Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape

Evidence

In the enlightened world, mythology has entered into the profane. In its blank purity, the reality which has been cleansed of demons and their conceptual descendants assumes the numinous character which the ancient world attributed to demons. Under the title of brute facts, the social injustice from which they proceed is now as assuredly sacred a preserve as the medicine man was sacrosanct by reason of the protection of his gods. It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of men—even those of the individual to himself—were bewitched. The individual is reduced to the nodal point of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected of him. Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits of men. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is no more than a so to speak universal taboo. Nothing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 40 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In philosophy, the Distinction, especially in its Is/Ought form, was perhaps the dominating problem in moral thought. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has asserted, “the fact/value split” has become “a dominant theme in our [twentieth] century” and has undergirded “a new understanding and valuation of freedom and dignity.” What needs to be said in addition is that it determined the entirety of our conception of reality, which Taylor appears to subsume under “freedom and dignity.” Powerfully expressed in the Kantian notion of autonomy, freedom ceases to denote God’s omnipotence and becomes instead an expression of man’s own natural powers of reasoning. Human reason becomes the sole arbiter in the project of objectifying the world, of submitting it to its own demands and will, which now have turned relentlessly instrumentalist. The pursuit of happiness, utility, and much else that is subservient to these imperatives—such as preservation of life and protection of private property—become natural rights derivable from the natural order by what is/was seen as far-sighted, calculating reason. Formerly restricted by the power of revelation as defined by the Catholic Church, reason now becomes, like a free market, free and unbound by any restricting consideration or enduring moral principle. It is reason on the loose. Yet, in the very outburst of Enlightenment reason against the absolutism of Church and monarch, precisely in its mighty reaction against such powers that had ruled over it with utterly free absolutism, Enlightenment reason’s distension and extension went the full circle of replicating the very tyranny that caused its rise in the first place, but this time it was not just people who were its subject of rule, but also nature and indeed the world in its entirety. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: enlightenment is indefatigably self-destructive in its own tendencies; Enlightenment’s conversion into positivism has been historically confirmed.; Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination #corroborates (0.95) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46
• Enlightenment reason replicated the tyranny it rebelled against, now over nature #corroborates (0.90) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182
• Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical against all outsideness. #corroborates (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 40
• Enlightenment reason reshaped religious providence rather than displacing it #expands (0.85) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 122
• Enlightenment secularization also sacralized profane history and myth in new ways. #expands (0.80)
• The Enlightenment’s self-image required the Rest as its suppressed opposite. #expands (0.80)
• Enlightenment rationalism generated new monsters instead of eradicating them #complicates (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 352