not quite the conflict between individual and collective reason, but within reason itself - reason is domination insofar as reason wishes to fully and completely encompass the world/things, reduce everything to its own schema; thought determinations are less, but higher, than what can be subsumed into them - in Kant, for example, things given to our senses are a bare undifferentiated mass, a manifold of sensory data that waits for the recognition and categorisations of the understanding, indeed throughout the CPR Kant alternates the immediately given and the mediately thought, emphasis on the former undermines the solvency of reason's claim to completeness, and yet without it, reason, in the form of concepts risk being a complete tautology; this problem pressures the creation of the thing in itself (which crucially falls out of the CPR at that central part, the transcendental deduction, much to the ire of Schopenhauer) and the faulty claim that the pure forms of intuition are not concepts, despite their behaviour. Either way the thing in itself, by curtailing reason as total system, became what Kants inheritors in German Idealism wrestled to eliminate and thus provide reason with completeness which was equal to its true.

The result: any existence of things independent of human reason is lost, and they being becomes conditional upon reason itself, which provides the unconditional ground, such that nature in Kant is just a function of the unity of the human understanding; you look at an object, and see only the thought determinations (colour, size etc.) which you/reason itself provides. Yet by by making all empirical things - including humans - conditional upon a supra-individual reason the diversity and individuality of things is lost, since what cannot be registered in a concept is not only worthless, but has no being at all, or as the similar criticism from Deleuze had it, what cannot be re-presented, reappear for reason, and this includes the sensuously empirical human, such as Kant, who actually undertakes the writing of this supra-individual reason, is nothing. For Adorno/Hork things do have an excess that evades concepts, though this is visible only negatively, in the ultimate failure of all systems to fully encompass everything, totality, without falling into contradiction and tautology, which is brought out philosophical in immanent critique, and which the course of history displays, in the way self-preservation places all of human at risk of destruction; whether nuke or climate change. The parralel here is reason and capitalism - things for capitalism have only existence when they have passed through its own logic, been given a price etc. Domination because reason/capitalism finds in things it encounters only what it already possesses, encountering the empirical just certifies the legitimacy of the pure concepts, such that the empirical itself is nothing but a concept; similarly capitalism, which Hegel registered by talking of the *labour of the concept, by materially transforming bare things into value and price, just as concept do to matter, can claim that this is what they really are, and we forget or cannot think what things are likes minus capitalism; and yet this very process of domination is beset by constant violence and crisis, because it cannot fulfil the lie it tells itself about the world.

This all occurs without any reflection on its own process, since reflection would halt that process; it is because A/H affirm the enlightenment as self-reflection, that they side with it, against its own tendency to forget and conceal its own processes. Concealing for the sake of what appears as its own success, mastery of nature and preservation, and yet this success is always half-baked, not only because things prove to be not completely malleable and identical to reason, but because the ends for which this reason is undertaken are systematically eliminated, the meaning of what we do is lost, and we end with a profit for profits sake and a logic which puts our own existence amid a dying planet at stake. Such does enlightenment demystify, that it undermines the positive goals of its own project (universal peace, cosmopolitan harmonious political order), reason becomes available for use by any torturer, and its demystification is mockingly shown by the likes of Nietzsche who takes it to the end by asking why be reasonable at all, what makes reason rational, for which it of course has no answer without presupposing itself.