The Concept of Enlightenment I7 taken on wherever language has consolidated the community of the rulers for the enforcement of commands. As a means of reinforcing the social power of language, ideas became more superfluous the more that power increased, and the language of science put an end to them altogether Conscious justification lacked the suggestive power which springs from dread of the fetish. The unity of collectivity and power now revealed itself in the generality which faulty content necessarily takes on in language metaphysical or scientific. The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more meta- physical than metaphysics. Enlightenment finally devoured not only sym- bols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of meta physics behind except the abstract fear of the collective from which it had sprung. Concepts in face of enlightenment are like those living on un- earned income in face of industrial trusts: *none can feel secure. If logical positivism still allowed some latitude for probability, ethnological po civism already equates probability with essence. Our vague ideas of chance and quintessence are pale relics of that far richer notion, "27that of the magical substance Enlightenment as a nominalist tendency stops short before the nomen,the non-extensive, restricted concept, the proper name. Although it cannot be established with certainty whether proper names were origi nally generic names, as some maintain, the former have not yet shared the fate of the latter. The substantial ego repudiated by Hume and Mach is not the same thing as the name. In the Jewish religion, in which the idea of the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth, the link between name and essence is still acknowledged in the prohibition on uttering the name of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism propitiates magic by negating it in the idea of God. The Jewish religion brooks ne word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infi nite,the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which claims to depict it, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion legation, however, is not abstract. The indiscriminate denial of anything positive, the stereotyped formula of nothingness as used by buddhism
18 The Concept of Enlightenment ignores the ban on calling the absolute by its name no less than its oppo- site,pantheism, or the latter's caricature, bourgeois skepticism. Explana tions of the world as nothingness or as the entire cosmos are mythologies and the guaranteed paths to redemption sublimated magical practices The self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, and the transfiguration of negativity as redemption, are untrue forms of the resistance to deception The right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibi tion. Such observance, determinate negation, "29 is not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void. Unlike rig orism,determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representa tions of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teach- es us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its ower and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs. With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postu lating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and hi Imself succumbed to mythology. That fate befell not only his philosophy, as the apotheosis of advanc ing thought, but enlightenment itself, in the form of the sober matter-of- fatness by which it purported to distinguish itself from Hegel and from metaphysics in general. For enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be. Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is pre- judged. When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quan- tity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before ralue* has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is can be registered mathematically: even what cannot be assimilated insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical.It equates thought with mathematics. The latter is thereby cut loose, as it were,turned into an absolute authority. "An infinite world, in this case a
The Concept of Enlightenment I9 world of idealities, is conceived as one in which objects are not accessible dividually to our cognition in an imperfect and accidental way but are attained by a rational, systematically unified method which finally ap pretends each object-in an infinite progression--fully as its own in- itself... In Galileos mathematization of nature, nature itself is idealized on the model of the new mathematics. In modern terms, it becomes a mathematical manifold. "30 Thought is reified as an autonomous, auto- matic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can final- ly be replaced by the machine. Enlightenment pushed aside the classical demand to "think thinking"-Fichte's philosophy is its radical fulfill- ment-because it distracted philosophers from the command to control praxis, which Fichte himself had wanted to enforce. Mathematical proce dure became a kind of ritual of thought. Despite its axiomatic self-limita tion, it installed itself as necessary and objective: mathematics made thought into a thing-a tool, to use its own term. Through this mimesis, however, in which thought makes the world resemble itself, the actual has become so much the only concern that even the denial of God falls under the same judgment as metaphysics For positivism, which has assumed the judicial office of enlightened reason, to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle. Positivism--fortu nately for it-does not need to be atheistic, since objectified thought can- not even pose the question of the existence of God. The positivist sensor turns a blind eye to official worship, as a special, knowledge-free zone of social activity, just as willingly as to art-but never to denial, even when it has a claim to be knowledge. For the scientific temper, any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping out side the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender. The mastery of nature draws the circle in which the critique of pure reason holds thought spellbound. Kant combined the doctrine of thought's restlessly toilsome progress toward infinity with insistence on its insufficiency and eternal limitation. The wisdom he imparted is oracular: There is no being in the world that knowledge can not penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being Philosophical judgment, according to Kant, aims at the new yet recognizes nothing new, since it always merely repeats what reason has placed into
20 The Concept of Enlightenment objects beforehand. However, this thought, protected within the depart- ments of science from the dreams of a spirit-seer, has to pay the price world domination over nature turns against the thinking subject itself nothing is left of it except that ever-unchanging "I think, "which must accompany all my conceptions oth subject and object are nullified.The B abstract self, which alone confers the legal right to record and systematize, is confronted by nothing but abstract material, which has no other prop- ty than to be the substrate of that right. The equation of mind and world is finally resolved but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure. What appears as the triumph of subjectivity, the sub- jection of all existing things to logical formalism, is bought with the obe dient subordination of reason to what is immediately at hand. To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning-th whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned. Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation,mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most abstract form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy. The actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology. The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with repro- ducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape. For mythology had reflected in its forms the essence of the existing order--cyclical motion, fate, domination of the world truth-and had renounced hope. In the terseness of the mythical image, as in the clarity of the scientific formula, the eternity of the actual is con firmed and mere existence is pronounced as the meaning it obstructsThe world as a gigantic analytical judgment, the only surviving dream of sci- ence, is of the same kind as the cosmic myth which linked the alternation of spring and autumn to the abduction of Persephone. The uniqueness of the mythical event, which was intended to legitimize the factual one, is a deception. Originally, the rape of the goddess was directly equated with the dying of nature. It was repeated each autumn, and even the repetition
The Concept of Enlightenment 21 was not a succession of separate events, but the same one each time. With the consolidation of temporal consciousness the process was fixed as a unique event in the past, and ritual assuagement of the terror of death in each new cycle of seasons was sought in the recourse to the distant past. But such separation is powerless. The postulation of the single pa st event endows the cycle with a quality of inevitability, and the terror radiating from the ancient event spreads over the whole process as its mere repet n. The subsumption of the actual whether under mythical prehisto or under mathematical formalism, the symbolic relating of the present to the mythical event in the rite or to the abstract category in science, makes the new appear as something predetermined which therefore is really the old. It is not existence that is without hope, but knowledge which appro- rates and perpetuates existence as a schema in the pictorial or mathe- matical symbol In the enlightened world, mythology has pe creat the profane. Existence, thoroughly cleansed of demons and their concep- tual descendants, takes on, in its gleaming naturalness, the numinous character which former ages attributed to demons. Justified in the guise of brutal facts as something eternally immune to intervention, the social injustice from which those facts arise is as sacrosanct today as the medicine man once was under the protection of his gods. Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conven- tional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things. *On its own account, even in advance of total planning, the eco- nomic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people. Since, with the ending of free exchange, commodities have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this char- acter has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its aspects The countless agencies of mass production and its culture* impress stan dardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and ratio- nal one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical ele- ments,successes or failures. Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the