344 Epiloguewhich of them nonetheless ultimately sought support in something
expansive. To Nietzsche, certainly, the all-embracing "Dionysian" life
was not a supporting basis but an abyss, posing a threat to our
"Apollonian" attempts at self-reinforcement He might well have accused
Heidegger of a lack of radicalism in transcending the need for security.
Perhaps he would have considered Heidegger's 'Oeing" nothing more
than a Platonic world behind that can offer protection and security.
Heidegger interpreted Nietzsche's philosophy as a final stage of
metaphysics. This metaphysics cannot grasp Being in a practical, evalu-
ative manner. The obscurity of the forgetfulness of Being, which
Heidegger traced back to Plato, was still evident in Nietzsche. Heidegger
felt drawn to Nietzsche because he saw clear parallels between them.
Nietzsche had also set the beginnings of the Western affliction of alien-
ation from the Dionysian sources of culture at Plato and Socrates. To
the one, this was forgetfulness of Being; to the other, a betrayal of
Dionysus. Both maintained that the calamity of the present had begun
long ago in the deep recesses of history.
A few years after Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures, Theodor W. Adorno
and Max Horkheimer published Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of
Enlightenment, 1944). An analysis of Nietzsche was the basis of this
work as well, which has since become a classic of contemporary critical
philosophy. Adorno and Horkheimer moved away from the ideological
focus of their earlier years, when they had pitted the values of bourgeois
enlightenment against capitalist reality and had sought and found sub-
versive potential in the disparities of late capitalism. That was still
enlightenment Now, in the aftermath of war, National Socialist and
Stalinist rule, the American culture industry, and the triumphant advance
of noncontemplative applied science, they felt that the time had come
to enlighten enlightenment about itself, specifically its involvement in
spinning a web of delusions. "The fiilly enlightened earth radiates disas-
ter triumphant" (Adorno/Horkheimer 3).
Nietzsche and Heidegger had dated the moment of the Fall back to
Plato and Socrates. Adorno and Horkheimer looked back still farther, to