12 The Concept of Enlightenment ened justice, guilt and atonement, happiness and misfortune, are seen as the two sides of an equation. Justice gives way to law. The shaman wards off a danger with its likeness. Equivalence is his instrument; and equiva lence regulates punishment and reward within civilization. The imagery of myths, too, can be traced back without exception to natural conditions Just as the constellation Gemini, like all the other symbols of duality, refers to the inescapable cycle of nature; just as this cycle itself has its primeval sign in the symbol of the egg from which those later symbols are sprung, the Scales(Libra) held by Zeus, which symbolize the justice of the entire patriarchal world, point back to mere nature. The step from chaos to civ ilization, in which natural conditions exert their power no longer directly but through the consciousness of human beings, changed nothing in the principle of equivalence. Indeed, human beings atoned for this very step by worshipping that to which previously, like all other creatures, they had been merely subjected. Earlier, fetishes had been subject to the law of equivalence. Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish. The blindfold over the eyes of Justitia means not only that justice brooks no interference but that it does not originate in freedom The teachings of the priests were symbolic in the sense that in them sign and image coincided. As the hieroglyphs attest, the word originally also had a pictorial function. This function was transferred to myths. They, like magic rites, refer to the repetitive cycle of nature. Nature as self-repe- tition is the core of the symbolic: an entity or a process which is conceived as eternal because it is reenacted again and again in the guise of the sym bol. Inexhaustibility, endless renewal, and the permanence of what they signify are not only attributes of all symbols but their true content. Contrary to the Jewish Genesis, the representations of creation in which the world emerges from the primal mother, the cow or the egg, are sym bolic. The scorn of the ancients for their all-too-human gods left their core untouched. The essence of the gods is not exhausted by individuality. They still had about them a quality of mana; they embodied nature as a universal power. With their preanimistic traits they intrude into the enlightenment. Beneath the modest veil of the Olympian chronique scan- daleuse the doctrine of the commingling and colliding of elements had evolved; establishing itself at once as science, it turned the myths into fig ments of fantasy. With the clean separation between science and poetry
The Concept of Enlightenment 13 the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art." As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it. With advancing enlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is. The pre- vailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of cul- ture, finally causes them, through their internal tendencies as exact oppo- sites, to converge. Science, in its neopositivist interpretation, becomes aes- the of isolated signs devoid of any intention transcending the system; it becomes the game which mathematicians have long since proudly declared their activity to be. Meanwhile, art as integral replication has pledged itself to positivist science, even in its specific techniques.It becomes,indeed, the world over again, an ideological doubling, a compl ant reproduction. The separation of sign and image is inescapable. But if, with heedless complacency, it is hypostatized over again, then each of the solated principles tends toward the destruction of truth Philosophy has perceived the chasm opened by this separation as relationship between intuition and concept and repeatedly but vainly attempted to close it; indeed, philosophy is defined by that attempt Usually, however, it has sided with the tendency to which it owes its name Plato banished poetry with the same severity with which positivism dis- missed the doctrine of Forms. Homer, Piato argued, had procured neither public nor private reforms through his much-vaunted art, had neither wor a war nor made an invention. We did not know, he said, of any numerous followers who had honored or loved him. art had to demonstrate its use- fulness. 2 The making of images was proscribed by Plato as it was by the Jews. Both reason and religion outlaw the principle of magic. Even in it resigned detachment from existence, as art, it remains dishonorable; those who practice it become vagrants, latter-day nomads, who find no domicile among the settled. Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work. Art has in common with magic the postulation of a special, self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane exis-
14 The Concept of Enlightenment tence. Within it special laws prevail. Just as the sorcerer begins the cere mony by marking out from all its surroundings the place in which the sacred forces are to come into play, each work of art is closed off from real- ity by its own circumference. The very renunciation of external effects by which art is distinguished from magical sympathy binds art only. more deeply to the heritage of magic. This renunciation places the pure image in opposition to corporeal existence, the elements of which the image sub lates within itself. It is in the nature of the work of art of aesthetic illu sion,to be what was experienced as a new and terrible event in the mag he of the whole in the particular. The work of art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura.As an expression of totality art claims the dignity of the absolute. This has led philosophy to rank it higher than According to Schelling, art begins where knowledge leaves humans in the lurch. For him art is "the model of science, and wherever art is, there sci- ence must go. 2 According to his theory the separation of mage an is entirely abolished by each single representation of art. "24 The bourgeois world was rarely amenable to such confidence in art. Where it restricted knowledge, it generally did so to make room for faith, not art. It was through faith that the militant religiosity of the modern age, of Tor- quemada, Luther, and Mohammed, sought to reconcile spirit and exis- tence. But faith is a privative concept: it is abolished as faith if it does not continuously assert either its opposition to knowledge or its agreement with it. In being dependent on the limits set to knowledge, it is itself lim ited. The attempt made by faith under Protestantism to locate the princi ple of truth, which transcends faith and without which faith cannot exist, directly in the word itself, as in primeval times, and to restore the symbolic power of the word, was paid for by obedience to the word, but not in its sacred form. Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowl edge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad con- science is second nature to it. The secret awareness of this necessary, inher- ent flaw, the immanent contradiction that lies in making a profession of is the reason why h sensitive and dangerous affair. The horrors of fire and sword, of counter
