Noel’s Reviews > Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments > Status Update

…telos of the external mastery of nature but also the telos of one’s own life becomes confused and opaque. At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the purposes for which they keep themselves alive—social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness itself—become void, and the enthronement of the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity.

(This is from the first “Excursus” on the Odyssey. A&H view the epic as a mode of enlightenment that subordinates myth in the same way as “enlightened” civilization. In an unrelated footnote: “In keeping with this, human sacrifices in the literal sense do not occur in Homer. The epic’s civilizing tendency is manifested in the selection of the incidents narrated. “With one exception … both Iliad and Odyssey are completely expurgated of the abomination of Human Sacrifice” (Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, Oxford 1911, p. 150).”)