I had a few ideas derived from Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment that I wanted to post here, but every time I came back to this post I found another and better quote from their book that expresses my interpretation of their ideas in their own more eloquent and coherent words. It would be an injustice to distort their thoughts beyond those that must have occurred via translation to English from German in 1947, so instead I'll list a few choice quotes from the first 16 pages of their book. It gets even better further in as more ideas stretching back to Homer and Plato are used to illustrate just what this Enlightenment thing was all about and the lasting effect it has had on everything from faith and knowledge, to factory work and capitalism.

Without further ado:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.... Enlightenment's program was the disenchantment of the world.

But the Enlightenment discerned the old powers in the Platonic and Aristotelian heritage of metaphysics and suppressed the universal categories' claims to truth as superstition.... For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.

Mythology itself set in motion the endless process of enlightenment by which, with ineluctable necessity, every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief until even the concepts of mind, truth, and indeed enlightenment itself have been reduced to animistic magic.

But faith is a privative concept: it is abolished as faith if it does not continuously assert either its opposition of knowledge or its agreement with it. In being dependent on the limits set to knowledge, it is itself limited.... Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it. The secret awareness of this necessary, inherent flaw... is the reason why honesty in believers has always been a sensitive and dangerous affair.

Not only is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century inexorable, as Hegel confirmed; so, too, as none knew better than he, is the movement of thought itself. The lowest insight, like the highest, contains the knowledge of its distance from the truth, which makes the apologist a liar.

It will be a challenge to read the book--I challenge anyone to stop reading their book after completing the first 34 pages (1st chapter). Horkheimer and Adorno's arguments and examples are varied and compelling, and the breadth and complexity of material they cover is remarkable. Indeed, I originally came across their book in a second year film studies course and have used it in current courses covering everything from research methods to information policy.

A great and challenging read all around.