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us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend.
As a critique of philosophy it does not seek to abandon philosophy itself.
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.
Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world.* It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement * of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
Technology is the essence of this knowledge.
Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.
On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning.
For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.
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. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed.
The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships. In
Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command.
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.”
In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a ...
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The manifold affinities between existing things are supplanted by the single relationship between the subject who confers meaning and the meaningless object,
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.
this barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was.
Whatever might be different is made the same.
That is the verdict which critically sets the boundaries to p...
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But because that self never quite fitted the mold, enlightenment throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion.
It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness.
