Once upon a time…

Though he [Nietzsche] discerned both the universal movement of sovereign Spirit (whose executor he felt himself to be) and a “nihilistic” anti-life forece of the enlightenement, his pre-Fascist followers retained only the second aspect and perverted it into an ideology”

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (44)

As a grandfather sits down to begin to read a story to his grandson, the air is filled with excited anticipation, and as he starts reading, “Once upon a time…”, there is a clear break with reality, as in a dissolve sequence in a film, and with it the space for an alternate reality has been cleared. As Horkheimer and Adorno (H&A) understand the enlightenment there is a similar break at play, and one that transitions from a powerful, sovereign nature to a rational, autonomous, self-directing individual with the confidence to use their reason to control, manipulate, and ultimately dominate nature itself. As H&A read Nietzsche, and as the leading quote shows, Nietzsche was painfully aware of both the power of nature, the power of our instinctual, natural spirit to foster the conditions that will lead to a flourishing life, and he was aware of the sense of power one gains from subjecting this very nature and spirit to the yoke of one’s subjective will. The displays of this very power over nature, through vows to celibacy, etc. was one of the reasons why, as Nietzsche pointed out, the powerful nobles and aristocrats would be in awe of priests and the power and strength they must muster to control and dominate the nature they allowed themselves to get caught up with. The concern Nietzsche had, and one that H&A were able to see come to fruition, was that the second sense of power would win out over the first. This is the power of controlling nature, of controlling society and peoples as objects for mathematical, scientific, and industrial control. Unfortunately for society, as H&A read events in 1947, the “universal movement of sovereign Spirit” had been left behind in the march of enlightenment progress.

Continuing the discussion of H&A’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the second chapter begins to sharpen the focus on the “anti-life” tendencies of the enlightenment, and the influence of Nietzsche is pronounced. Beginning with the role epics and myths play in reconciling us with the power of nature, we are led in this chapter to see that they invoke a “once upon a time…” moment that could bring about either life-affirming challenges or an anti-life ideology and fascism. For H&A “The opposition of enlightenment to myth is expressed in the opposition of the surviving individual ego to multifarious fate” (46). Homer’s epics mark a transitional state, one where “Odysseus loses himself in order to find himself; the estrangement from nature that he brings about is realized in the process of the abandonment to nature he contends with in each adventure” (47). Although an individual struggling against the power of fate and nature, Odysseus takes the name Nobody (Udeis being Greek for nobody and a clear echo of Odyesseus) so as to escape the fate and consequences that would have come had he taken up his individuality. With the rise of the Enlightenment the shift to individuality is completed, and with it the reversal of power relations, although the power of Nature continues to lurk, H&A argue, in the concept of risk whereby “the possibility of failure becomes the postulate of a moral excuse for profit” (62). H&A immediately draw the parallels to Odysseus: “From the standpoint of developed exchange society and its individuals, the adventures of Odysseus are an exact representation of the risks which mark out the road to success” (62). The daring, adventurous entrepreneur, the Nobody whose power to return from the possibility of failure with a profit, is the Odysseus of modern capitalism.

What Odysseus prepares the way for, therefore, is a life where one is both justified and rewarded for sacrificing the power of nature they themselves are. As H&A put it, “As soon as man discards his awareness that he himself is nature, all the aims of which he keeps himself alive—social progress, the intensification of all his material and spiritual powers, even consciousness itself—are nullified,” and thus what is nullified, they continue, “the substance which is dominated, suppressed, and dissolved by virtue of self-preservation is none other than that very life as functions of which the achievements of self-preservation find their sole definition and determination…” (54-55). The self that is preserved, however, is an abstract self, the Kantian “I think” that accompanies all our representations and ensures that the ongoing experiences are mine rather than a fragmentary confederacy of confusion. In H&A’s terms, Odysseus “acknowledges himself to himself by denying himself under the name Nobody; he saves his life by losing himself” (60); or as Kant would have it, one has experiences that are one’s own only by losing the uniqueness of oneself to an abstract, logical Nobody. “This linguistic adaption to death,” H&A argue, and following up on the previous post as well, “contains the schema of modern mathematics” (60). Towards the end of the second chapter H&A show the relevance of laughter to the themes they had been discussing. As they suggest, “perhaps names are no more than frozen laughter, as is evident nowadays in nicknames…” (77). When I was a high school cross-country athlete I would often come to the end of a race with dried saliva on my lips, and my friends jokingly, laughingly said it looked like I foamed at the mouth as I came to the finish line. After much laughter I and a few replays of the joke, I acquired the nickname “foam” for a time, and as H&A put it, the laughter and joy came to be frozen in a name. The appearance of laughter, which for H&A is “still a sign of force, of the breaking out of blind and obdurate nature” (77), became, with my nickname, a power frozen in time and abstracted from the power of nature. Similarly the modern glorification of the individual, the abstract self becomes the frozen aspect of the power of nature that becomes the basis for turning against nature itself in an endless effort to quantify, control, and order it.