Tweet the Dialectic (again)

Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the 'outside' is the real source of fear. #DoE

The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. #DoE

Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. #DoE

This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. #DoE

Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. #DialecticofEnlightenment

The gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their names. #DoE

But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself. #DialecticofEnlightenment

This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. #DoE

The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. #DoE

Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. #DoE

If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of *mana*, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. #DoE

Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. #DoE

The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from this preanimism. #DoE

This does not mean that the soul is transposed into nature, as psychologism would have us believe; *mana*, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the echo of the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people. #DoE

The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force, made possible by myth no less than by science, springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation. #DoE

It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. #DoE

The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. #DialecticofEnlightenment

What the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link. #DoE

Primal and undifferentiated, it is everything unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence. #DoE

The murky, undivided entity worshipped as the principle of *mana* at the earliest known stages of humanity lived on in the bright world of the Greek religion. #DoE

They were bound together like genesis and decline, life and death, summer and winter. #DoE

In the same way, the good and evil powers, the holy and unholy, were not unambiguously distinguished. #DoE

The name Zeus was applied both to a god of the underworld and to a god of light in cults which did not exclude each other, and the Olympian gods maintained all kinds of commerce with the chthonic deities. #DoE

But heaven and hell were linked. #DoE

The dark, chthonic gods of the original inhabitants are banished to the hell into which the earth is transformed under the religions of Indra and Zeus, with their worship of sun and light. #DoE

Its hatred is directed at the image of the vanquished primeval world and its imaginary happiness. #DialecticofEnlightenment

Along with mimetic magic it tabooed the knowledge which really apprehends the object. #DoE

The self which learned about order and subordination through the subjugation of the world soon equated truth in general with classifying thought, without whose fixed distinctions it cannot exist. #DoE

The superseding of the old diffuse notions of the magical heritage by conceptual unity expresses a condition of life defined by the freeborn citizen and articulated by command. #DoE

The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality. #DoE