: Philosophia (Belgrade, 1936), pp. 95ft"
31. Cf. Schopenhauer, Parerga una Paralipomena, Vol. n, S. 356;
Werke, ed. Deussen, VoL V, p. 671.
25
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
\ p_v_I permiLthaLdeniaLot it-which..itseILclaims. to be knowl, _esIge...For the scientific mind, the separation of thought from . business for the purpose of adjusting actuality, departure from the privileged area of real existence, is as insane and selfdestructive as the primitive magician would consider stepping out of the magic circle he has prepared for his invocation; in both cases the offense against the taboo will actually result in the malefactor's ruin. The mastery of nature draws the circle into which the criticism of pure reason banished thought. Kant joined the theory of its unceasingly laborious advance into infinity with an insistence on its deficiency and everlasting limi ,_", tation. His judgment is an oracle. There is no form of being in
, the world that science could not penetrate, but what can be
,// penetrated by science is not being. According to Kant, philosophic
'_._ judgment aims at the new; and yet it recognizes nothing new,
;' since it always merely recalls what reason has always deposited
i ,in the object. But there is a reckoning for this form of thinking that considers itself secure in the various departments of science -secure from the dreams of a ghost-seer: world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject himself; nothing is left of him but that eternally same I think that must accompany all my ideas. Subject and object are both rendered ineffectual.. The abstract self, which ju._!ifies r_cord:-m,_1:cing and sys-. tematizatiOll, 'has --nothIng-set oV_! _gainst it but the abstract material'which -pos'sesses rio" other quality than to be .a substrate , of such poss__sio__ The equation of spirit and world arises _ eventually, but only with a mutual restriction of both sides. Th_
I re____!o_, o._ t?o_ght to _ math_matica_ aIWaratus con_eals the
i sanctIon or tIle world-as Its own yardstIcIl. What appears to be
the triumph of subjective rationality, tlie- subjection of all
reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the obedient' subjection of reason to what is directly given. What is abandoned
is the whole claim and approach of knowledge: to comprehend the given as such;- not -merely to determine the abstract spatio
temporal relations of the facts which allow them just to be grasp_d, but on the contrary to conceive them as the superficies, as mediated conceptual moments which come to fulfill
26
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
ment only in the development of their social, historical, and
human significance:} Ib:e_- task of cognition does not consist in
_f .. ' , '
mere apprehension, classification, and calculation, but in the
deterininafe negation of each im-mediacy. Mathematical for
,.." '_._._
malism, however, whose, medium IS number, the most abstract
form of the immediate, instead holds thinking firmly to mere immediacy..Factuality.wins th_uday; cognition is restricted to its r__t__i.on; and thought becomes mere tautology. The more the machinery of thought subjects existence to itself, the more blind its resignation in reproducing existence. Hence enlightenment returns to mythology, which it never really knew how to elude. For in its figures' mythology had the essence of the status quo: cycle, fate, and domination of the world reflected as the truth and deprived of hope. .In, b<?!:b. the pregnancy of the mythical imag_ a_d ,the clarity of the scientific formula, the everlasting__s_ .,of, the factual is confirmed and mere e_stence pure and simple--expressed as the meaning which it forbids. The world as a gigantic analytic judgment, the only one left over from all the dreams of science, is of the same mold as the cosmic myth which associated the cycle of spring and autumn with the kidnapping of Persephone. The uniqueness of the mythic process, which tends to legitimize factuality, is deception. Originally the carrying off of the goddess was directly synonymous with the dying of nature. It repeated itself every autumn, and even the repetition was not the result of the buried one but the same every time. With the rigidification of the consciousness of time, the process was fixed in the past as a unique one, and in each new cycle of the. seasons an attempt was made ritually to appease fear of death by recourse to what was long past. But the separation is ineffective. Through the establishment of a unique past, the cycle takes on the character of in_itability, and dread radiates from the age-old occurrence to make every event its mere repetition. The absorption of factuality, whether into legendary prehistory or into mathematical formalism, the symbolical, relation of the contemporary to the mythic process in the rite or to the abstract category in science, makes the new appear '.. as the predetermined, which is accordingly the old. Not exis
27
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
tence but knowledge is without hope, for in the pictorical or mathematical symbol it appropriates and perpetuates existence as a schema. .
