22 The Concept of enlightenment schemata assigned to it. Everything which is different, from the idea to criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence. Its brutal ity, which keeps the individual up to the mark, no more represents the true uality of people than value*represents that of commodities. The demon- ically distorted form which things and human beings have taken on in the clear light of unprejudiced knowledge points back to domination, to the principle which already imparted the qualities of mand to spirits and deities and trapped the human gaze in the fakery of sorcerers and medi- cine men. The fatalism by which incomprehensible death was sanctioned in primeval times has now passed over into utterly comprehensible life The noonday panic fear in which nature suddenly appeared to humans an all-encompassing power has found its counterpart in the panic which is ready to break out at any moment today: human beings expect the world, which is without issue to be set ablaze by a universal power which they themselves are and over which they are powerless Enlightenment's mythic terror springs from a horror of myth. It detects myth not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words, as linguistic criticism imagines, but in any human utterance which has no place in the functional context of self-preservation. Spinozas proposition: the endeavor of preserving oneself is the first and only basis of virtue, 32 contains the true maxim of all Western civilization, in which the religious and philosophical differences of the bourgeoisie are laid to rest. The self which, after the methodicai extirpation of all natural traces as mythologi cal, was no longer supposed to be either a body or blood or a soul or even a natural ego but was sublimated into a transcendental or logical subject formed the reference point of reason, the legislating authority of action. In the judgment of enlightenment as of Protestantism, those who entrust themselves directly to life, without any rational reference to self-preserva tion, revert to the realm of prehistory. Impulse as such, according to this view, is as mythical as superstition, and worship of any God not postulat ed by the self, as aberrant as dr un keenness For both--worship and self- immersion in immediate natural existence-progress holds the same fate in store. It has anathematized the self-forgetfulness both of thought and of
The Concept of Enlightenment 23 pleasure. In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self; for some this labor is supposed to yield increased capital, for others the strength for extra work. But the more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul. Enlightened thinking has an answer for this, too: finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abol- ished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order, which therefore run all the more smoothly. Subjectivity has volatilized itself into the logic of supposedly optional rules, to gain more absolute control. Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last inter- vening agency between individual action and the social norm. The tech nical process, to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigid ly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated opera tions of material production. the results of which for human beings escape all calculation. Reason's old ambition to be purely an instrument of pur poses has finally been fulfilled. The exclusivity of logical laws stems from this obdurate adherence to function and ultimately from the compulsive character of self-preservation. The latter is constantly magnified into the choice between survival and doom, a choice which is reflected even in the principle that, of two contradictory propositions, only one can be true an the other false. The formalism of this principle and the entire logic estab lished around it stem from the opacity and entanglement of interests in a society in which the maintenance of forms and the preservation of indi viduals only fortuitously coincide. The expulsion of thought from logic ratifies in the lecture hall the reification of human beings in factory and office. In this way the taboo encroaches on the power imposing it, enlight enment on mind, which it itself is. But nature as true self-preservation is thereby unleashed, in the individual as in the collective fate of crisis and war, by the process which promised to extirpate it. If unitary knowledge is the only norm which theory has left, praxis must be handed over to the
24 The Concept of Enlightenment unfettered operations of world history. The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape. The oldest fear, that of losing ones own name, is being fulfilled. For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger. Mimetic, mythical, and metaphysical forms of behavior were successively regarded as stages of world history which had been left behind, and the idea of reverting to them held the terror that the self would be changed back into the mere nature from which it had extricated itself with unspeakable exer tions and which for that reason filled it with unspeakable dread. Over the millennia the living memory of prehistory, of its nomadic period and even more of the truly prepatriarchal stages, has been expunged from human consciousness with the most terrible punishments. The enlightened spirit replaced fire and the wheel by the stigma it attached to all irrationality, which led to perdition. Its hedonism was moderate, extremes being no less repugnant to enlightenment than to Aristotle. The bourgeois ideal of nat- uralness is based not on amorphous nature but on the virtue of the mid dle way. For this ideal, promiscuity and asceticism, superfluity and hunger, although opposites, are directly identical as powers of disintegration. By subordinating