Enlightenment’s fixed temporal order aims to neutralize the past’s power over the present.

Evidence

Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past. But the hero to whom the temptation is offered has reached maturity through suffering. Throughout the many mortal perils he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the individual, has been confirmed for him. The regions of time part for him as do water, earth, and air. For him, the flood of that-which-was has retreated from the rock of the present, and the future lies cloudy on the horizon. What Odysseus left behind him entered into the nether world; for the self is still so close to prehistoric myth, from whose womb it tore itself, that its very own experienced past becomes mythic prehistory. And it seeks to encounter that myth through the fixed order of time. The threefold schema is intended to free the present moment from the power of the past by referring that power behind the absolute barrier of the unrepeatable and placing it at the disposal of the present as practicable knowledge. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 48

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘threefold schema’ of time as the Enlightenment’s mechanism for mastering mythic past.
• XREF: connects to: Freedom as choice retroactively constitutes the past as irremediable. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1178; The past is fixed being while the future remains modifiable by freedom — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 454; Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 408 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• The past is fixed being while the future remains modifiable by freedom #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 454
• Truth about the past limits human power, future-dependent truth expands it #expands (0.80) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 2937
• Treating time as a series of nows annihilates past, present, and future alike #qualifies (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 408
• The past informs the individual but can be re-captured through successive choices. #complicates (0.75)
• Enlightenment thought was grounded in the practical rationalization of space and time. #expands (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1641
• Freedom can objectify its own past, rupturing temporal continuity with the instant #complicates (0.74)
• Dramatic conflict overcomes time by condensing past and future into the present instant #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 118
• The present realizes what was essential in the past #complicates (0.72)