In the enlig___ne_._.__v'Orld, mythology has entered into the '. :"._ profa__.-l__!!S blank purity, the reality which haS been Cleansed .,.' of demons and their conceptual descendants assumes the numi'. ._. \"... nousd1araCter whfcb the ancient world attributed to demons.
'J" u__er-ihe' titi_ 'of brute facts2..Jhe. social injustic_ from which
they proceed J._..!1.QW- as ._suredly sacred a preserve as the medic!I!_.man- __s sa_rosanct by reason of the protection of his gods. It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of men-even those of the individual to
himself-were bewitched. The individual is reduced to the nodal
Eoint of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected <?_ ._ir!l- _imism __plrit!l._l__d the object,-_w__re__j!1._1:l__
/ tE._.Ji_!!L.o"bjectifies._the- spirits oLme_ Automatically, the eco
nomic apparatus, even before total planning, equips commodities with the values which decide human behavior. Since, with the end of free exchange, commodities lost all their economic qualities except for fetishism, the latter has extended its arthritic influence over all aspects of social life. Through the countless agencie__ mass £r.9____!!on and its culture the conventionalized modes of 6diavior are impressed on the individual as the only natural; re.sp-ectaQl_,..and rational °l!__. He-defines-himself only as a thing, as a static element, as success or failure. His yardstick is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful approximation to the objectivity of his function and the models established for it. Everything else, idea and crime, suffers the force of the collective, which monitors it from the classroom to the trade union. But even the threatening collective. belongs only to the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate it as the instrument of power. Its brutality, which keeps the individual up to scratch, r_presents the true quality of men as little as value represents the things whicn he consumes. The demonically distorted form which things and men have assumed in the light of unprejudiced cognition, indicates domination, the principle which effected the
28
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
specification of mana in spirits and gods and occurred in the jugglery of magicians and medicine men. The fatality by means of which prehistory sanctioned the incomprehensibility of death is transferred to wholly comprehensible real existence. The noontide panic fear in which men suddenly became aware of nature as totality has found its like in the panic which nowa
days is ready to break out at every moment: men expect that. the world, which is without any issue, will be set on fire by a totality which they themselves are and over which they have no control.
The mythic terror feared by the Enlightenment accords with myth. Enlightenment discerns it not merely in unclarified concepts and words, as demonstrated by semantic language-criticism, but in any human assertion that has no place in the ultimate context of self-preservation. Spinola's ItConatus sese conservandi primum et unicum virtutis est fundamentum"32 contains the true maxim of all Western civilization, in which the religious and philosophical differences of the middle class are reconciled. The self ( which, according to the methodical e_:' tirpation of all natural residues because they are mythological, must no longer be either body or blood, or soul, or even the natural I), once sublimated into the transcendental or logical subject, would form the refe__s!. point of reason, of the deter
minative instance of action. Whoever resigns himself to lif_-_ . without any rational reference to self -preservation would, according to the Enlightenment-and Protestantism-regress to t prehistory. Impulse as such is as _ythic as superstition; to serve!
the god not postulated by the self is as idt'otic as drunkenness. Progress has prepared the same fate for both adoration and descent into a state of directly natural being, and has anathematized both the self-abandonment of thought and that of pleasure. The social work of every individual in bourgeois society is mediated through the principle of self; for one, labor will bring an increased return on capital; for others, the energy for extra labor. But the more the process of self-preservation is effected by the bourgeois division of labor, the more it requires the selfalienation of the individuals who must model their body and 32. Ethica, Pars. IV. Propos, XXII. Coroll.
