"The knowledge that in per-history the objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, indeed by virtual of annihilating individual qualities, without the reconciliation of general and particular - constructed in thought - ever yet being accomplished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with serene indifference he opts once again for liquidation of the particular. Nowhere in his work is the primacy of the whole doubted. The more questionable the transition from reflective isolation to glorified totality becomes in history as in Hegelian logic, the more eagerly philosophy, as the justification of what exists, attaches itself to the triumphal car of objective tendencies." (17)
"Hegel, in hypostasizing both bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual, did not truly carry through the dialectic between the two." (17)
"For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud." (17)
"The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture itself might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself... As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated." (55)
"The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death." (56)
"Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means." (150)
"Stringency and totality, the bourgeois intellectual ideas of necessity and generality, do indeed circumscribe the formula of history, but for just this reason the constitution of society finds its precipitate in those great, immovable, lordly concepts against which dialectical criticism and practice are directed." (151)
"If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might ass that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside - what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic." (151)
"What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement." (151)
"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it." (219)
"but even if things have always been so, although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms." (233-234)
"Not only in the development of forces of production but also in the increasing pressure of domination does quantity change into quality." (234)
"Horror consists in its always remaining the same - the persistence of 'pre-history' - but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces." (234)
"Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind." (234)
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso Books, 2005).
The colonial period of U.S. history contains a variety of interesting lessons. One of these pertains to the concept of a "virtuoso." The virtuoso was primarily characterized by curiosity. Rather than being overly specialized, the virtuoso explored a wide range of interests. The study of nature, art, literature, and theology all would have been pursuits common to this stereotype. This blog aspires to take this early category and use it as a point of departure for exploration and reflection.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
The Concept of Enlightenment
"Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters." (1)
"Bacon... substituted belief for knowledge." (1)
"Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters." (2)
"Technology is the essence of this knowledge." (2)
"On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability." (3)
"For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion." (3)
"Enlightenment is totalitarian. Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth." (4)
"...number became enlightenment's canon." (4)
"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 positivism consigns it to poetry." (4-5)
"But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products." (5)
"The single distinction between man's own existence and reality swallows us all others." (5)
"The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships." (5)
"in their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man's 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. Their 'in-itself' becomes 'for him.'" (6)
"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 impenetrable mask." (6)
"Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object." (7)
"receiving all its subject matter from myths, in order to destroy them, it falls under the spell of myth. It seeks to escape the trial of fate and retribution by itself exacting retribution on that trial." (8)
"The doctrine that action equals reaction continued to maintain the power of repetition over existence long after humankind has 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 objectified in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects." (8)
"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." (8)
"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 are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market." (9)
"The horde, a term which doubtless is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive egalite, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals." (9)
"Under the leveling rule of abstraction , which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the 'herd', which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment." (9)
"The self which learned about order and subordination through the subjugation 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." (10)
"What 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 unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature... springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation." (10)
"The concept... a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only be becoming what it is not." (11)
"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." (11)
"Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo." (11)
"The shaman wards off a danger with its likeness. Equivalence is his instrument; and equivalence regulates punishment and reward within civilization... The step from chaos to civilization... changed nothing in the principle of equivalence. Indeed, human beings atoned for this very step by worshiping that to which previously, like all other creatures, they had been merely subjected... Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish." (12)
"With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language... As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it." (12-13)
"With advancing enlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is... Science, in it neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system 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." (13)
"Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work." (13)
"As an expression of totality art claims the dignity of the absolute." (14)
"But faith is a privative concept: it is abolished as faith it is 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 limited." (14)
"Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it." (14)
"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 special ruse." (15)
Division of labor and "a means of enforcing the particular interest." (16)
"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 collective." (16)
"Language itself endowed what it expressed, the conditions of domination, with the universality it had acquired as the means of intercourse in civil society." (16)
"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... Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics behind except the abstract fear of the collective from which it had sprung." (17)
the link between name and essence (17)
"dialectic discloses each image as script... 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." (18)
"In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mystical. It equates thought with mathematics." (18)
"Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine." (19)
"Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought." (19)
"There is no being in the world that knowledge cannot penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being." (19)
"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." (20)
"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 actual form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy." (20)
"industrialism makes souls into things...The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, descent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures." (21)
"In the judgment of enlightenment as of Protestantism, those who entrust themselves directly to life, without any rational reference to self-preservation, revert to the realm of prehistory." (22)
"finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order" (23)
"Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm." (23)
"reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus." (23)
"the expulsion of thought from logic ratifies in the lecture hall the reification of human beings in factory and office." (23)
"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 one's own name, is being fulfilled. For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger." (24)
"pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-contempt." (24)
"the control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life." (24)
"Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self." (25)
"Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell." (25)
"Narcotic intoxication... is one of the oldest social transactions mediating between self-preservation and self-annihilation, an attempt by the self to survive itself." (26)
"The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power." (26)
Odysseus... (26-27)
Allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment (27)
Hegel and the Master-Slave Dialectic (27)
"The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses." (27)
"The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression." (28)
"Through the mediation of total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity." (29)
