The Island, an Essay in a Tempest

The Island, an Essay in a Tempest

Dramatis Personae

Emerson, Horkheimer, Adorno, Roth, Prospero, Ariel. The Writer

(On a ship at sea; a tempestuous storm. Enter Roth and The Writer.)

Roth: Horkheimer and Adorno see progress? (Enlightenment?) as a kind of trap; discuss their thoughts in relation to another thinker  who also saw progress as a trap.

(A brilliant strike of lighting. Enter Horkheimer/Adorno)

Horkheimer/Adorno: 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. (Thunder) Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

(Enter Ariel floating above the ship.)

Ariel: Where the bee sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry. (He waves his hand and the storm worsens.)

Horkheimer/Adorno: (Astonished seeing Ariel. Faces.) Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.

(Enter Emerson.)

Horkheimer/Adorno: Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.

(The storm worsens.)

Emerson: At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.

Horkheimer/Adorno: What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.

Emerson: The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.

(The storm becomes violent.)

The Writer: We are about to die at sea. I need real help finding a balance between this ship and nature!

Horkheimer/Adorno: Nature, stripped of qualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes a mere having, an abstract identity.

Emerson: The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.

The Writer: We are ALL about to die at sea.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small.

Emerson: It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own  ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped; it is the new form of blindness.

Emerson: To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door… the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law.

The Writer: Gentlemen, we truly are ALL about to die at sea.

(Prospero appears. The ship vanishes. We are on a rocky island.)

PROSPERO: Be connected;


No more amazement; tell your piteous heart

There's no harm done.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied only in art.

Roth: (Re-appearing) Art rescues the past. This is important for Horkheimer and Adorno because the past contains alternatives to the status quo… The seeds of alternatives to the status quo.

PROSPERO: My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,

And they shall be themselves.

I have be-dimm'd

The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,

And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault

Set roaring war.But this rough magic

I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd

Some heavenly music-which even now I do-

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,


And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

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Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Emerson, Nature