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
soul according to the technical apparatus. This again is taken into account by enlightened thought: in the end the transcendental subject of cognition is apparently abandoned as the last reminiscence of subjectivity and replaced by the much smoother work of automatic control mechanisms. ._ubjectivity has given way to the logic of the allegedly indifferent rules of the game, in order to dictate all the more unrestrainedly. Positivism, which
\finally did not spare thought itself, the chimera in a cerebral form, has removed the very last insulating instance between in
.' dividual behavior and the social norm. The technical process, into which the subject has objectified itself after being removed from the consciousness, is free of the ambiguity of mythic thought as of all meaning altogether, because reas___l_e!L _as become the mere instrument of th_ all-inclusive- '_conomic apparatus. It serves as a general tool, useful for the manufacture of all other tools, firmly directed toward its end, as fateful as the precisely calculated movement of material production, whose result for mankind is beyond all calculation. At last its old am
- bi_i.2I.!2.J___ a pure organ of en9s, has been realized. TheexC1u
- -- . . ""-'" _ -'-'-_'---,
siveness of logical laws origInates in this uruque functional
significance, and ultimately in the compulsive nature of selfpreservation. And self-preservation repeatedly culminates in the choice between survival and destruction, apparent again in the principle that of two contradictory propositions only one can be true and only one false. The formalism of this principle, and of the entire logic in which form it is established, derives from the opacity and complexity of interests in a society in which the maintenance.of forms and the preservation of individuals coincide only by chance. The derivation of thought from logic ratifies in th_ lecture rppm the r_ft__a.tloI!..S?(m!n-i!l._!fi_}actory'-and
-!he offic_ In this way the taboo encroaches upon the amitlie:. matizing power, and enlightenment upon the spirit which it itself comprises. Then, however, nature as true self-preservation is released by the very process which promised to extirpate it, in the individual as in the collective destiny of crisis and armed
_onfliCt. If the only norm that remains for theory. is the ideal of
_nified science, practice must be subjected to the irrepressible . process of world history. The self that is wholly comprehended
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
by civilization resolves itself in an element of the inhumanity
which from the beginning has aspired to evade civilization. The
primordial fear of losing one's own name is realized. For civili
zation, pure natural existence, animal and vegetative, was the
absolute danger. One after the other, mimetic, mythic and meta
physical modes of behavior were taken as superseded eras, any
reversion to which was to be feared as implying a reversion of the self to that mere state of nature from which it had estranged
itself with so huge an effort, and which therefore struck such
terror into the self. In every century, any living reminiscence of olden times, not only of nomadic antiquity but all the more of
the pre-patriarchal stages, was most rigorously punished and
extirpated from human consciousness. The sp!__- o_.___ght__
IDent replaced the fire and the rack by the stigma it attached to
all irrationality, because it led to corruption. Hedonism was moderate, finding the extreme no less odious than did Aristotle.
The bourgeois ideal of naturalness intends not amorphous n_
-;;_ {lire, but the virtuous mean. Promiscuity and asceticism, excess'
. I -and hunger, are directly identical, despite the a!ltagonlsm, as
____ of disintegration. By subjecting the whole of life to the,\ .
demands of its maintenance, the dictatorial minority guarantees,1 \ .
together with its own security, the persistence of the whole. J
From Homer to modem times, the dominant spirit wishes to steer between the Scylla of a return to mere reproduction and
the Charybdis of unfettered fulfillillent; it has always mistrusted
. ......
any star oth_r than that of the lesser evil. The new German pagans and warmongers want to set pleasure free once mo!_.
