1992/01/01 by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Robert Hullot-Kentor
Arts and Humanities · #Classical Philosophy and Thought
paper · doi:10.2307/488331
Just as the episode of the Sirens contains the entwninement of myth and rational labor, the Odyssey as a whole bears witness to the dialectic of enlightenment. Especially in its most ancient stratum, the epic proves to be bound to myth: the adventures have their origin in popular tradition. However, by appropriating the myths, by organizing them, the Homeric spirit opposes them. The habitual equation of epic and myth, which has been challenged by recent classical philology, has been shown to be a complete fraud by philosophical criticism. The two concepts diverge. They mark two phases of an historical process that can be distinguished along the seams of the Homeric editorial work. Homeric discourse creates a universality of language, if it does not already presuppose it; the epic dissolves the hierarchical order of society by the exoteric form of its presentation, even and precisely there where it glorifies this order. To sing of Achilles's rage and the wanderings of Odysseus is already the nostalgic stylization of what may no longer be sung. And the hero of the adventure proves to be the prototype of the bourgeois individual, whose concept originates in that coherent self-assertion the primordial model of which is rendered by the beleaguered hero. In the epic, the historical-philosophical counterpart to the novel, novelistic aspects ultimately begin to show through, and the venerable meaning-charged cosmos of the Homeric world reveals itself to be the work of ordering reason, which destroys m)yth precisely by means of the rational order in which it reflects m)yth.