Enlightenment’s mastery over nature exceeds anything nature itself threatened humans with.

Evidence

In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 258

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The terrifying inversion — human dominion over nature becoming a horror greater than nature’s own threats — is a core negative-dialectic claim.
• XREF: Culminates the Dialectic of Enlightenment thesis on domination turning back on humanity. — connects to: Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical against all outsideness. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 40; Enlightenment reason is fundamentally a project of self-preservation through mastery of nature; Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual. (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual. #expands (0.85)
• Dominating nature chiefly becomes power over other humans #expands (0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 703
• Nature is the object of reason as liberation, not only domination #complicates (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 826
• The unified sense of self arose from internalized mastery of nature. #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 298
• The drive to dominate external nature extends inward to the human self #expands (0.80)