Adorno And Horkhiemers Dialect

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appearance of the subject as it is objectified alongside nature, and is dominated with it. The subject becomes an object and his intellect becomes instrumental, and all instinct and sensory experience that fails to be productive in the pursuit of domination is repressed, man becomes mechanized. They also assert that class domination is a direct and inevitable consequence of the attempt to dominate nature, and is therefore inescapable.
Background to the text.
Adorno and Horkheimer, members of the Frankfurt school in Germany, wrote DoE (which was completed in 1944) while Fascism, a kind of barbarism never seen before, was threatening Europe. They viewed this as the epitome of the self-destructive nature of enlightenment, the final evidence that it would never result in ‘a truly human condition’. They wrote in the introduction to DoE that ‘the indefatigable self-destructiveness of enlightenment…requires philosophy to discard even the last vestiges of innocence ...

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extended to the world and the objective and purely independent is not yet realized#. The magician and shaman use ritual magic to influence nature but never to dominate it. The tool of the shaman is mimesis (imitation in an attempt to influence) and sacrifice. ‘The magician imitates demons; in order to frighten them or appease them, he behaves frighteningly or makes gestures of appeasement’ (p.9) but neither this nor sacrifices are attempts to control nature but are pleas to animistic forces of nature that the shaman considers more powerful than himself.

The gradual move from myth to Enlightenment is the move from reaction to nature to interaction with nature. ...

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