The program of the Enlightenment was the "disenchantment of the world", as the social scientists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote in their philosophical fragments written in the 1940s in the USA, which became famous under the title "Dialectic of Enlightenment" and are celebrated in intellectual circles as the book of the century.
The contemptuous term "disenchantment" goes back to the great Max Weber, although it should be remembered that the philosophy of the Enlightenment came into being after the birth of modern science in Europe and was able to provide insights into natural science, with the help of which the world was not disenchanted, but on the contrary enchanted, as can be read in my book "The Enchantment of the World" (2014). Back to the "Dialectic of Enlightenment", which goes on to say that the associated thinking "wanted to dissolve myths and overthrow imagination through knowledge" in order to make the world predictable, to control it rationally and to remove any mystery from it, one might add. I believe that this project has failed and that the theses presented have no validity in a world that has long been permeated by science and dependent on its insights. The "dialectic of enlightenment" has indeed happened, but in a way that leaves the sociologist duo cold, who were politically and socially oriented and stated the disaster that the world wars had brought to the world. This is about the epistemological aspect, i.e. the paradoxes of the Enlightenment, which can be seen in the fact that the "enchantment of the world" has been brought about by its scientific explanation and a return to myth (narrative) can be observed in the narratives (stories) of natural research - newspapers often talk about the myth of the gene or the myth of the atom. At the same time, people's imagination has become more important for understanding the world than any knowledge. This has also been the case in DNA research. In 1953, researchers like Rosalind Franklin and chemists like Erwin Chargaff tried to generate and collect as many measurement results as possible. James Watson and Francis Crick, on the other hand, wanted to build DNA models using what was available and their ideas. In their imaginations, the two believed they had solved the secret of life with the double helix. In reality, they had only found it. That at least.
