![]() Bacon expressed the hopes for Enlightenment well when he envisioned a patriarchal future where humans, having conquered mythical superstition and in perfect control of knowledge, establish themselves as autonomous masters of the natural world: The goal of Enlightenment was always to “ human beings from fear and them as masters”. That is to say, the historical development of our conceptual schemas through which we view and interact with the world. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlightenment does not refer to the specific 18th-century intellectual movement but what could be “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought”. The last interpretation is an optimistic one: the potential to actualize true freedom has increased even if our freedom has become increasingly restricted. The very abstractedness which makes our thinking so powerful is also what estranges us from ourselves, society, and nature. This is the unspoken price of discipline. Humanity has progressed in its ability to dominate the external world by an increasing domination of itself. The second interpretation is that this history is ambivalent. Positivism is no different from myth because it renders the world fated before the rigid laws of mathematics and rejects the authority of concepts. Myth is no different from positivism because it is rooted from an urge to explain and control. The first interpretation is that this history is circular. The final progression of this development, mathematics and logic, claim to know or at least be able to know the full extent of reality. As a reflex, we’ve expanded the reach of our knowledge and its ability to predict and control reality by making our thinking more abstract, total, utilitarian, unifying, and calculative. ![]() This progression is motivated by a fear of the unknown and uncontrollable. Currently, the positivist era interacts with the world through the abstractions of mathematics and logic. ![]() The metaphysical era deals directly with concepts such as being, suffering, and love. The mythical era interacts with elements controlled by gods who reveal their mechanisms in myth. The magical era interacts with discrete entities through imitation. The Dialectic’s philosophy of history is split into four distinct eras defined by a progression in thought. I will present a philosophy of history as well as three different but compatible ways to interpret it. This summary is, therefore, an attempt to systematize the theoretical foundations of the Dialectic as found in its first chapter. This form was chosen because of the shared belief that society, as it was, was too dysfunctional, inconsistent, and chaotic for any consistent and structured truth to be presented. Instead, it presents chunks of different philosophical arguments (the book was originally titled Philosophical Fragments) that are all equidistant from the central thrust of the argument. This book, notoriously difficult to parse, has no semblance of structure or systematicity. While the conclusions of the text may be too pessimistic and extreme, the main critiques within it of mathematics, science, abstraction and knowledge in general are nonetheless relevant. Furthermore, the culprit for this regress is the pride of modernity: our increased ability to control and manipulate the external world. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is worth reading because and not despite the seeming absurdity of its central claim: the history of humanity is one of regress rather than progress. With that said, I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they are helpful to other readers. ![]() These notes were created during my reading process to aid my own understanding and not written for the purpose of instruction. My preferred way of engaging with books is reconstruction. ![]()
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