ABSTRACT
Insofar as we discover telling resemblances between Nietzsche’s genealogical tactics and Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of enlightenment, the larger purpose served by this examination comes into view. Laying bare the genealogical dimensions of their work concentrates our interest on their original translation of “man back into nature,” of subjectivity back into individuality. For by way of this translation all the arguments of Dialectic of Enlightenment proceed from a common point of departure. Individuality is the normative point of departure for an argument that reconstructs the evolution of reason as a struggle within thought that culminates in a defining historical event. An aesthetic form of individuality, whose promise shone brightly though evanescently through the narrow window of contingency circumscribed by the ambiguity of mythical thought framing Odysseus’s adventures, is sacrificed to the inner organization of individuality. In Odysseus’s sacrifice of individuality’s aesthetic features, Horkheimer and Adorno offer us a metaphorical representation of the creation of the modern subject coinciding with the Enlightenment of modern times, through which formal reason becomes objectified in structures enabling it to achieve universality. Aesthetic reason, which had oriented individuality receptively to a world of fathomless differences, is confined to sublimated expressions in art and to the aesthetic sensibility preserved by art. Against this catastrophic historical event, which launches the modern subject on a trajectory leading to the Holocaust, we are encouraged through their Nietzschean translation to conceptualize individuality as originally oriented to the world aesthetically, an orientation receptive to the world as in some profound way different from our every thought of it. Aesthetic individuality is thinking’s recognition of the opacity and mystery of being, thinkings intuition that the darkness of the world may conceal some fathomless meaning lying forever beyond the boundaries of thought. Aesthetic individuality is perhaps nothing less than thinking’s reflection of the limits of thought, though it also is a great deal more.
