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 la ges, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the por 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. 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 mans 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 lo 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 3 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 tood in the way of such criticism, the latest secular form of the creative inciple. 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 vere 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 rationalize 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 universai 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. 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 enlight nds ac- cused. Enlightenment is totalitarian Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projec tion of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth. 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 lways been the same. Despite the pluralism of the different fields of research, Bacons postulate of una scientia universalis'is as hostile to any- thing which cannot be connected as Leibnizs 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. 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 Plat 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 inmaequalibus aequalis addas omnia erunt inaequalis, [If you add like to unlike you will always end up ith 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 5 civism 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 myt 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 eaven 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 ods 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. "10O Zeus, Father Zeus, yours is the dominion of the heavens; you oversee the works of men, both the wicked and the just, and the unr uy animals. you who uphold righteousness. 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 relationshi unity o son the distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance, as
6 The Concept of Enlightenment reason has steadfastly indicated since the earliest critique of Homer. In their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Mans likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make then. Their“in- itself” becomes" "for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a sub- strate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature, Neither it nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation The rites of the shaman were directed at the wind the rain . the snake out side or the demon inside the sick person, not at materials or specimens The spirit which practiced magic was not single or identical; it changed with the cult masks which repr resented the multiplicity of spirits. Magic is bloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transform- ing itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves. The magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimi- dating or appeasing ge tures Although his task was impersonation he did not claim to be made in the image of the invisible power, as does civilized man,whose modest hunting ground then shrinks to the unified cosmos in which nothing exists but prey. Only when made in such an image does man attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identification with the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impen etrable mask. It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature,which subdues the abundance of qualities. Nature, stripped of qualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-pow erful self becomes a mere having, an abstract identity. Magic implies spe ific representation. What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god. The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step toward discursive logic. Even though the hind which was offered up for the daughter, the lamb for the firstborn, necessarily still had qualities ofits own,it already represented the genus. It manifested the arbitrariness of imen. But the sanctity of the hic et nung, the uniqueness of the