Odysseus and the Sirens: The Dialectic of Enlightenment

One of the aims of the Enlightenment was to rid the world of superstition. Kant, one of the leading philosophers of this effort, writes that, ‘Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’. Myths, magic, folklore — these were to be replaced with reason, rationality and science. However, according to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the cost of this exchange was not just the disenchantment of the world, it also meant the subjugation of everything — ourselves included. Under the runaway logic of the Enlightenment, everything is instrumentalized. Everything is reduced to a value:

Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so gar as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them. In this way their potentiality is turned to his own ends (Adorno & Horkheimer)

The great irony is that, instead of the ‘dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy’, the enlightenment, right before our very eyes, reverts back to myth, ‘which it never really knew how to elude’. This is the counterintuitive claim made by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of…