"The powerlessness of the workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers but the logical consequence of industrial society, into which the efforts to escape it have finally transformed the ancient concept of fate." (29)
"The instruments of power - language, weapons, and finally machines - which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone." (29)
"On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself, and machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them." (29)
Poverty (30)
"Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is made audible in its estrangement... In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists." (31)
"Each advance of civilization has renewed not only mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that prospect depends on the concept." (32)
"Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, and even in the time of Vanini the call to hold back enlightenment was uttered less from fear of exact science than from hatred of licentious thought, which had escaped the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature's own dread of itself." (32)
"...confusing freedom with the business of self-preservation." (32)
"By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization." (33)
"But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify." (33)
"In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeois are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed." (33)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
"Bacon... substituted belief for knowledge." (1)
"Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters." (2)
"Technology is the essence of this knowledge." (2)
"On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability." (3)
"For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion." (3)
"Enlightenment is totalitarian. Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth." (4)
"...number became enlightenment's canon." (4)
"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 positivism consigns it to poetry." (4-5)
"But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products." (5)
"The single distinction between man's own existence and reality swallows us all others." (5)
"The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships." (5)
"in their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man's 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. Their 'in-itself' becomes 'for him.'" (6)
"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 impenetrable mask." (6)
"Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object." (7)
"receiving all its subject matter from myths, in order to destroy them, it falls under the spell of myth. It seeks to escape the trial of fate and retribution by itself exacting retribution on that trial." (8)
"The doctrine that action equals reaction continued to maintain the power of repetition over existence long after humankind has 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 objectified in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects." (8)
"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." (8)
"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 are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market." (9)
"The horde, a term which doubtless is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive egalite, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals." (9)
"Under the leveling rule of abstraction , which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the 'herd', which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment." (9)
"The self which learned about order and subordination through the subjugation 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." (10)
"What 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 unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature... springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation." (10)
"The concept... a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only be becoming what it is not." (11)
"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." (11)
"Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo." (11)
"The shaman wards off a danger with its likeness. Equivalence is his instrument; and equivalence regulates punishment and reward within civilization... The step from chaos to civilization... changed nothing in the principle of equivalence. Indeed, human beings atoned for this very step by worshiping that to which previously, like all other creatures, they had been merely subjected... Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish." (12)
"With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language... As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it." (12-13)
"With advancing enlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is... Science, in it neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system 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." (13)
"Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work." (13)
"As an expression of totality art claims the dignity of the absolute." (14)
"But faith is a privative concept: it is abolished as faith it is 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 limited." (14)
"Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it." (14)
"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 special ruse." (15)
Division of labor and "a means of enforcing the particular interest." (16)
"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 collective." (16)
"Language itself endowed what it expressed, the conditions of domination, with the universality it had acquired as the means of intercourse in civil society." (16)
"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... Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics behind except the abstract fear of the collective from which it had sprung." (17)
the link between name and essence (17)
"dialectic discloses each image as script... 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." (18)
"In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mystical. It equates thought with mathematics." (18)
"Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine." (19)
"Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought." (19)
"There is no being in the world that knowledge cannot penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being." (19)
"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." (20)
"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 actual form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy." (20)
"industrialism makes souls into things...The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, descent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures." (21)
"In the judgment of enlightenment as of Protestantism, those who entrust themselves directly to life, without any rational reference to self-preservation, revert to the realm of prehistory." (22)
"finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order" (23)
"Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm." (23)
"reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus." (23)
"the expulsion of thought from logic ratifies in the lecture hall the reification of human beings in factory and office." (23)
"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 one's own name, is being fulfilled. For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger." (24)
"pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-contempt." (24)
"the control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life." (24)
"Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self." (25)
"Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell." (25)
"Narcotic intoxication... is one of the oldest social transactions mediating between self-preservation and self-annihilation, an attempt by the self to survive itself." (26)
"The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power." (26)
Odysseus... (26-27)
Allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment (27)
Hegel and the Master-Slave Dialectic (27)
"The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses." (27)
"The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression." (28)
"Through the mediation of total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity." (29)
"The powerlessness of the workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers but the logical consequence of industrial society, into which the efforts to escape it have finally transformed the ancient concept of fate." (29)
"The instruments of power - language, weapons, and finally machines - which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone." (29)
"On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself, and machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them." (29)
Poverty (30)
"Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is made audible in its estrangement... In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists." (31)
"Each advance of civilization has renewed not only mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that prospect depends on the concept." (32)
"Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, and even in the time of Vanini the call to hold back enlightenment was uttered less from fear of exact science than from hatred of licentious thought, which had escaped the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature's own dread of itself." (32)
"...confusing freedom with the business of self-preservation." (32)
"By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization." (33)
"But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify." (33)
"In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeois are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed." (33)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
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