life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation, the controlling minority guarantees, with its own security, the continuation of the whole From Homer to modernity the ruling spirit has sought to steer between the Scylla of relapse into simple reproduction and the Charybdis of unfettered fulfillment; from the first it has mistrusted any guiding star other than the lesser evil. The German neopagans and administrators of war fever want to reinstate pleasure But since, under the work-pressure of the millennium now ending, pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self- ontempt *It is still in the grip of the self-preservation inculcated in it by he reason which has now been deposed. At the turning points of Western civilization, whenever new peoples and classes have more heavily repressed myth, from the beginnings of the Olympian religion to the Renaissance, he Reformation, and bourgeois atheism, the fear of unsubdued, threaten ing nature-a fear resulting from nature's very materialization and objec tification -has been belittled as animist superstition, and the control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life Now that self-preservation has been finally automated, reason is dismisse
The Concept of enligh by those who, as controllers of production, have taken over its inheritance and fear it in the disinherited. The essence of enlightenment is the choice between alternatives, and the inescapability of this choice is that of power. Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self. With the spread of the bourgeois commodity economy the dark horizon of myth is illuminated by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new bar barism are germinating. Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell. The intertwinement of myth, power, and labor is preserved in one of the tales of Homer. Book XII of the Odyssey tells how Odysseus sailed past the Sirens. Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past.But the hero exposed to it has come of age in suffering. In the multitude of mortal dangers which he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the person, have been hardened. The realms of time have been separated for him like water, earth, and air. The tide of what has been has receded from the rock of the present, and the future lies veiled in cloud on the horizon. What Odysseus has left behind him has passed into the world of shades: so close is the self to the primeval myth from whose embrace it has wrested itself that its own lived past becomes a mythical prehistory. It seeks to combat this by a fixed order of time The tripartite division is intended to liberate the present moment from the power of the past by banishing the latter beyond the absolute boundary of the irrecoverable and placing it, as usable knowledge, in the service of the present. The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied only in art, in which even history, as a repre- sentation of past life, is included. As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis in the same way as pleasure. But the Sirens' song has not yet been deprived of power as art. They have knowledge "of all that has ever happened on this fruitful earth" and especially of what has befallen Odysseus himself: For we know all that the Argives and the Trojans suf- fered on the broad plain of Troy by the will of the gods. 34 By directly Invo ing the recent past, and with the irresistible promise of pleasure which their song contains, the Sirens threaten the patriarchal order, which gives each person back their life only in exchange for their full measure of
26 The Concept of Enlightenment time. When only unfailing presence of mind wrests survival from nature, anyone who follows the Sirens' phantasmagoria is lost. If the Sirens know every hing that has happened, they demand the future as its price, and their promise of a happy homecoming is the deception by which the past entraps a humanity filled with longing. Odysseus has been warned by Circe, the divinity of regression to animal form, whom he has withstood and who therefore gives him the strength to withstand other powers of dis solution. But the lure of the Sirens remains overpowering. No one who ears their song can escape. Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self-the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings-was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold itself together attends the ego at al its stages, and the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone hand in-hand with the blind determination to preserve it. Narcotic intoxication, in which the euphoric suspension of the self is expiated by deathlike sleep, is one of the oldest social transactions mediating between self-p nd self-annihilation, an attempt by the self to survive itself. The fea ar o losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment. The way of civ ilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power Odysseus's idea, equally inimical to his death and to his happiness, shows awareness of this. He knows only two possibilities of escape. One he pre- scribes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unabie to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Work- ers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side. The urge toward distraction must be grimly sublimated in redoubled exertions. Thus the workers are made practical. The other pos- sibility Odysseus chooses for himself, the landowner, who has others to work for him. He listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast, and the stronger the allurement grows the more tightly he has himself bound, just as later the bourgeois denied themselves happiness the closer it drew to them with the increase in their own power. What he hears has no consequences for him; he can signal to his men to untie him only by