The Concept of Enlightenment 7 chosen victim which coincides with its representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange. Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility. An atom is smashed not as a representative but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit suffering the torment of the laboratory is seen not as a representative but, mistakenly, as a mere exemplar. Because in func tional science the differences are so fluid that everything is submerged in one and the same matter, the scientific object is petrified, whereas the rigi ritual of former times appears supple in its substitution of one thing for another. The world of magic still retained differences whose traces have vanished even in linguistic forms. 3 The manifold affinities between exist- ing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object, between rational signif- icance and its accidental bearer. At the magical stage dream and image were not regarded as mere signs of things but were linked to them by resemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but of kinship. Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object. It certainly is not founded on the omnipotence of thought, "which the primitive is supposed to impute to himself like the neurotic; there can be no"over-valuation of psychical acts"in relation to reality where thought and reality are not radically distinguished. The"unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world"5 which Freud anachronistically attributes to magic applies only to the more realistic form of world domi- nation achieved by the greater astuteness of science. The autonomy of thought in relation to objects, as manifested in the reality-adequacy of the Ego, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of the medicine man by all-embracing industrial technology As a totality set out in language and laying claim to a truth which suppressed the older mythical faith of popular religion, the solar, patria chal myth was itself an enlightenment, fully comparable on that level to the philosophical one. But now it paid the price. Mythology itself set in motion the endless process of enlightenment by which, with ineluctable necessity, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating riticism that it is only a belief, until even the concepts of mind, truth, and, indeed, enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic
8 The Concept of Enlightenment The principle of the fated necessity which caused the downfall of the mythical hero, and finally evolved as the logical conclusion from the orac- ular utterance, not only predominates, refined to the cogency of formal logic, in every rationalistic system of Western philosophy but also presides over the succession of systems which begins with the hierarchy of the gods and, in a permanent twilight of the idols, hands down a single identic content: wrath against those of insufficient righteousness. Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology. Receiving all its subject matter from myths, in order to destroy them, it falls as judge under the spell of myth It seeks to escape the trial of fate and retribution by itself exacting retri- bution on that trial. In myths, everything that happens must atone for the fact of having happened. It is no different in enlightenment: no sooner has a fact been established than it is rendered insignificant The doctrine that action equals reaction continued to maintain the power of repetition over existence long after humankind had shed the illusion that, by repetition, it could identify itself with repeated existence and so escape its power. But the more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now objecti fied in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects. The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination is that of myth itself. The arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played out, all the great thoughts have been thought, all IScO. eries can be construed in advance, and human beings are defined by self- preservation through adaptation-this barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which, through retri- bution, incessantly reinstates what always was. Whatever might be differ ent is made the same. That is the verdict which critically sets the bound- aries to possible experience. The identity of everything with everything is bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself. Enlightenment dissolves away the injustice of the old inequality of unmediated mastery, but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation,by relating every existing thing to every other. It brings about the situation for which Kierkegaard praised his Protestant ethic and which, in the legend-cycle of Hercules, constitutes one of the primal images of
The Concept of Enlightenment 9 mythical violence: it amputates the incommensurable. Not merely are qualities dissolved in thought, but human beings are forced into real con- formity. The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth re molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the mar ket. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same. But because that self never quite fitted the mold, enlightenment hroughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social co- ercion. The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals. The horde, a term which doubtless* is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old bar barism but the triumph of repressive egalite, the degeneration of the equal- ity of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals. The fake myth of fascism reveals itself as the genuine myth of prehistory, in that the genuine myth beheld retribution while the false one wreaks it blindly on its victims. any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only suc- cumbs more deeply to that compulsion. That has been the trajectory of European civilization. Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it erad- icates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction pre- pared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the"herd"(Trupp which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment. The distance of subject from object, the presupposition of abstrac- tion, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by means of the ruled. The songs of Homer and the hymns of the Rig veda date from the time of territorial dominion and its strongholds, when a warlike race of overlords imposed itself on the defeated indigenous popu lation. The supreme god among gods came into being with this civil world in which the king, as leader of the arms-bearing nobility, tied the subjugated people to the land while doctors, soothsayers, artisans, and traders took care of circulation With the end of nomadism the social order is established on the basis of fixed property. power and labor diverge.A roperty owner like Odysseus"controls from a distance a numerous, fine ly graded personnel of ox herds, shepherds, swineherds, and servants. In
Io The Concept of Enlightenment the evening, having looked out from his castle to see the countryside lit up by a thousand fires, he can go to his rest in peace. He knows that his loyal servants are watching to keep away wild animals and to drive away thieves from the enclosures which they are there to protect. "18 The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, built on the foundation of power in reality. The superseding of the old diffuse notions of the magical heritage by conceptual unity expresses a condition of life defined by the freeborn citizen and articulated by com- mand. The self which learned about order and subordination through the bjugation of the world soon equated truth in general with classifying thought, without whose fixed distinctions it cannot exist. Along with mimetic magic it tabooed the knowledge which really apprehends the object. Its hatred is directed at the image of the vanquished primeval worid and its imaginary happiness. The dark, chthonic gods of the original inhabitants are banished to the hell into which the earth is transformed under the religions of Indra and Zeus, with their worship of sun and light. But heaven and hell were linked. The name Zeus was applied both to a god of the underworld and to a god of light in cults which did not exclude each other, 9 and the Olympian gods maintained all kinds of com- merce with the chthonic deities. In the same way, the good and evil pow ers,the holy and the unholy, were not unambiguously distinguished. They were bound together like genesis and decline, life and death, summer and winter. The murky, undivided entity worshipped as the principle of mana at the earliest known stages of humanity lived on in the bright world of the greek religion. Primal and undifferentiated, it is everything unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link. The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the un known in relation to the known, pe ermanent tly linking horror to holiness The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force made possible by myth no less than by science, springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation. This does not mean that the soul is transposed into nature, as psychologism would have us believe mana,the moving spirit, is not a projection but the echo of the real pre-
The Concept of Enlightenment II ponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from this preanimism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, lan- guage expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical.20 Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather om the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself. The gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their names. Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to re main outside, since the mere idea of the" outside "is the real source of fea If the revenge of primitive people for a murder committed on a member of their family could sometimes be assuaged by admitting the murderer into that family, both the murder and its remedy mean the absorption of alien blood into ones own, the establishment of immanence. The myth cal dualism does not lead outside the circle of existence. The world con trolled by mana, and even the worlds of Indian and Greek myth, are issue- less and eternally the same. All birth is paid for with death, all fortune with misfortune. While men and gods may attempt in their short span to assess their fates by a measure other than blind destiny, existence triumphs over them in the end. Even their justice, wrested from calamity, bears its features; it corresponds to the way in which human beings, primitives ne less than Greeks and barbarians, looked upon their world from within a society of oppression and poverty. Hence, for both mythical and enlight-