The Concept of Enlightenment Is Reformation and Reformation, were perpetrated not as an exaggeration but as a realization of the principle of faith. Faith repeatedly shows itself of the same stamp as the world history it would like to command; indeed, in the modern period it has become that history's preferred means, its spe- cial ruse. Not only is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century inex- orable, as Hegel confirmed; so, too, as none knew better than he, is the movement of thought itself. The lowest insight, like the highest, contains the knowledge of its distance from the truth, which makes the apolo liar. The paradox of faith degenerates finally into fraud, the myth of the twentieth century* and faiths irrationality into rational organization in the hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism When language first entered history its masters were already priests and sorcerers. Anyone who affronted the symbols fell prey in the name of the unearthly powers to the earthly ones, represented by these appointed organs of society. What preceded that stage is shrouded in darkness Wherever it is found in ethnology, the terror from which mana was born was already sanctioned, at least by the tribal elders. Unidentical, fluid mand was solidified, violently materialized by men. Soon the sorcerers had populated every place with its emanations and coordinated the multiplic ity of sacred realms with that of sacred rites. With the spirit-world and its peculiarities they extended their esoteric knowledge and their power. The sacred essence was transferred to the sorcerers who managed it. In the first stages of nomadism the members of the tribe still played an independent part in influencing the course of nature. The men tracked prey while the women performed tasks which did not require rigid commands. How much violence preceded the habituation to even so simple an order can- not be known. In that order the world was already divided into zones of power and of the profane. The course of natural events as an emanation of mana had already been elevated to a norm demanding submission. But if the nomadic savage, despite his subjection, could still participate in the magic which defined the limits of that world, and could disguise himself as his quarry in order to stalk it, in later periods the intercourse with spir its and the subjection were assigned to different classes of humanity power to one side, obedience to the other. The recurring, never-changing natural processes were drummed into the subjects, either by other tribes or by their own cliques, as the rhythm of work, to the beat of the club and the rod, which reechoed in every barbaric drum, in each monotonous rit
16 The Concept of enlightenment ual. The symbols take on the expression of the fetish. The repetition of nature which they signify always manifests itself in later times as the per manence of social compulsion, which the symbols represent. The dread objectified in the fixed image becomes a sign of the consolidated power of the privileged. But general concepts continued to symbolize that power even when they had shed all pictorial traits. Even the deductive form of science mirrors hiera archy and compulsion. Just as the first categories rep resented the organized tribe and its power over the individual e entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the su nation and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor. 2Of course, this social character of intellectual forms is not, as Durkheim argues,an expression of social solidarity but evidence of the impenetrable unity of society and power. Power confers increased cohesion and strength on the social whole in which it is established. The division of labor, through which power manifests itself socially, serves the self-preservation of the dominated whole. But this necessarily turns the whole, as a whole, and the operation of its immanent reason, into a means of enforcing the particu lar interest Power confronts the individual as the universal, as the reason which informs reality. The power of all the members of society, to whom as individuals no other way is open, is constantly summated, through the division of labor imposed on them, in the realization of the whole, whose rationality is thereby multiplied over again. What is done to all by the few always takes the form of the subduing of individuals by the many: the oppression of society always bears the features of oppression by a collec- tive. It is this unity of collectivity and power, and not the immediate social universal, solidarity, which is precipitated in intellectual forms. Through their claim to universal validity, the philosophical concepts with which Plato and Aristotle represented the world elevated the conditions which those concepts justified to the status of true reality. They originated, as Vico put it, in the marketplace of Athens; they reflected with the same fidelity the laws of physics, the equality of freeborn citizens, and the infe- riority of women, children, and slaves. Language itself endowed what it expressed, the conditions of domination, with the universality it had acquired as the means of intercourse in civil society. The metaphysica emphasis, the sanction by ideas and norms, was no more than a hyposta tization of the rigidity and exclusivity which concepts have necessarily