_ut under th__re of labor, through t__ centuries, pleasure._
.has leafQ.ed___!f-hatred, and therefor__j!l.!h_._st!lte of totalitarian 1
_man_lP__t4_n remains mean andJii.s.able.d_by-self_cont_mE!. It l
remains in the grip of the self -preservation to which it once
trained reason-deposed in the meantime. At the turning points at-Western civilization, from the transition to Olympian religion
up to the Renaissance, Reformation, and bourgeois atheism,
whenever new nations and classes more firmly repressed myth,
I the fear of uncomprehended, threatening nature, the conse
Auenee of its very materialization and objectification, was re
uced to animistic superstition, and the subjugation of nature
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
as made the absolute purpose of life within and without. If
in the end s.elf-preservation has been auto_ated, so reason has
been abandoned by those who, as administrators of production,
entered upon its inheritance and now fear it in the persons of
the disinherited. The essence of enlightenment is the alternative
_.whose ineradicability is that of domination. Men have always
had to choose between their subjection to nature or the sub
jjection o_ nature to !he Self. With t_e extension o.f t?e b_urgeois
commodIty economy, the dark honzon of myth IS IllumIned by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition. Under the pressure of domination human labor has always led away from myth-but under domination always returns to the jurisdiction of myth.
The entanglement of myth, domination, and labor is preserved in one of the Homeric narratives. Book XII of the Odyssey tells of the enco_nter with the Sirens. Their allureA1_n! is _t_h_t of Josing_on_s-elf. in.-:tlle F-ist. But the hero to whom the temptation is offered has reached maturity through suffering. Throughout the many mortal perils he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the individual,. has been confirmed for him. The regions of time part for him as do water, earth, and air. For him, the flood of that-which-was has retreated from the rock of the present, and the future lies cloudy on the horizon. What Odysseus left behind him entered into the nether world; for the self is still so close to prehistoric myth, from whose womb it tore itself, 1h_____veIT...q_p._-_)(: perienced past becomes myt__!£...Erehistory. And it seeks to encounter"il1it myth through the fixed orderOf time. The threefold schema is intended to .lree_. the- presenLmomenLfrom-1he E9JYer oLthe.pasLby..referring..that power. behind the...absolute
pyarrier. of ,tp..e_ un!_p__atable_and_placingjt__Lthe_.disposaLoLthe
J'__L_!_p_!lcti__a.t>._e _tc.gowle.Q.ge_ The compulsion .!Q_J:e.§_.1l_. ,_]1_!J._ g_n_____h.a! J__li vin gl_stead=_QlJ!sJn.gj.J,- __Jhe - mateJi_
£tP!9gres$- was appeased only in art: to which history itself ap
pertains as a presentation of past life. So long as art declines to pa;8S as cognition and is thus '!cp"arated frqn:LP!__ti_e, _a1 \ practice tolerates it _, it toler_te.__p)_asure: But the Sirens' song has not yet been rendered powerless by reduction to the condi
32
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
tion of art. They know "everything that ever happened on this so fruitful earth, "83 including the events in which Odysseus himself took part, "all those things that Argos' sons and the Trojans suffered by the will of the gods on the plains of Troy."34 While they directly evoke the recent past, with the irresistible promise of pleasure as which their song is heard, they threaten the patriarchal order which renders to each man his life only in return
for his full measure of time. Whoever falls for their trickery must perish, whereas only perpetual presence of mind forces an existence from nature. Even though the Sirens know all that has - happened, they demand the future as the price of that knowledge, andJhe pf.9.mise of t.b_qRPy-_!:__urn is the d___ption with whic_!__e past ensnares the one who longs for it. Odysseus is warned by Circe_ tliat-diviriity'-6Creversionlo the animal, whom he resisted and who therefore gives him strength to resist other powers of disintegration. But the allurement of the Sirens remains superior; no one who hears their song can escape. Men had to do fearful things to themselves before the self, the identi
. cal, purposive, and virile nature of man, was formed, and some: _}pg 9f thgU__u_S __!_f}yery childhood. The strain of holding
'. the I together adheres.-to'tlie-TIri""an sfages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it. The narcotic intoxication which permits .th_- atone
.E:1.e?.! of deathlike sleep for J_e euP:S9riajn which__:_elf-i8:S.us.-.
