Dialectic of Enlightenment

“Technology … aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.”

“Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.”

“On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules.”

“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.”

“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”

“Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins—but therefore also to narrate, record, explain.”

“The essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature. Neither it nor the unity of the subject was presupposed by magical incantation.”

“The identity of everything with everything is bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself. 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. … It amputates the incommensurable. Not merely are qualities dissolved in thought, but human beings are forced into real conformity”

“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.”

“The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals.”

“The prevailing antithesis between art and science … rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of culture.”

“As a means of reinforcing the social power of language, ideas became more superfluous the more that power increased, and the language of science put an end to them altogether. Conscious justification lacked the suggestive power which springs from dread of the fetish.”

“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. Enlightenment pushed aside the classical demand to “think thinking.” … . Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought.”

“To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning—this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned.”

“Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them.”

“The economic apparatus endows commodities with the values which decide the behavior of people. … Commodities have forfeited all economic qualities except their fetish character, this character has spread like a cataract across the life of society in all its aspects.”

“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.”

“The technical 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, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculation. Reason’s old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has finally been fulfilled.”

“… subordinating life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation”

“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-contempt.”

“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 barbarism are germinating.”

“The more complex and sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the operation of which the system of production has long since attuned the body, the more impoverished are the experiences of which the body is capable.”

“On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself.”

“Machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them.”

“This illusion, in which utterly enlightened humanity is losing itself, cannot be dispelled by a thinking which, as an instrument of power, has to choose between command and obedience.”

“Precisely by virtue of its irresistible logic, thought, in whose compulsive mechanism nature is reflected and perpetuated, also reflects itself as a nature oblivious of itself.”

“… truth neutralized as cultural heritage.”

“In the world of exchange the one who gives more is in the wrong; but the one who loves is always the one who loves more.”

“As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory.”

“Whereas the unconscious colossus of real existence, subjectless capitalism, inflicts its destruction blindly, the deludedly rebellious subject is willing to see that destruction as its fulfillment, and, together with the biting cold it emits toward human beings misused as things, it also radiates the perverted love which, in the world of things, takes the place of love in its immediacy.”