Horkheimer And Adorno

14 Pages 3395 Words

it is instrumental to human purposes. Matter is defined as a possible object of manipulation. People, embodying the natural, are also potentially controllable.
Science and Enlightenment degenerates into myth. Enlightenment comes to attack values, ideas, and any emphasis on subjectivity, invoking a principle of 'fatal necessity', irrespective of beliefs. That includes a belief in Enlightenment, or truth. Thought becomes a matter of developing closed systems, natural laws, which work just like myths. Qualities are dissolved and human beings are brought to order too. The notion of individuality appears and is immediately mediated, in social mechanisms such as markets, to produce a repressive equality: 'In markets, men were given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other' (pg 13, Dialectic of enlightenment). The social collectivities that appear in modern societies have the same effect, 'negating' the individual, and offering 'the parity of the right...