_pend_d,..iU>!!_9.tthe..oldest social arrangements which mediate
Q"___p... self-preservation and - s_lf -destruction aIL_attempt.-oL
the s_!UQ_§.uJ:.vive_.i.tself... The dread of losing the self and of abrogating together with the self the barrier between oneself and other life, the fear of death and destruction, is ____t_ly associated with _romise of happiness whi_h- th_eatened civilizationTiri. every moment Its_.'road - was' that of obedience and
labo_, over which fulfillment shines forth perpetually bur-only
as i1fiiSfve appearance, as devitalized beauty. The mind of Odys
, 33. Odyssey 12.191. (Since the authors' translation differs at certain
concise points from the best-known English versions, this and other
. passages quoted here are near-literal prose renderings of the German.
;-TR) .
it' ", _ 34: Odyssey 12.189-90.
33
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
seus, inimical both to his own death and to his own happiness, is aware of this. He knows only two possible ways to escape. One of them he prescribes for his men. He plugs their ears with wax, and they must row with all their strength. Whoever would survive must not hear the temptation of that which is unrepeatable, and he is able to survive only by being unable to hear it. Society has always made provision for that. The laborers must be fresh and concentrate as they look ahead, and must ignore whatever lies to one side. They must doggedly sublimate in ad
_ ,ditional effort the drive that impels to diversion.-_And::.so.::.the-y
_be_ome praciical.- The other possibility Odysseus, the seigneur who allows the others to labor for themselves; reserves to himself. He listens, but while bound impotently to the mast; the greater the temptation the more he has his bonds tightenedjust as later the burghers would deny themselves happiness all the more doggedly as it drew closer to them with the growth of their own power. What Odysseus hears is without consequence for him; he is able only to nod his head as a sign to be set free from his bonds; but it is too late; his men, who do not listen, know only the song's danger but nothing of its beauty, and leave him at the mast in order to save him an_ themselves. They reproduce the oppressor's life together with their own, and the oppre_or is no longer able to escape his social role. The bonds with which he has irremediably tied himself to practice, also keep the Sirens away from practice: Jheir temptation is neutral:-i?__t and ", becomes. .a_me.r__.Q.bjecL oC contemplation=becom_s _ arL. The prisoner is present at a. concert, an inactive eaves: __opper like later concertgoers, and his spirited call for libera
_"'iion fades like applause. Thus the- enjQY.!!!_nJQLart and .!11anual.. labo_ br___t _pa_ as - t__. world of prehistory _ left behind. The epic already contains the appropriate theory. The cultural ma
socIal domInation of nature.
Measures such as those taken on Odysseus' ship in regard to the Sirens forin presentient allegory of the dialectic of enlighten ment. Just as tIle capacity o.iJ::_presentation. ..is_the...measure..of
\ domination, a1!4. d°!llin_!jQnis_ the most po_erful.thing_thaLcan
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
E.e_!'_P!'___!lt_,Q.}n most performances, so the capacity of .!_.EE_:
...!_ti.on ._..!:b.e .vehiC?l.e__o,t progress and regression at one,.an_
.tb__same time. Under the given conditions, exemption from-, work-not only among the unemployed but even at the other end of the social scale-also means disablement. The rulers experience existence, with which they need no longer concern themselves, only as a substratum, and hence wholly ossify into the condition of the commanding self. Primitive man experi- v
enced the natural thing merely as the evasive object of desire. "But the master, who has interposed the servant between it and himself, in this way relates himself only to the dependence of the thing and enjoys it pure; however, he leaves the aspect of [its] independence to the servant, who works upon it. "35 Odys
. seus is represented in labor. Just as he cannot yield to the temptatiOri _-to_, self-abandonment, so, as proprietor, he finally renounces even participation in labor, and ultimately even its _p1anagement, whereas his men-despite their closeness to things __nnot enjoy their labor because it is performed under pres
_sure,jn desperation, with senses stopped by force. The servant remains enslaved in body and soul; the master regresses. No authority has yet been able to escape paYing this price, and the apparent cyclical nature of the advance of history is partly explained by this debilitation, the equivalent of power. ____d, w___se versatility and know_e_dg_ lJe_ome- _d!ff_r._.mt!ated__ith the
division of 1abor_- is at the same time forced back to anthr6_
-,_
pologically'more primitive stages: for 'with' the techriicar-easing
of life' tne P_E__stence of domimition" brings about a --fixationof tnemstincts by mearis- of heavfer" repre-ssi6n.-Imagiiultioil-ifro
phies. Tfiedisaster IS not merely tnafliidiVIdua!s migIit -remain
-1JehIna society or its material production. Where the evolution of the machine has already turned into that of the machinery of domination (so that technical al!d social tendencies, always interwoven, converge in the' total schematization of men), untruth is not represented merely by the outdistanced. As against that, _daptation to the EQwer.. oLprogress.inY91ves_the_progress.
