March 3, 1998

Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

horkheimer and adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment is the hypothesis of the title, the hypothesis of—what else?—an identity between its two elements.

thinking about the fact that we only need to fear ourselves: walking down the street, i looked out across one of the fields that overpopulates the urban rurality of houston, texas, the universal suburb; i thought about how an ancient might fear the vast expanse of darkened field, expecting at any moment to be accosted by a spiritual monster of some kind. i had only to fear a material monster of some kind. revenge of the disenchanted spirit: it collapses into the individuals with the violence and tumult of yet-untamed natural forces.

and from whom did we learn violence? from nature. why do we remember violence, when nature has to such a large extent been brought under our control?

a better question—in order to avoid the time-consuming search for the single contradiction that would destroy my question’s presupposition, which is that we should forget the lesson when the condition of its learning has been removed; in order to avoid the search for the thing that we have forgotten that we should have remembered—is whether we have forgotten anything at all.

if ætiology is the hypothesis that ancients created myths in order to appease the fear of nature, thus remaining in sublated thrall to it, then ideology is the hypothesis that moderns created rationality in order to appease the fear of myth, with a similar result.

a purveyor of religious myths said that “the focus of infancy is survival. i am happy to declare tonight that we are not in survival mode any longer. the focus of infancy is survival; the focus of childhood is learning; the focus of adolescence is self; the focus of maturity is reproduction.” he did not know how correct he was: archaeology discovers the archaic childhood of humanity in its nature-imposed state of survival. the ætiology of myth created at least a new class of priests, allowing the few to survive at the height of their potential, suffering neither fear nor destruction at the hands of nature, but doubling back the fear and destruction by way of human, animal, and economic sacrifice. from hierarchically above and chthonically below the masses feared for their lives. the development of intellect, learnëd upon the myths, invented the ideology of progressive humanism for the sake of forsaken mass humanity as it presents itself in the form of the individual, a natural form, i.e., the form in which the prior development of the social subject took place. gross mismatch between individual man of leisure and the mass peasant aside, all worked toward the betterment of self, although whose self was never at issue: “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the latter of which was originally that of property (the mismatch cannot be so easily swept away). since the new world for modernity was utopia achieved, all that remained was to maintain and reproduce heaven on earth.

both ratio and its exemplar, philosophy, are the distillation of self-conscious reflection upon the process of history from the standpoint of the original victors: those who mastered violence and its fearful emblems early on: the kings, warriors, and priests (who still only threaten). if philosophy and science were to work towards universal prosperity in modernity, then it was only their ideology which claimed these motives; then mythology was to work in service of particular prosperity, and this most untrue of untruths seems not to have an ideology at all; the violence which was formerly faced in the universal aspect of nature and in the particular countenances of those who magically controlled it is now found in the universal particular: the simultaneous slaves-lords we are becoming: the blessed poor in spirit and meek possessing the kingdom of heaven and inheriting the earth by sheer force of numbers.
March 3, 1998































1. max horkheimer & theodor w. adorno, dialectic of enlightenment, continuum 1996 (s. fischer verlag gmbh, frankfurt am main, 1969) (social studies association, new york, 1944).

2. “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 into the mass of all things within and without. this single distinction between existence proper and reality engulfs all others. without regard to distinction, the world becomes subject to man.” they really meant object to man. id. at 8.

3. pastor michael pitts, “leaving the old, coming into the new,” audiocassette, higher dimension industries, friday, april 18, 1997.

4. u.s. declaration of independence, national archives & records administration, http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/declaration.htm, 1997 (1776).

5. see john locke.

6. see jean baudrillard, america.

7. listen to al pacino’s lucifer’s speech in the film devil’s advocate: the world teems with petty would-be tyrants, who have already and only mastered the petty; junior imperialists.

8. matthew 5:3, 5, niv study bible, 1995.

Adorno Horkheimer critical.theory Frankfurt.School