Enlightenment’s principle of immanence is itself the mythic principle of repetition.

Evidence

The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, that the Enlightenment upholds against mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself. That arid wisdom that holds there is nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played, and all the great thoughts have already been thought, and because all possible discoveries can be construed in advance and all men are decided on adaptation as the means to self-preservation—that dry sagacity merely reproduces the fantastic wisdom that it supposedly rejects: the sanction of fate that in retribution relentlessly remakes what has already been. What was different is equalized. That is the verdict which critically determines the limits of possible experience. The identity of everything with everything else is paid for in that nothing may at the same time be identical with itself. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 38

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Adorno’s claim that the Enlightenment’s own core tool (explaining everything as repetition/immanence) reproduces mythic fate is a paradigm-level insight, not a passing point.
• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape; Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46; The Dialectic holds that myth was already enlightenment and prepared self-destructive enlightenment — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1371

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46
• Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape #contradicts (0.75)