"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology" proclaims the introduction to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii). This chiastic statement lies at the core of this work's account of a fundamental incompatibility between enlightenment's goals of "liberating human beings from fear" (the freedom that Adorno and Horkheimer believe is inseparable from enlightenment thinking) and the simultaneous state of "the wholly enlightened earth" as "radiant with triumphant calamity" (DoE, 1). The key to grasping this interrelation of enlightenment and myth lies in the depiction of nature, to which one subsection will here be dedicated. Nature, for the longest period, was deemed to hold a degree of enchantment; it was intrinsically meaningful. The abstracted tales that correlate to such a foundationalist stance are myths. Conversely, at the dawn of the Age of Reason there began a progressive disenchantment of nature: "[f]rom now on, matter was to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties' (DoE, 3). The world and all aspects therein were available to be used and understood; there was no longer any intrinsic meaning: "[o]n their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning" (3). This disenchantment of nature is termed enlightenment.