Europe Discovers Nietzsche 345the moment at which Odysseus had himself bound to the mast in order
to resist the song of the sirens. The self that was attempting to assert itself
in this instance had to brace and shackle itself and inflict violence on itself.
Above all, it could not give in to music "Without music, life would be an
error" (6,64; 77 "Maxims and Arrows" § 33), Nietzsche had said, and
Adorno and Horkheimer were now demonstrating how life succumbed to
error by opting for self-affirmation against the music of the world.
Nietzsche inspired the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment by laying
out the track of Dionysus, which they proceeded to follow. When
things are Dionysian, life is where it ought to be, in the heart of its cre-
ative, consuming commotion. The life that Adorno and Horkheimer
saw disappearing before their very eyes under the force of socialization,
which they called "nature in the subject," was Dionysian and siren seek-
ing. To become a subject, one must be bound to the mast of rational
self-affirmation. Anyone wishing to be the master of his own fate must
not follow the voices of the sirens, whose beauty signals demise.
Becoming a subject means applying force to one's outer and inner
nature. "Nature," however, was for Adorno and Horkheimer, as it had
been for their philosophical forebear Nietzsche, "that which transcends
the confines of experience; whatever in things is more than their previ-
ously known reality" (Adorno/Horkheimer 15). Nietzsche's "Diony-
sus," Heidegger's "Being," and Adorno and Horkheimer's "nature" are
all designations for the colossal dimensions of existence.
Adorno and Horkheimer expanded Nietzsche's analysis of power.
Since Nietzsche interpreted the will to truth as a form of the will to
power, power games appeared to reign supreme. No matter how deeply
absorbed in the truth a person might be, no matter how pure and self-
less, ultimately the will to power would rear its head. The authors of
Dialectic of Enlightenment, who felt let down by Western reason, saw the
situation in much the same way. The magic of the humanistic ideas of
the Enlightenment had vanished, and the cold heart of power—or, one
might say, the dynamic structure of an anonymous exercise of power—
was everywhere manifest.