Humanity dethroned external nature yet failed to master or respect inner nature.

Evidence

As if they were still under the spell of the old fear of a superior nature, people made it their highest goal to bring nature into submission. But they did not succeed in breaking its superior power; instead, nature, within them, remained superior. Nature had been dethroned, but they did not succeed in achieving fearless respect for it, even after they had intentionally brought it down: respect for something which had potentially produced a means of alleviating its own harshnesses in the form of humanity itself. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 325

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A compact restatement of the dialectic of enlightenment’s core mechanism: the subjugation of outer nature recoils and leaves inner nature unconquered but no longer respected either.
• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s earlier note that Horkheimer and Adorno located culture’s decisive event in humanity’s domination of nature, not capitalism. — connects to: Modern Western man’s alienation results from losing connection to an ethically ordered cosmos.; Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual.; Humanity’s domination of nature fails because inner nature remains unruly — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1260 (+7 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Modern Western man’s alienation results from losing connection to an ethically ordered cosmos.; Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual.; Humanity’s domination of nature fails because inner nature remains unruly — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1260 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Humanity’s domination of nature fails because inner nature remains unruly #corroborates (0.92) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1260
• Belief in a fixed human nature rests on a tragic fallacy. #complicates (0.76) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1023