Adorno’s Years in California 283condition of both the domination of nature and self-determination, is
seen to have two aspects.^53 An imbalance has occurred between the
instrumental and reflective elements of a rationality that is thought of as
a unity. In the view of Horkheimer and Adorno, dialectical thinking is
the only way to appropriate the rationality of reason at a more advanced
stage of reflection.
Because reason as ‘the happiness of insight’^54 has vanished from con-
sciousness, ‘men pay for their increase in power with their alienation
from that over which they exercise their power.’^55 The fact that people
equate reason with self-preservation is a quid pro quo that can even be
seen in myth, the prototype of enlightenment. For the narratives about
primeval events are themselves early attempts at explanation that serve
to secure the human subject’s domination over the forces of nature.
‘Myth intended report, naming, the narration of the beginning: but also
presentation, confirmation, explanation.’^56 And just as myth is already
enlightenment, so enlightenment reverts to myth. The mythological
or ideological aspect of the modern enlightened consciousness consists
in the idea that Homo sapiens is able to use his reason to subject the
universe to his will. The reason for man’s wish to control the world
through knowledge, for the merging of enlightenment and domination,
lies in his fear of the real overwhelming power of nature. ‘Every attempt
to break nature’s coercive power by breaking nature itself’ leads thought
‘all the more deeply into enslavement. Hence the course of European
civilization.’^57
This dialectic applies also to the constitution of the subject. By bowing
to the need for a methodical conduct of life, the human subject ‘is
reduced to the nodal point of the conventional responses and modes of
operation expected of him.’^58 The progress of individuation in bourgeois
society ‘took place at the expense of individuality’, and at the end nothing
was left but ‘the resolve to pursue one’s own particular purpose’.^59
In order to persuade the reader of this equivalence of enlightenment
and myth in this chapter, perhaps the most impressive chapter of the
entire book,^60 Adorno interprets scenes from Homer’s Odyssey (eighth
century bc) as an allegory of the prehistory of subjectivity from which
we can read off the conditions and consequences of a rationality in the
service of absolute self-preservation. This is the process of liberation
from the constraints of nature through self-discipline ‘until the self, the
identical, purposive and virile nature of mankind was formed’.^61 Odysseus
exemplifies the way in which this story of the domestication of man’s
inner nature was carried out. In Canto 12, when Odysseus and his men
risk falling victim to the lethal song of the Sirens,^62 he is warned by
Circe that there are ‘only two possible ways of escape’:
One of them he prescribes for his men. He plugs their ears with
wax, and they must row with all their strength. Whoever would
survive must not hear the temptation of that which is unrepeatable,