Reason’s apparent triumph over nature is really its obedient subjection to facts
Evidence
What appears to be the triumph of subjective rationality, the subjection of all reality to logical formalism, is paid for by the obedient subjection of reason to what is directly given. What is abandoned is the whole claim and approach of knowledge: to comprehend the given as such; not merely to determine the abstract spatiotemporal relations of the facts which allow them just to be grasped, but on the contrary to conceive them as the superficies, as mediated conceptual moments which come to fulfillment only in the development of their social, historical, and human significance. The task of cognition does not consist in mere apprehension, classification, and calculation, but in the determinate negation of each im-mediacy. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 45
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘determinate negation’ as the counter-task of cognition against mere classification.
- DEEPTHINKING: The inversion—subjective rationality’s victory is reason’s servitude to the given—is the chapter’s deepest structural claim.
- XREF: Directly anchors Burns’s theme: the culture industry’s administered cognition is exactly this resigned repetition of the given. — connects to: Enlightenment reason is fundamentally a project of self-preservation through mastery of nature; Nature is the object of reason as liberation, not only domination — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 826; Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 487 (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Preserving nature within civilization always means dominating it more completely
#corroborates(0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 145 - Enlightenment reason is fundamentally a project of self-preservation through mastery of nature
#corroborates(0.85) - Scientific reason is the methodology of a pre-given historical reality.
#corroborates(0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 600 - Enlightenment reason replicated the tyranny it rebelled against, now over nature
#expands(0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182 - Nature is the object of reason as liberation, not only domination
#contradicts(0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 826 - Enlightenment defines reason as systematic organization of data
#expands(0.80) - Universal quantifiability is a prerequisite for the domination of nature.
#expands(0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 608 - Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth
#complicates(0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 487 - Kant absolutized historical contradictions into nature, thereby affirming the status quo
#exemplifies(0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 215