CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

objects only to the extent that the objects can be manipulated for the sake of achieving
subjective goals 188 —ultimately, for the sake of self-preservation. Under this condition,
Adorno and Horkheimer argue, the “essence” of the object becomes simply its being an
indeterminate substrate for the projection of subjective categories that are themselves
defined for the sake of manipulation, for domination:
Die Menschen bezahlen die Vermehrung ihrer Macht mit der Entfremdung von
dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben. Die Aufklärung verhält sich zu den Dingen
wie der Diktator zu den Menschen. Er kennt sie, insofern er sie manipulieren
kann. Der Mann der Wissenschaft kennt die Dinge, insofern er sie machen
kann. 189
As a result of the instrumentality of knowledge, “[d]ie disqualifizierte Natur wird
zum chaotischen Stoff bloßer Einteilung und das allgewaltige Selbst zum bloßen Haben,
188 In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer provides vivid examples of how even the perception of
external reality has become instrumental: a landscape appears as a possible space for an advertising
billboard; the moon is perceived as an advertisement for something or as an object to be exploited for
profit. In these cases, external nature is perceived in terms of its utility for advancing and securing the
individual’s well-being in market society and, in this sense, for the sake of self-preservation. See Eclipse of
Reason (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 69:
The story of the boy who looked up at the sky and asked, ‘Daddy, what is the moon supposed to
advertise?’ is an allegory of what has happened to the relation between man and nature in the era
of formalized reason. On the one hand, nature has been stripped of all intrinsic value or meaning.
On the other, man has been stripped of all aims except self-preservation. He tries to transform
everything within reach into a means to that end. Every word or sentence that hints of relations
other than pragmatic is suspect. … Though people may not ask what the moon is supposed to
advertise, they tend to think of it in terms of ballistics of aerial mileage.
189 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 31. English translation by
Edmund Jephcott in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6:
Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is
exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings.
He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to
the extent that he can make them. Their ‘in itself’ becomes ‘for him.’ In their transformation the
essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination.
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