CHAPTER 1

The Concept of Enlightenment

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance ofthought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear andinstalling them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant withtriumphant calamity. Enlightenment's program was the disenchantmentof the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.Bacon, "the father of experimental philosophy," brought these motifstogether. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belieffor knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless insupplying answers. All this, he said, stood in the way of "the happy matchbetween the mind of man and the nature of things," with the result thathumanity was unable to use its knowledge for the betterment of its condition.Such inventions as had been made—Bacon cites printing, artillery,and the compass—had been arrived at more by chance than by systematicenquiry into nature. Knowledge obtained through such enquiry wouldnot only be exempt from the influence of wealth and power but wouldestablish man as the master of nature:

Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein manythings are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their forcecommand; their spials and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamenand discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions,but we are thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention,we should command her by action.

Although not a mathematician, Bacon well understood the scientific temperwhich was to come after him. The "happy match" between humanunderstanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchalone: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchantednature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavementof creation or in its deference to worldly masters. Just as it serves allthe purposes of the bourgeois economy both in factories and on the battlefield,it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins.Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is asdemocratic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology isthe essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts norimages, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of thelabor of others, capital. The "many things" which, according to Bacon,knowledge still held in store are themselves mere instruments: the radio asa sublimated printing press, the dive bomber as a more effective form ofartillery, remote control as a more reliable compass. What human beingsseek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it andhuman beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenmenthas eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness. Onlythought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.Faced by the present triumph of the factual mentality, Bacon's nominalistcredo would have smacked of metaphysics and would have been convictedof the same vanity for which he criticized scholasticism. Power andknowledge are synonymous. For Bacon as for Luther, "knowledge thattendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, andnot for fruit or generation." Its concern is not "satisfaction, which men calltruth," but "operation," the effective procedure. The "true end, scope oroffice of knowledge" does not consist in "any plausible, delectable, reverendor admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effectingand working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before, for thebetter endowment and help of man's life." There shall be neither mysterynor any desire to reveal mystery.

The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.Xenophanes mocked the multiplicity of gods because they resembled theircreators, men, in all their idiosyncrasies and faults, and the latest logicdenounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, ascounterfeit coin that would be better replaced by neutral counters. Theworld becomes chaos, and synthesis salvation. No difference is said to existbetween the totemic animal, the dreams of the spirit-seer, and the absoluteIdea. On their way toward modern science human beings have discardedmeaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules andprobability. Causality was only the last philosophical concept on which scientificcriticism tested its strength, because it alone of the old ideas stillstood in the way of such criticism, the latest secular form of the creativeprinciple. To define substance and quality, activity and suffering, being andexistence in terms appropriate to the time has been a concern of philosophysince Bacon; but science could manage without such categories. Theywere left behind as idola theatri of the old metaphysics and even in theirtime were monuments to entities and powers from prehistory. In that distanttime life and death had been interpreted and interwoven in myths.The categories by which Western philosophy defined its timeless order ofnature marked out the positions which had once been occupied by Ocnusand Persephone, Ariadne and Nereus. The moment of transition is recordedin the pre-Socratic cosmologies. The moist, the undivided, the air andfire which they take to be the primal stuff of nature are early rationalizationsprecipitated from the mythical vision. Just as the images of generationfrom water and earth, that had come to the Greeks from the Nile, wereconverted by these cosmologies into Hylozoic principles and elements, thewhole ambiguous profusion of mythical demons was intellectualized to becomethe pure form of ontological entities. Even the patriarchal gods ofOlympus were finally assimilated by the philosophical logos as the PlatonicForms. But the Enlightenment...