" \__J_9we_ and, each _ime anew _gs .___t tho___4eg_E-___!.!9!!S
, , ,\V_ich show-. not unsuccessful but successful progress to b_
, " , 'i_ 35. Phiinomenologie des Geistes, p. 146.
35
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
contra__ _e _1l____ ,_f irresistible progress is irresistible regression.
This regression is not restricted to the experience of the sensuous world bound up with the circumambient animate, but at the same time affects the self-dominant il!,_e.pect, which sepa
J.._!es from sensuous experience in order to subjugate it. The unification of intellectual functions by means, ot Wbi(;;b. 99plin_tion over the senses is achieved, the resignation of thought to the rise of unanimity, means the impoverishment of thought and of e__!!____: the separation--of hod} areaSleavesooth-'iIfi:: paired. The restriction of thought to organization and administration, practiced by rulers from the cunning Odysseus to the naive managing directors of today, necessarily implies the restriction which comes upon the great as soon as it is no longer
, merely a question of manipulating the small. Hence the spirit becomes the very apparatus of domination and self -domination which bourgeois thought has always mistakenly supposed it to be. The stopped ears which the pliable proletarians have retained ever since the time of myth have no advantage over the , ,immobility of the master. The over-maturity of society lives by \ the immaturity of the dominated. The more complicated and
precise the social, economic, and scientific apparatus with whose service the production system has long harmonized the
body, the lnore impoverished the experiences which it can offer.
/-The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is translated from science by means of rationalized modes of labor to the experiential world of nations, and tends to approximate it once more to that of the amphibians. The regression of the masses today is their inability to hear the unheard-of with their own ears, to touch the unapprehended with their awn handsthe new form of delusion which deposes every conquered mythic form. Through the mediation of the total society which embraces all relations and emotions, men are once again made to be that against which the evolutionary law of society, the principle of self, had turned: mere species beings, exactly like one anot_er through isolation in the forcibly united collectivity. The oarsmen, who cannot speak to one another, are each of them yoked in the same rhythm as the modern worker in the factory,
36
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
11
movie theater, and collective. Th_ctual w_ng conditions , in society com.pel conillrmisJI1.-not the conscious irilfuences wiiich also made the suppressed men dumb and separated them from truth. The impotence of the worker is not merely a stratagem of the rulers, but the logical conse uence of the indust . _ society into which the ancient ate-in the very course of the effort to escape it-has finally changed.
