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

overcome and in fact became stronger and stronger as civilization called for ever greater
sacrifice of instinctual desires.
Rein natürliche Existenz, animalische und vegetative, bildete der Zivilisation die
absolute Gefahr. Mimetische, mythische, metaphysische Verhaltensweisen galten
nacheinander als überwundene Weltalter, auf die hinabzusinken mit dem
Schrecken behaftet war, daß das Selbst in jene bloße Natur zurückverwandelt
werde, der es sich mit unsäglicher Anstrengung entfremdet hatte, und die ihm
eben darum unsägliches Grauen einflößte. Die lebendige Erinnerung an die
Vorzeit, schon an die nomadischen, um wie viel mehr an die eigentlich
präpatriarchalischen Stufen, war mit den furchtbarsten Strafen in allen
Jahrtausenden aus dem Bewußtsein der Menschen ausgebrannt worden. Der
aufgeklärte Geist ersetzte Feuer und Rad durch das Stigma, das er aller
Irrationalität aufprägte, da sie ins Verderben führt. 234
The creation of the self and of civilization is presented in Dialektik der
Aufklärung as a painful process that required extreme sacrifice and exertion. All this
exertion was for the sake of survival and a future promise of re-gaining pleasure, of
acquiring a sort of compensation for the sacrifices required by finding an Odyssean
“return home”—a return to nature that is not unmediated, and so does not entail the
destruction of civilization, but that offers a mediated satisfaction of the wish for
happiness. As this compensation became ever more remote and unattainable, the pull of
unsatisfied instinctual desires clamoring for the satisfaction of pleasure became ever
234 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 54. English translation by
Edmund Jephcott in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 24:
For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger.
Mimetic, mythical, and metaphysical forms of behavior were successively regarded as stages of
world history which had been left behind, and the idea of reverting to them held the terror that the
self would be changed back into the mere nature from which it had extricated itself with
unspeakable exertions and which for that reason filled it with unspeakable dread. Over the
millennia the living memory of prehistory, of its nomadic period and even more of the truly
prepatriarchal stages, has been expunged from human consciousness with the most terrible
punishments. The enlightened spirit replaced fire and the wheel by the stigma it attached to all
irrationality, which led to perdition.
244