Noel’s Reviews > Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments > Status Update
Noel
is on page 31 of 282
Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is nature made audible in its estrangement. In mind’s self-recognition as nature divided from itself, nature … is calling to itself … as something blind and mutilated. In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists.
— 13 hours, 59 min ago
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Noel’s Previous Updates
Noel
is on page 26 of 282
The tide of what has been has receded from the rock of the present, and the future lies veiled in cloud on the horizon. What Odysseus has left behind him has passed into the world of shades: so close is the self to the primeval myth from whose embrace it has wrested itself that its own lived past becomes a mythical prehistory. It seeks to combat this by a fixed order of time. The tripartite division is…
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— 15 hours, 44 min ago
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Noel
is on page 11 of 282
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. [A&H clearly disdain myth.] 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…
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— Mar 01, 2026 10:03PM
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Noel
is on page 9 of 282
Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion. That has been the trajectory of European civilization. Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation.
— Mar 01, 2026 08:53AM
Noel
is on page 6 of 282
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. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.”
— Mar 01, 2026 08:50AM
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Noel
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13 hours, 16 min ago
Okay, I’m done with Chapter 1. A lot of the stuff here is prefigured, or rather postfigured in Minima Moralia, which is the only reason why any of this is seemingly comprehensible to me. I still have to reread the last 17 pages, though. (Like Minima Moralia, I have to split it into chunks and read each twice before moving forward.) I’m definitely hooked now. A&H’s critique of rational modernity is so grand, so awesome—so damning!
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