But this logical necessity is not conclusive. It remains tied to domination, as both its reflection and its tool. Therefore its truth is no less questionable than its evidence is irrefutable. Of course thought has always sufficed concretely to characterize its own equivocation. It is the servant that the master cannot check as he wishes. Domination, ever since men settled down, and
later in the commodity society, has become objectified as lawv'" and organization and must therefore restrict itself. The instrument achieves independence: the mediating instance of the spirit, independently of the will of the master, modifies the. directness of economic injustice. The inStruments of domina-' tion, which would encompass all-language, weapons, and finally machines-must allow themselves to be encompassed by
all. Hence in domination the aspect of rationality prevails as'
one that is also different from it. The "objectivity" ot the JP._a!1s__which makes it uni.yeJ.:sally av._Ifip'!e_jltea_yj..!iip_es th_ " ' criticism of that domination as whose means thought arose. OI!.. tb"e.way' from.' mythology- to Iogistics:- though"Chis' 105£ t1i_-&_ '
Jn_J!t9J self,:,_eflection, and today machinery disables men even .,/
as it nurtures them. But in the form of machines the alienated ratio moves toward a society which reconciles thought in its fixed form as a material and intellectual apparatus with free, live, thought, and refers to society itself as the real subject of thought. The specific origin of thought and its universal perspective have always been inseparable. Today, with the transformation of the world into industry, the perspective of universality, the social realization of thought, extends so far that in its behalf the rulers themselves disavow thought as mere ideology. The bad conscience of cliques which ultimately em, body economic necessity is betrayed in that its revelations, from the intuitions of the Leader to the dynamic Weltanschauung,
37
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
no longer recognize (in marked contrast to earlier bourgeois apologetics) their own misdeeds as necessary consequences of statutory contexts. The mythological lies of mission and destiny
_'!Vhich they use as substitutes never declare the whole truth: gone are the objective laws of the market which ruled in the actions of the entrepreneurs and tended toward catastrophe. In
--'stead the conscious decision of the managing directors executes as results (which are more obligatory than the blindest pricemechanisms) the old law of value and hence the destiny of capitalism. The rulers themselves do not believe in any objective __cessity, even though they sometimes describe their concoc. lions thus. They declare themselves to be the engineers of world
. history. Only the ruled accept as unquestionable necessity the course of development that with every decreed rise in the standard of living makes them so much more powerless. When the standard of living of those who are still employed to service the machines can be assured with a minimal part of the working time available to the rulers of society, the superfluous reminder, the vast mass of the population, is drilled as yet another battalion-additional material to serve the present and future great plans of the system. The masses are fed and quartered as the army 'of the unemployed. In their eyes, their reduction to mere
. objects of the administered life, which preforms every sector of modern existence including language and perception, represents objective necessity, against which they believe there is nothing they can do. Mis.ery as the antithesis of power- and powerlessness grows iJ:p.m_g!rJJ.blY,-19g_h_Lwith- the- capacity_to_X_..Plo.Ye all misery permanently. Each individual is unable to penetrate the forest orCllques and institutions which, from the. highest levels of command to the last professional rackets, ensure the boundless persistence of status. For the union boss, let alone the director, the proletarian (should he ever come face to face with him) is nothing but a supernumerary example of the mass, while the boss in his turn has to tremble at the thought of his OWI\ liquidation.
The absurdity of a state of__airs in" wbich...the_._enforced.,
power of the system o_I_!l1.J_!t grQ..ws-with..cxe.ry-Step- that t_ ke_
. !t.-qy.lQ.LWe... pOW_;L9.LAatuxe., __J:lm,m_es- th__J;J.Jiona1ity oL.the
38
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
rational society as obsolete. Its necessity is illusive, no less than
the freedom-- of th-e -entrepreneurs who ultimately reveal their
compulsive nature in their inevitable wars and contracts. 1'!¥_. i_us_<:m, in which a wholly enlightened mankind has lost itself,
cannot be dissolved by a philosophy" \vhich, -as the organ of .//
