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ald, Bacon, dreamed of the many things which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command, [of which] their spials and intelligencers can give no news. * Just as he wished, those things have been given to the bourgeois, the enlightened heirs of the kings. In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed. From the power of things they finally learn to forgo power. Enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already attained, and the lands of which their spials and intelligencers can give no news that is, nature misunderstood by masterful science are remem- bered as those of origin. Today, when Bacon s utopia, in which we should command nature in action, has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the 34 The Concept of Enlightenment essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself. Knowledge, in which, for Bacon, the sovereignty of man unquestionably lay hidden, can now devote itself to dissolving that power. But in face of this possibility enlightenment, in the service of the present, is turning itself into an outright deception of the masses. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |