문화영웅, 헤라클래스와 계몽의 변증법

Abstract

According to Adorno and Horkheimer’ Dialectic of Enlightenment, the most urgent to do was to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. They see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. First of all, this paper is to demonstrate Heracles a first cultural hero that succeeded in struggling against natural forces and establishing a civilized world. His great feats for civilization went far beyond mere conquering huge monsters such as Hydra, a Nemean lion, an Arcadian boar and so on. It was an earth-breaking event in the history of enlightenment in the West that Heracles succeeded by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth in Augean stables because it was technological and scientific victory by human reason itself, not by divinity. But the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces can be also said to bring out the violence and war against human itself as represented in Heracles’ myths in which he got crueler and more militant. Finally, I conclude that Heracles’ cultural feats are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the modern times with the rise of the fascism.