Troublesome Terminology.

This opposition between myth and enlightenment brings us to what
Adorno and Horkheimer might mean by a ‘dialectic’ of enlightenment.
Again, like ‘enlightenment’, ‘dialectic’ has a significant philosophical
pedigree. Perhaps the most important understanding of ‘dialectic’ upon
which Adorno and Horkheimer draw is that developed throughout his work
by the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831). In his Logic, which
is the first part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (first published,
1817; third edition, 1830), for example, Hegel says that ‘dialectic’ names
the way in which apparently simple concepts or propositions ultimately go
beyond their own simplicity and turn into their opposites (Hegel 1975b:
115). We can most usefully begin to see what this might mean by considering
Adorno and Horkheimer’s opposition between enlightenment and myth
itself. The argument of their book is that myth is already, in some sense,
enlightenment because it is already an attempt at knowledge: the bogeyman
is an attempt to explain the bump in the night. Conversely, enlightenment
is still myth because, although human beings might have been relieved of
their fear of nature, they are increasingly alienated from it and thus an
antagonistic relationship with it persists: the squirrel gets it in the neck.
Enlightenment can be shown to be characterized by what is allegedly opposed
to it; in this way, it is dialectical.