The Odyssey excursus chiefly shows enlightenment reverting to myth, not myth being enlightenment

Evidence

The first excursus, `Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment’, was, according to the Introduction, intended to provide evidence for the thesis that myth was already enlightenment; but that was not an exact description of what it contained. Most of it was concerned to demonstrate that enlightenment, even at that early stage, was already reverting to mythology. It was hardly possible to interpret the text of the Odyssey otherwise. The author allowed his heroes to take the myths seriously, but he himself already stood in an ironical, enlightened relation to them, and his central figure was moving towards a similar relation. Horkheimer called the Odyssey the first document on the anthropology of man as a rationally enlightened being in the modern sense; and the ingenuity with which Adorno managed to discover new aspects in this much-interpreted classical text was at its clearest in the way in which he used it to indicate the cost at which enlightenment was achieved. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1377

Categorization

• XREF: The whole excursus thesis — myth already enlightenment, enlightenment reverting to myth — touches the critique of instrumental reason that recurs across Critical Theory (Marcuse, The One-Dimensional Man). — connects to: The Frankfurt School treated the Odyssey as the first anthropology of enlightened man — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1354; Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape; Enlightenment thought posits a primal mythic unity that never actually existed — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 728 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the actual thesis of the first Dialectic of Enlightenment excursus, which is often mis-summarized as ‘myth was already enlightenment’.

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape #corroborates (0.95)
• All civilization so far is enlightenment trapped within mythic immanence #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1372
• Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination #corroborates (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46
• Enlightenment reason reshaped religious providence rather than displacing it #corroborates (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 122
• Enlightenment thought posits a primal mythic unity that never actually existed #qualifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 728