Adorno & Horkheimer - The Concept of Enlightenment [en].pdf - Adorno - MKTK

The Concept * of Enlightenment

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of

thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and

installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with

triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment

of the world.* It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowl-

edge. Bacon, “the father of experimental philosophy,” 1 brought these mo-

tifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted be-

lief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in

supplying answers. All this, he said, stood in the way of “the happy match

between the mind of man and the nature of things,” with the result that

humanity was unable to use its knowledge for the betterment of its con-

dition. Such inventions as had been made—Bacon cites printing, artillery,

and the compass—had been arrived at more by chance than by systemat-

ic enquiry into nature. Knowledge obtained through such enquiry would

not only be exempt from the influence of wealth and power but would

establish man as the master of nature:

Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many

things are reserved, which kings with 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 we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention,

we should command her by action. 2

The Concept of Enlightenment

Although not a mathematician, Bacon well understood the scientific tem-

per which was to come after him. The “happy match” between human

understanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchal

one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted

nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslave-

ment* of creation or in its deference to worldly masters. Just as it serves all

the purposes of the bourgeois economy both in factories and on the bat-

tlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins.

Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as

democratic as the economic system* with which it evolved. Technology is

the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor

images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the

labor of others,* capital. The “many things” which, according to Bacon,

knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio as

a sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form of

artillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beings

seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and

human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlighten-

ment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only

thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.

Faced by the present triumph of the factual mentality, Bacon’s nominalist

credo would have smacked of metaphysics and would have been convict-

ed of the same vanity for which he criticized scholasticism. Power and

knowledge are synonymous. 3 For Bacon as for Luther, “knowledge that

tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and

not for fruit or generation.” Its concern is not “satisfaction, which men call

truth,” but “operation,” the effective procedure. The “true end, scope or

office of knowledge” does not consist in “any plausible, delectable, rever-

end 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 shall be neither mystery

nor any desire to reveal mystery.

The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.

Xenophanes mocked the multiplicity of gods because they resembled their

creators, men, in all their idiosyncrasies and faults, and the latest logic

denounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, as

counterfeit coin that would be better replaced by neutral counters. The

The Concept of Enlightenment

world becomes chaos, and synthesis salvation. No difference is said to exist

between the totemic animal, the dreams of the spirit-seer,* and the absolute

Idea. On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded

meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and

probability. Causality was only the last philosophical concept on which sci-

entific criticism tested its strength, because it alone of the old ideas still

stood in the way of such criticism, the latest secular form of the creative

principle. To define substance and quality, activity and suffering, being and

existence in terms appropriate to the time has been a concern of philoso-

phy since Bacon; but science could manage without such categories. They

were left behind as idola theatri of the old metaphysics and even in their

time were monuments to entities and powers from prehistory. In that dis-

tant time life and death had been interpreted and interwoven in myths.

The categories by which Western philosophy defined its timeless order of

nature marked out the positions which had once been occupied by Ocnus

and Persephone, Ariadne and Nereus. The moment of transition is record-

ed in the pre-Socratic cosmologies. The moist, the undivided, the air and

fire which they take to be the primal stuff of nature are early rationaliza-

tions precipitated from the mythical vision. Just as the images of generation

from water and earth, that had come to the Greeks from the Nile, were

converted by these cosmologies into Hylozoic principles and elements, the

whole ambiguous profusion of mythical demons was intellectualized to be-

come the pure form of ontological entities. Even the patriarchal gods of

Olympus were finally assimilated by the philosophical logos as the Platonic

Forms. But the Enlightenment discerned the old powers in the Platonic

and Aristotelian heritage of metaphysics and suppressed the universal cate-

gories’ claims to truth as superstition. In the authority of universal concepts

the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies

human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. From now on

matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent pow-

ers or hidden properties. For enlightenment, anything which does not con-

form to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with sus-

picion. Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external

oppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights then

fare no better than the older universals. Any intellectual resistance it en-

counters merely increases its strength. 5 The reason is that enlightenment

also recognizes itself in the old myths. No matter which myths are invoked

The Concept of Enlightenment

against it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the

very principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands ac-

cused. Enlightenment is totalitarian.

Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projec-

tion of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth. 6 The super-

natural, spirits and demons, are taken to be reflections of human beings

who allow themselves to be frightened by natural phenomena. According

to enlightened thinking, the multiplicity of mythical figures can be

reduced to a single common denominator, the subject. Oedipus’s answer

to the riddle of the Sphinx—“That being is man”—is repeated indiscrim-

inately as enlightenment’s stereotyped message, whether in response to a

piece of objective meaning, a schematic order, a fear of evil powers, or a

hope of salvation. For the Enlightenment, only what can be encompassed

by unity has the status of an existent or an event; its ideal is the system

from which everything and anything follows. Its rationalist and empiricist

versions do not differ on that point. Although the various schools may

have interpreted its axioms differently, the structure of unitary science has

always been the same. Despite the pluralism of the different fields of

research, Bacon’s postulate of una scientia universalis 7 is as hostile to any-

thing which cannot be connected as Leibniz’s mathesis universalis is to dis-

continuity. The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrange-

ment, history to fact, things to matter. For Bacon, too, there was a clear

logical connection, through degrees of generality, linking the highest prin-

ciples to propositions based on observation. De Maistre mocks him for

harboring this “idolized ladder.” 8 Formal logic was the high school of uni-

fication. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world

calculable. The mythologizing equation of Forms with numbers in Plato’s

last writings expresses the longing of all demythologizing: number became

enlightenment’s canon. The same equations govern bourgeois justice and

commodity exchange. “Is not the rule, ‘ Si inaequalibus aequalia addas,

omnia erunt inaequalia ,’ [If you add like to unlike you will always end up

with unlike] an axiom of justice as well as of mathematics? And is there

not a true coincidence between commutative and distributive justice, and

arithmetical and geometrical proportion?” 9 Bourgeois society is ruled by

equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to

abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be

resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern posi-

The Concept of Enlightenment

tivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmen-

ides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.

But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were them-

selves its products. The scientific calculation of events annuls the account

of them which thought had once given in myth. Myth sought to report,

to name, to tell of origins—but therefore also to narrate, record, explain.

This tendency was reinforced by the recording and collecting of myths.

From a record, they soon became a teaching. Each ritual contains a repre-

sentation of how things happen and of the specific process which is to be

influenced by magic. In the earliest popular epics this theoretical element

of ritual became autonomous. The myths which the tragic dramatists drew

on were already marked by the discipline and power which Bacon cele-

brated as the goal. The local spirits and demons had been replaced by

heaven and its hierarchy, the incantatory practices of the magician by the

carefully graduated sacrifice and the labor of enslaved men mediated by

command. The Olympian deities are no longer directly identical with ele-

ments, but signify them. In Homer Zeus controls the daytime sky, Apollo

guides the sun; Helios and Eos are already passing over into allegory. The

gods detach themselves from substances to become their quintessence.

From now on, being is split between logos —which, with the advance of

philosophy, contracts to a monad, a mere reference point—and the mass

of things and creatures in the external world. The single distinction

between man’s own existence and reality swallows up all others. Without

regard for differences, the world is made subject to man. In this the Jewish

story of creation and the Olympian religion are at one: “. . . and 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; you oversee the works of men, both the wicked and the

just, and the unruly animals, you who uphold righteousness.” 11 “It is so

ordained that one atones at once, another later; but even should one

escape the doom threatened by the gods, it will surely come to pass one

day, and innocents shall expiate his deed, whether his children or a later

generation.” 12 Only those who subject themselves utterly pass muster with

the gods. The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of

power as the principle of all relationships. In face of the unity of such rea-

son the distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance, as

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