domination, ha_ to choose between command and obedience. Without being able to escape the confusion which still ensnares it in prehistory, it is nevertheless able to recognize the logic of either-or, of consequence and antimony, with which it radically emancipated itself from nature, as this very nature, unredeemed and self-alienated. Thinking, in whose mechanism of compulsion nature is reflected and persists, inescapably reflects its v-
very own self as its O\vn forgotten nature-as a mechanism of compulsion. Ideation is only an instrument. In thought,.. men distan__ - themselves from nature. ill.grder thus. imaginatively to P.E___!lt iL!o_Jh._J!1s.elves-but onlyjn .order..te.determine how !!.i_.!o- be ..dominateg. L__Jh_)__.ng,..!he materi_! J9pl, which is held on to in different situations as the same thing, and hence divides the world as the chaotic, manysided, and disparate from
the known, one, and identical, the concept is the ideal tool, fit /
to do service for everytWng, wherever it can be appfiec!:" Arid so
.!!!._!!ght P§_Qij}__ ll(us[ona1}'-_wheneier"irseeks To deny ine-divislY_ fl!!fc_Q.l.!,-9istaq_ing.ancl_QlJj__tifi._atio_ All !11-j1_tic 1!.J!i1i.9._: __9__r__m_ns - d_c.eptiq.Ib the impotently inward trace of the absolved revolution. But while enligJU_nme.nt.maintains its justness against any hypostatization of utopia and unfailingly proclaims dorninMion-to -be.JJ,JsJInion,_the ..Q!£.4.gtomy_between subject and .object-iliat it will not allow to be obscured _Q_e__-!__jJ1cl._X
_o_..!__.untruth_9( that dichotomy- and_pfJntll1.._Ihe- proscription. 9f . svpersti.tionJ; _ _ _ lways-signified...not...only-1he.. progress...of. gQ._ationJ_,_t i_ _o_prqmis_.- Enlightenment is more than enlightenment-the "distinct representation of nature in its alienation. In the self-cognition of the spirit as nature in disunion with itself, as in prehistory, nature calls itself to account; no longer directly, as mana-that is, with the alias that signifies omnipotence-but as blind and lame. The decline, the forfeiture. of nature consists in the subjugation of nature without which spirit does not exist. ThrougIi- the-deCision in wIiIcIispratacknowr_
39
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
edges itself to be domination and retreats into nature, it abandons the claim to domination which makes it a vassal of nature. Even though in the flight from necessity, in progress and civilization, mankind cannot hold the course without abandoning knowledge itself, at least it no longer mistakes the ramparts that it erects against necessity (the institutions and practices of sub,. jection that have always redounded on society from the subju
/ gation of nature) for guarantees of the freedom to come. Every progress made by civilization has renewed together with domination that prospect of its removal. Whereas, however, real history is woven out of a real suffering that is not lessened in proportion to the growth of means for its abrogation, the realization of the prospect is referred to the notion, the concept. For it does not merely, as science, distance men from nature, but, as the self-consideration of thought that in the form of science remains tied to blind economic tendency, allows the distance perpetuating injustice to be measured. By virtue of this remembrance of nature in the subject, in whose fulfillment the unacknowledged truth of all culture lies hidden, enlightenment is universally opposed to domination; and the call to check enlightenment resounded even in the time of Vaninj36 less out of fear of exact science than out of that hatred of undisciplined ideas which emerges from the jurisdiction of nature even as it acknowledges itself to be nature's very dread of its own self. The priests always avenged mana on the prophet of enlightenment, who propitiated mana by a terror-stricken attitude to what went by the name of terror, and the augurs of the Enlightenment were one with the priests in their hybris. .J_n i_ b<2_tggeois __or_, .t_e ?I1ligh__l}me_t h_d lost i!selfj_,its positivistic aspe_t long .before,.Turgot and d'Alembert. It was never
"-Immune to the exchange of freedom for the pursuit of self-preservation. The suspension of the concept, whether in the name of progress or of culture—which had already long before tacitly leagued themselves against. the truth—opened the way for falsehood. And this in a world that verified only evidential propositions, and preserved thought—degraded to the achievement
36. Lucilio Vanini, a quasi-pantheistic Italian philosopher (15841619) sentenced and burned for blasphemy by the Inquisition. -TR.
40
THE CONCEPT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
of great thinkers—as a kind of stock of superannuated cliches, no longer to be distinguished from truth neutralized as a cultural commodity.
But to recognize domination, even in thought itself, as unreconciled nature, would mean a slackening of the necessity whose perpetuity socialism itself prematurely confirmed as a concession to reactionary common sense. By elevating necessity to the status of the basis for all time to come, and by idealistically degrading the spirit forever to the very apex, socialism held on all too s