ion, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as it did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them .... The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered .... The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination 40. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin ofNegative Dialectics (New York, 1977). 41. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations 254 ff. I have explored the relationship between the philosophies of history ofBenjamin and the authors ofDialecticofEnlightenment in my study WalterBenjamin: An Aesthetic ofRedemption (New York, 1982) 266 ff. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 48 Dialectic ofRationality in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the basis of actual domination. The dissolution of the magical heritage, of the old diffuse ideas, by conceptual unity, expresses the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free. The individuality that learned order and subordination in the subjection of the world, soon wholly equated truth with the regulative thought without whose fixed distinctions universal truth cannot exist.42 The explanation for the emergence of rational thought offered here is a thoroughly disenchanted one. Its motives point in the direction of a radicalized ideology-critique that seems to draw more on pragmatist insights and a genealogical focus of Nietzschean inspiration than the Marxist tradition with which critical theory was earlier associated. The utopian potentials of the rational concept could emerge only with great difficulty from this perspective. Instead, the faculty of rational thought would appear to have more determinate links with the history of domination over human and non-human nature than with prospects for emancipation. Whereas Horkheimer seemed for the most part to retain this negative historico-philosophical orientation in his later work, he never attempted to work out fully the epistemological implications of the critique of reason in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Instead, this task was left to Adorno, who, one might say, executed it with a vengeance in Negative Dialectics, where it seems that the most essential function that conceptual thought could assume at present would be to reflect on its own inadequacies. As Adorno remarks: Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept's seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning .... Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from growing rampant and becoming an absolute unto itself.4s If the preceding reconstruction of the development of critical theory is correct, then its own internal ambivalences concerning the history of Western rationalism would have to be taken into consideration to a much greater extent than it has been in the secondary literature heretofore. One possible way out of this dilemma would seem to be to 42. Horkheimerand Adorno, DialecticofEnlightenment 13-14. 43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (NewYork, 1973) 12-13. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms