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Oplysningens dialektik (Moderne tænkere) - filosofiske fragmenter
Status over den vestlige civilisation fra 1944. Oplysningens dialektik er blevet kaldt den kritiske bevidstheds bibel - en pessimistisk sammenfatning af udviklingen i vesten med en bemærkelsesværdig kritisk og provokatorisk kraft, der endnu i dag står usvækket. Værket er Horkheimer og Adornos forsøg på at begribe, hvorfor oplysningens sejrende fornuft altid har været forfulgt af en slagskygge af formørkelse og barbari.
347 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
About the author
Max Horkheimer
137 books237 followersMax Horkheimer (1895–1973) was a leader of the so-called “Frankfurt School,” a group of philosophers and social scientists associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute of Social Research) in Frankfurt am Main. Horkheimer was the director of the Institute and Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt from 1930–1933, and again from 1949–1958. In between those periods he would lead the Institute in exile, primarily in America. As a philosopher he is best known (especially in the Anglophone world), for his work during the 1940s, including Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was co-authored with Theodor Adorno. While deservedly influential, Dialectic of Enlightenment (and other works from that period) should not be separated from the context of Horkheimer's work as a whole. Especially important in this regard are the writings from the 1930s, which were largely responsible for developing the epistemological and methodological orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory. This work both influenced his contemporaries (including Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) and has had an enduring influence on critical theory's later practitioners (including Jürgen Habermas, and the Institute's current director Axel Honneth).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 351 reviews
January 19, 2009
In a world... where the geist is pure evil... and the Fasshou System lurks right around the corner... two unlikely German Jew friends dare... to frighten enlightenment/mythology back into its box.
This summer....
DIALECTIC
OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
This summer....
DIALECTIC
OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
September 25, 2008
The enlightenment wasn't all that. You think science replaced magic and religion? Not so fast. Isn't science, at a certain point, based on faith just as much as religion? Horkdorno (Horkheimer and Adorno) views the achievements of the enlightenment with a gimlet eye, refusing to accept that a forward movement in history equates to positive progress. You can just as easily move forward while descending. If you believe in progress, concomitantly, you must believe in decline. Many of the things that are generally accepted to be advances, both technological and cultural, in modern society actually threaten the liberty of the individual.
There's a scene in "Deadwood" where Swearengen and someone else are watching the construction of telegraph lines in the distance. Rather than embracing the new technology, they express a deep fear of what it might bring. As they are trying to build a community--violent and chaotic though it may be--this new technology threatens the the very basis of that community: one-on-one human contact. The technology effaces the individual.
If this is the outcome of the advances of the enlightenment, then doesn't it contradict the very ideas of individual freedom that the enlightenment was based on? These are the dangers and fears with which Horkdorno grappled.
There's a scene in "Deadwood" where Swearengen and someone else are watching the construction of telegraph lines in the distance. Rather than embracing the new technology, they express a deep fear of what it might bring. As they are trying to build a community--violent and chaotic though it may be--this new technology threatens the the very basis of that community: one-on-one human contact. The technology effaces the individual.
If this is the outcome of the advances of the enlightenment, then doesn't it contradict the very ideas of individual freedom that the enlightenment was based on? These are the dangers and fears with which Horkdorno grappled.
July 21, 2019
پیش‌گفتار:
یک روز برمی‌گردم و به خودم می‌گم: "چقدر تباه بودم که همچین مرورهایی بر چنین کتاب‌هایی می‌نوشتم." مطمئنم! :)))
___________________________
مطالعه این کتاب، تجربه‌ای پر از شگفتی بود. کتاب پر از ایده‌های مختلفی است که می‌توان ساعت‌ها درباره هرکدام فکر کرد، آنها را پذیرفت، نقد یا رد کرد. از آن کتاب‌هایی است که با یک بار خواندن، نه تنها همه مطالب آن دریافت نمی‌شود، که بعضی از بخش‌هایش مشخصا با یک بار خواندن قابل فهم نیست. برای من که اینگونه بود.
در بخش اول کتاب، به نقد عقل روشنگری و شباهت‌های آن با اسطوره، یعنی همان چیزی که قرار بود عقل آن را منسوخ کند، پرداخته شده است. در کتاب "شناخت هگل‌گرایی"۱ بخش مربوط به دیالکتیک روشنگری، چنین می‌خوانیم: "هر اسطوره کوششی است در راستای روایت رخدادها، به نحوی که از یک خاستگاه نشات گرفته‌اند. از این حیث، اسطوره‌ها که از سوی روشنگری به چالش کشیده شدند، روایت‌های مشروعی بودند که جویای تفسیر توامان واقعیت طبیعی و اجتماعی به منظور کنترل بهتر آن بودند. بدین معنا، مقتدرترین اسطوره، خود اسطوره عقل روشنگری است: یعنی اسطوره رهایی انسان به واسطه کنترل عقلانی و اربابی بر طبیعت." از نظر آدورنو و هورکهایمر، بشر نه تنها نتوانسته با استفاده از عقل روشنگری به ترس‌هایی از قبیل ترس از طبیعت پایان دهد، که این ترس را به ترس از موجودیت غیرقابل پیش‌بینی و غیرقابل کنترلی به نام "اجتماع بشری" تبدیل کرده است. از نظر آنها، عقل محاسبه‌گر روشنگری، هرچیزی را که در منطق سودمندی و ابزارانگاری‌اش نگنجد، طرد می‌کند و از این رو سلطه‌گر و توتالیتر است!
در بخش "صنعت فرهنگ‌سازی"، نقد ابزارانگاری عقل روشنگری مشخصا در عرصه هنر، مورد بررسی قرار گرفته است. از نظر آدورنو و هورکهایمر، "صنعتی‌سازی تولید فرهنگی و جایگزینی هم‌بسته خودآئینی زیباشناختی با ارزش‌های سودمندی ابزاری و اجتماعی به کالایی شدن هنر انجامیده است. امری که به فروکاستن هنر خودآئین به سرگرمی، تبلیغات تجاری یا تبلیغات سیاسی انجامیده است. در نتیجه امکان نا‌این‌همانی-لحظه آزادی، دگربوددگی و آزمون‌گری نابود شده است." (به نقل از کتاب شناخت هگل‌گرایی)
در بخش مربوط به "عناصر یهودستیزی" به ریشه‌های مختلف یهودستیزی، از جمله ریشه‌های روان‌کاوانه آن پرداخته می‌شود که با ظهور عقل روشنگری، ریشه در سرکوب طبیعت بیرونی و درونی انسان دارد. طبیعت درونی انسان، هرگز بصورت کامل سرکوب نمی‌شود و آن بخش سرکوب نشده، خود را به ابژه‌هایی در بیرون فرافکنی می‌کند، تا با عینیت مثبت یافتن در بیرون، قابل نابود کردن باشد. در عین حال آدورنو و هورکهایمر با تقلیل مسئله یهودستیزی به روان‌شناسی افراد شدیدا مخالفت می‌ورزند و ریشه‌های آن را در سطح اجتماعی جستجو می‌کنند.
از جمله انتقادات مهمی که در کتاب "شناخت هگل‌گرایی" به دیالکتیک روشنگری وارد شده، این است که اگر همه انواع گفتمان عقلانی، حاوی شکلی از شی‌انگاری و استیلا است، نقد منطقی و فلسفی همین عقل چگونه ممکن است؟ آیا این نقد در واقع خود را نقض نمی‌کند؟
شخصا معتقدم خود همین نقد، بیانگر این مسئله است که از نظر آدورنو و هورکهایمر، همه انواع گفتمان عقلانی، دچار شی‌انگاری نیست. بلکه عقلانیت ابزارانگار غالب از عصر روشنگری به بعد، دستخوش چنین وضعیتی است که البته در کتاب آنقدرها به چنین تمایزی پرداخته نشده و صورت‌های مختلف آن مورد بررسی قرار ن��رفته است.
______________________
۱. رابرت سیزبرینک، شناخت هگل‌گرایی، ترجمه مهدی بهرامی (ویراستار: محمدمهدی اردبیلی)، نشر لاهیتا
یک روز برمی‌گردم و به خودم می‌گم: "چقدر تباه بودم که همچین مرورهایی بر چنین کتاب‌هایی می‌نوشتم." مطمئنم! :)))
___________________________
مطالعه این کتاب، تجربه‌ای پر از شگفتی بود. کتاب پر از ایده‌های مختلفی است که می‌توان ساعت‌ها درباره هرکدام فکر کرد، آنها را پذیرفت، نقد یا رد کرد. از آن کتاب‌هایی است که با یک بار خواندن، نه تنها همه مطالب آن دریافت نمی‌شود، که بعضی از بخش‌هایش مشخصا با یک بار خواندن قابل فهم نیست. برای من که اینگونه بود.
در بخش اول کتاب، به نقد عقل روشنگری و شباهت‌های آن با اسطوره، یعنی همان چیزی که قرار بود عقل آن را منسوخ کند، پرداخته شده است. در کتاب "شناخت هگل‌گرایی"۱ بخش مربوط به دیالکتیک روشنگری، چنین می‌خوانیم: "هر اسطوره کوششی است در راستای روایت رخدادها، به نحوی که از یک خاستگاه نشات گرفته‌اند. از این حیث، اسطوره‌ها که از سوی روشنگری به چالش کشیده شدند، روایت‌های مشروعی بودند که جویای تفسیر توامان واقعیت طبیعی و اجتماعی به منظور کنترل بهتر آن بودند. بدین معنا، مقتدرترین اسطوره، خود اسطوره عقل روشنگری است: یعنی اسطوره رهایی انسان به واسطه کنترل عقلانی و اربابی بر طبیعت." از نظر آدورنو و هورکهایمر، بشر نه تنها نتوانسته با استفاده از عقل روشنگری به ترس‌هایی از قبیل ترس از طبیعت پایان دهد، که این ترس را به ترس از موجودیت غیرقابل پیش‌بینی و غیرقابل کنترلی به نام "اجتماع بشری" تبدیل کرده است. از نظر آنها، عقل محاسبه‌گر روشنگری، هرچیزی را که در منطق سودمندی و ابزارانگاری‌اش نگنجد، طرد می‌کند و از این رو سلطه‌گر و توتالیتر است!
در بخش "صنعت فرهنگ‌سازی"، نقد ابزارانگاری عقل روشنگری مشخصا در عرصه هنر، مورد بررسی قرار گرفته است. از نظر آدورنو و هورکهایمر، "صنعتی‌سازی تولید فرهنگی و جایگزینی هم‌بسته خودآئینی زیباشناختی با ارزش‌های سودمندی ابزاری و اجتماعی به کالایی شدن هنر انجامیده است. امری که به فروکاستن هنر خودآئین به سرگرمی، تبلیغات تجاری یا تبلیغات سیاسی انجامیده است. در نتیجه امکان نا‌این‌همانی-لحظه آزادی، دگربوددگی و آزمون‌گری نابود شده است." (به نقل از کتاب شناخت هگل‌گرایی)
در بخش مربوط به "عناصر یهودستیزی" به ریشه‌های مختلف یهودستیزی، از جمله ریشه‌های روان‌کاوانه آن پرداخته می‌شود که با ظهور عقل روشنگری، ریشه در سرکوب طبیعت بیرونی و درونی انسان دارد. طبیعت درونی انسان، هرگز بصورت کامل سرکوب نمی‌شود و آن بخش سرکوب نشده، خود را به ابژه‌هایی در بیرون فرافکنی می‌کند، تا با عینیت مثبت یافتن در بیرون، قابل نابود کردن باشد. در عین حال آدورنو و هورکهایمر با تقلیل مسئله یهودستیزی به روان‌شناسی افراد شدیدا مخالفت می‌ورزند و ریشه‌های آن را در سطح اجتماعی جستجو می‌کنند.
از جمله انتقادات مهمی که در کتاب "شناخت هگل‌گرایی" به دیالکتیک روشنگری وارد شده، این است که اگر همه انواع گفتمان عقلانی، حاوی شکلی از شی‌انگاری و استیلا است، نقد منطقی و فلسفی همین عقل چگونه ممکن است؟ آیا این نقد در واقع خود را نقض نمی‌کند؟
شخصا معتقدم خود همین نقد، بیانگر این مسئله است که از نظر آدورنو و هورکهایمر، همه انواع گفتمان عقلانی، دچار شی‌انگاری نیست. بلکه عقلانیت ابزارانگار غالب از عصر روشنگری به بعد، دستخوش چنین وضعیتی است که البته در کتاب آنقدرها به چنین تمایزی پرداخته نشده و صورت‌های مختلف آن مورد بررسی قرار ن��رفته است.
______________________
۱. رابرت سیزبرینک، شناخت هگل‌گرایی، ترجمه مهدی بهرامی (ویراستار: محمدمهدی اردبیلی)، نشر لاهیتا
October 9, 2022
خواندن این کتاب فقط به لطف گروهی میسر شد که با هم در دیسکورد، طی شش هفته، شش فصل کتاب را بررسی کردیم و با اراده‌ی جمعی، با دشواری‌های کتاب مواجه شدیم و تلاش کردیم نثر دیالکتیک روشنگری را برای خودمان درونی کنیم.
بنظر من بهتر است خواننده ابتدا فصل ششم را بخواند؛ آن‌جا که مؤلفان با مثال‌های متنوعی مسئله‌ی اساسی خود را بیان می‌کنند، و سپس از ابتدای کتاب پیش برود.
همچنین کتابی از راس ویلسون بنام «آدورنو» با ترجمه‌ی پویا ایمانی در نشر مرکز، می‌تواند «حین خواندنِ کتابِ اصلی» یاری‌دهنده باشد.
مقاله‌ی مراد فرهادپور با عنوان «درباره‌ی مفاهیم و ساختار دیالکتیک روشنگری» که در ارغنون ۱۱ و ۱۲ چاپ شده است (و همینطور در کتابش با عنوان «پاره‌های فکر: فلسفه و سیاست»)، متن دیگری است که خواندنش در توضیح این کتاب، خالی از لطف نیست.
ضمناً در همان شماره‌ی ارغنون، مقاله‌ای از هابرماس وجود دارد که شرحی است بر همین کتاب.
بنظر من بهتر است خواننده ابتدا فصل ششم را بخواند؛ آن‌جا که مؤلفان با مثال‌های متنوعی مسئله‌ی اساسی خود را بیان می‌کنند، و سپس از ابتدای کتاب پیش برود.
همچنین کتابی از راس ویلسون بنام «آدورنو» با ترجمه‌ی پویا ایمانی در نشر مرکز، می‌تواند «حین خواندنِ کتابِ اصلی» یاری‌دهنده باشد.
مقاله‌ی مراد فرهادپور با عنوان «درباره‌ی مفاهیم و ساختار دیالکتیک روشنگری» که در ارغنون ۱۱ و ۱۲ چاپ شده است (و همینطور در کتابش با عنوان «پاره‌های فکر: فلسفه و سیاست»)، متن دیگری است که خواندنش در توضیح این کتاب، خالی از لطف نیست.
ضمناً در همان شماره‌ی ارغنون، مقاله‌ای از هابرماس وجود دارد که شرحی است بر همین کتاب.
February 4, 2010
The most poorly written, ego-maniacal, self-important, masturbatory piece of shit that I have ever read. Horkheimer and Adorno? If you were alive, I would punch you both in the testicles.
May 6, 2016
Completely overrated. I'm shocked this book has had the influence it's had. It is bombastic and tendentious, a completely one-sided (abstract) view of the Englightenment and its implications -- with consequences that Adorno himself recoiled from (in 1968). And all his 'philosophical' 'reflections' on 'nature' and 'myth' are nothing but Central European rubbish -- without meaning or sense ('nonsense', as Wittgenstein would say). Very disappointing.
February 3, 2023
Proof that nothing gets pseudo-intellectuals salivating more quickly than non-sensical rants.
July 29, 2018
It’s too hard to trash this book properly because the way it is laid out in a series of five or so only moderately related essays and with a bunch of short essays. The core of their version of conservative belief is that the absolute truth does exist even if we are not capable of knowing that we know but we can recognize it and any version of relativism must always be wrong because they know their inherent truth must be true because they feel it to be true. I had not realized that Jordan Peterson fell into this school of thought and I must compliment him for adding ‘self help’ crap mixed in with Frankfurt School pseudo-philosophy in writing a mega best seller.
There is a second principle they have and it is the atomization of the world. The individual makes the world, or there is no such thing as a society because it is made up of mere individuals the authors would believe. They’ll also quote Leibnitz on how monads ‘have no windows’. Joseph Campbell did everything he could to make us embrace and be prideful of our own myths thus separating us from each other by how we think about ourselves thus making anybody who is just a little bit different not part of the in group and more vulnerable to exclusion. There only real philosophical problem they had with the Nazis is that they chose ‘the wrong myths’ (they say that kind of thing while defending myths multiple times).
You know that neighbor that lives next to you the one you describe as ‘the old fart’ the one who doesn’t really like kids walking across their yard and thinks the birds make too much noise when they sing? That’s who I imagined was writing these essays. There’s a real mixture of Alan Bloom, Jordan Peterson and David Brooks feel to what is at the heart of what is trying to be communicated within this book. Bloom wrote one of my least favorite books ‘Closing of the American Mind’ (a somewhat ironic title since his book is nothing but close minded). They and this book long for the days of yore when ‘character’ of the individual mattered, and ‘community’ was allowed to form us and the culture through our myths made us the men we used to be (at least that’s how they think).
The book summarized: 1) The Enlightenment sucks 2) Myths are great especially if they predate Socrates 3) Hollywood and mass marketing are the problem 4) Anti-Semitism sucks even more and 5) Nazi’s myths were just the wrong myths and 6) Truth is absolute because anything that is relative must suck.
At the core of the Enlightenment is tolerance of others because they realized our similarity that all humans have just for being human is less than the differences we have within our own pride group. Pride in one’s culture just because it is one’s culture is for fools and will always lead to the contempt of others as scapegoats for those not in your prideful group. The old myths are still just myths and just because they are mine does not make them superior to yours. Pride is best defined as an excessive belief in one’s own identity only because it is part of one’s own identity. Pride in our majority identity is the tool that Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson use to divide us and this book wants to do away with the principles of the Enlightenment and bring back prideful myths. As for me, I know we are thrown on to this earth and thrust into a world and it is up to us to determine what we believe and what is the best way to view the world and not just take the default position that one is born into believing we are better than everyone else who is not part of our select group based only on our experiences that formed our understanding and therefore thinking we our special, select and better than others thus leading to division and blaming others for their different understanding based on their ‘inferior’ experiences.
Bloom clearly took this book as his road map and modernized it when he wrote his awful book. I had no idea that Peterson’s incoherence was contained in much of this book too. (I have no doubt that he knows it, but I also have no doubt that his mostly puerile ‘fan boys’ don’t). In the New York Times David Brooks quoted somebody I never heard of before saying ‘Jordan Peterson is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world’. Essentially that means one old fart [Bloom] was influenced by another old fart [Adorno and Frankfurt School] leading to the pseudo-intellectual old fart [Brooks] thinking the best intellectual since Homer and his Odyssey is Peterson. All one has to do is read or watch one of Peterson’s Youtube videos to see why they aren’t even worth refuting.
One chapter I really did enjoy in this book for its anachronism and tone deafness even for its own time period was how the movies of that time period are such a disgrace. The one thing I am an expert on is old movies and I know every allusion they made in their book and know how absurd the writers where actually unintentionally being. They liked Garbo and thought Orson Welles was so overrated! I have nothing against Garbo, but Welles is a master at his craft. They used Mature and Rooney (I’m not sure if they used first names, but I didn’t need them) to show how actors are not playing themselves in order to be individuals thus not really being individuals (what a weird pair to pick to show that!). I explained that to my wife and at first she didn’t understand but I mentioned how ‘cool people’ get tattoos to show that they are cool and different but now days so many people get tattoos the really cool people don’t just in order to show how cool they really are and that’s what the authors we trying to get at with Mature and Rooney.
The connections to The Frankfurt School (and Bloom) to Peterson are really there. Also, within this book they have a lot of Freudian type psychology floating around. Catharsis, death wish (Freud’s ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, a very good book) and other psychoanalytical wannabe talk hovered around this book.
I’ve said it before. Right wing nuts like Peterson fans or Trump fans should read garbage like this because they would see a foundation for their politics but they don’t. I don’t agree with the resultant, but they should at least look for their foundations for their hateful politics from books like this one.
There is a second principle they have and it is the atomization of the world. The individual makes the world, or there is no such thing as a society because it is made up of mere individuals the authors would believe. They’ll also quote Leibnitz on how monads ‘have no windows’. Joseph Campbell did everything he could to make us embrace and be prideful of our own myths thus separating us from each other by how we think about ourselves thus making anybody who is just a little bit different not part of the in group and more vulnerable to exclusion. There only real philosophical problem they had with the Nazis is that they chose ‘the wrong myths’ (they say that kind of thing while defending myths multiple times).
You know that neighbor that lives next to you the one you describe as ‘the old fart’ the one who doesn’t really like kids walking across their yard and thinks the birds make too much noise when they sing? That’s who I imagined was writing these essays. There’s a real mixture of Alan Bloom, Jordan Peterson and David Brooks feel to what is at the heart of what is trying to be communicated within this book. Bloom wrote one of my least favorite books ‘Closing of the American Mind’ (a somewhat ironic title since his book is nothing but close minded). They and this book long for the days of yore when ‘character’ of the individual mattered, and ‘community’ was allowed to form us and the culture through our myths made us the men we used to be (at least that’s how they think).
The book summarized: 1) The Enlightenment sucks 2) Myths are great especially if they predate Socrates 3) Hollywood and mass marketing are the problem 4) Anti-Semitism sucks even more and 5) Nazi’s myths were just the wrong myths and 6) Truth is absolute because anything that is relative must suck.
At the core of the Enlightenment is tolerance of others because they realized our similarity that all humans have just for being human is less than the differences we have within our own pride group. Pride in one’s culture just because it is one’s culture is for fools and will always lead to the contempt of others as scapegoats for those not in your prideful group. The old myths are still just myths and just because they are mine does not make them superior to yours. Pride is best defined as an excessive belief in one’s own identity only because it is part of one’s own identity. Pride in our majority identity is the tool that Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson use to divide us and this book wants to do away with the principles of the Enlightenment and bring back prideful myths. As for me, I know we are thrown on to this earth and thrust into a world and it is up to us to determine what we believe and what is the best way to view the world and not just take the default position that one is born into believing we are better than everyone else who is not part of our select group based only on our experiences that formed our understanding and therefore thinking we our special, select and better than others thus leading to division and blaming others for their different understanding based on their ‘inferior’ experiences.
Bloom clearly took this book as his road map and modernized it when he wrote his awful book. I had no idea that Peterson’s incoherence was contained in much of this book too. (I have no doubt that he knows it, but I also have no doubt that his mostly puerile ‘fan boys’ don’t). In the New York Times David Brooks quoted somebody I never heard of before saying ‘Jordan Peterson is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world’. Essentially that means one old fart [Bloom] was influenced by another old fart [Adorno and Frankfurt School] leading to the pseudo-intellectual old fart [Brooks] thinking the best intellectual since Homer and his Odyssey is Peterson. All one has to do is read or watch one of Peterson’s Youtube videos to see why they aren’t even worth refuting.
One chapter I really did enjoy in this book for its anachronism and tone deafness even for its own time period was how the movies of that time period are such a disgrace. The one thing I am an expert on is old movies and I know every allusion they made in their book and know how absurd the writers where actually unintentionally being. They liked Garbo and thought Orson Welles was so overrated! I have nothing against Garbo, but Welles is a master at his craft. They used Mature and Rooney (I’m not sure if they used first names, but I didn’t need them) to show how actors are not playing themselves in order to be individuals thus not really being individuals (what a weird pair to pick to show that!). I explained that to my wife and at first she didn’t understand but I mentioned how ‘cool people’ get tattoos to show that they are cool and different but now days so many people get tattoos the really cool people don’t just in order to show how cool they really are and that’s what the authors we trying to get at with Mature and Rooney.
The connections to The Frankfurt School (and Bloom) to Peterson are really there. Also, within this book they have a lot of Freudian type psychology floating around. Catharsis, death wish (Freud’s ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, a very good book) and other psychoanalytical wannabe talk hovered around this book.
I’ve said it before. Right wing nuts like Peterson fans or Trump fans should read garbage like this because they would see a foundation for their politics but they don’t. I don’t agree with the resultant, but they should at least look for their foundations for their hateful politics from books like this one.
April 5, 2009
Three things I love here, above all else: a) the collaboration, and the refusal to disentangle themselves from it when others demanded that Horkorno coalesce into two identities: of course reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari, but, for a medievalist, also Marty Shichtman and Laurie Finke; b) the refusal to update the text to reflect the current moment: in this insistence on preserving the text as an intervention into a particular historical moment, Adorneimer refuse to pretend to speak from a position of atemporality ("We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth")--this helps account for the problems with their famous Culture Industry chapter, which, even before the 'New Media,' could have grappled with, for example, samizdat; c) the antisemitism essay, and here, I'm totally annoyed with Zizek, 'Republics of Gilead,' and so on, for not doing our thinkers the honor of acknowledging that in many ways, they got there first. But I suppose in honoring the Frankfurt school, SZ would accidentally honor Habermas...or he's just plain sloppy.
A favorite passage:
"What many individual things have in common, or what constantly recurs in one individual thing, needs not be more stable, eternal, or deep than the particular. The scale of categories is not the same as that of significance....The world is unique. The mere repetition in speech of moments which occur again and again in the same form bears more resemblance to a futile, compulsive litany than to the redeeming world. Classification is a condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves classification" (182).
Overall, given my current interests--for readers of the blog, see my stuff on Shakespeare 'The Phoenix and Turtle'--this critique of Reason is perfect.
A favorite passage:
"What many individual things have in common, or what constantly recurs in one individual thing, needs not be more stable, eternal, or deep than the particular. The scale of categories is not the same as that of significance....The world is unique. The mere repetition in speech of moments which occur again and again in the same form bears more resemblance to a futile, compulsive litany than to the redeeming world. Classification is a condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves classification" (182).
Overall, given my current interests--for readers of the blog, see my stuff on Shakespeare 'The Phoenix and Turtle'--this critique of Reason is perfect.
August 12, 2019
Nesumnjivo najvažniji filozofski tekst 20 veka. Obrni okreni, primenljivo na sve. Napisano nakon što su nacisti rasterali frankfurtovce, Adorno i Hokhajmer pišu o nevoljama sa razumom, o tome kako nas je prosvetiteljstvo oslobodilo mitova samo da bismo upali u maglu drugih mitova, o tome kako je kurta sjahala da bi uzjahala murta i kako „kulturna industrija” punom parom stvara lažnu svest o svetu oko nas zasnovanu na izobličenjima. Plus, nedovoljno se govori koliko je „Dijalektika prosvjetiteljstva” formalno i estetski superioran tekst, koji je i odbojan i fascinatan, poput nekog brutalističkog stambenog bloka pretočenog u rečenice i pasuse.
May 26, 2021
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) is a collection of essays by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The essays themselves are the results of long and intimate conversations they had while living in the USA as refugees from Nazi Germany. In these long philosophical discussions they talked and thought about the patterns in western civilization which had made the rise of fascism possible. In itself this is a very interesting perspective, but the project is severely hampered by the fact that they were both Jewish and both heavily influenced by Marxist theory. These two facts result in a biased, one-sided and very limited approach to a very important problem…
In the first essay Horkheimer and Adorno develop the theoretical framework, while the following essays all explore certain social and economic phenomena from this perspective.
With the risk of oversimplifying and distorting their ideas, I will only summarize the essays in the most accessible way possible.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, writing in the 1940s, the rise of fascism is only a logical consequence of capitalism. Capitalism itself is a way society has structured itself according to a certain rationale (creating value through exploitation of human being in an ever-growing fashion). In other words, capitalism is a social order which is enforced through power-relations, violence and propaganda.
The way capitalist society is ordered is literally a pattern of thought which is characteristic of western civilization. This way of thinking goes all the way back to Ancient Greece when mankind substituted myth for rationality – reversing mankind’s relationship with nature. We went from accepting nature’s power of us to growing our power over nature. The former way of life we associate with mythology, the latter way of life with Enlightenment – i.e. using our reason to investigate, understand and control nature.
Enlightenment is often viewed as a struggle in which we freed ourselves from nature, yet in reality – or so Horkheimer and Adorno claim – the more our power over nature grew, the more we’ve lost our freedom. Capitalism is the culmination of our enslavement to rationality. In this sense, Enlightenment is itself a myth, whose essence is the rejection of myths. In other words: we moderns live in self-denial. We celebrate reason as our means to freedom, while all it does is enslave us to a totalitarian system and way of life and drive us further and further from our own nature.
Fascism is nothing but the culmination of the Enlightenment, in the sense that it perfects the ordering of society and the necessary subjugation of all individuals to the collective. Its rationale is exactly that of the Enlightenment and it uses all the products of the Enlightenment - from bombs and machine guns to propaganda through advertisements and radio programmes – to perfect its totalitarian grasp over society.
The above comprises the main theses of Horkheimer and Adorno’s essays. As said, the first essay sets out this thesis while the latter essays all explore certain social aspects through this framework. For example, in the fourth essay, titled The Culture Industry, they explore modern culture as the expression of Enlightenment way of thinking: calculating effects of cultural products, perfecting techniques of production and distribution of cultural products, etc. And as another example, in the fifth essay, titled Elements of Antisemitism, Horkheimer and Adorno they use the phenomenon of antisemitism to explain the inherent tendency in western society to self-destruct, to regress to a state of barbarism.
Throughout the work, both authors use Hegelian dialectics to describe and explain their theories. This way of thinking lives off contradictions, which are seen not as problems but as the way reality is. For example, the tendency towards self-destruction of western civilization is a typical Hegelian analysis: through ever-increasing organisation and administration, the Holocaust – as a purely rational process in terms of its origin, its design and its execution - becomes only a logical consequence. And this is how the idea of progress and the idea of regress (Holocaust) are both synthesized into something new.
In a similar vein, Horkheimer and Adorno explain how cultural products offer exactly that which they want to eradicate: they offer hope, the illusion of something more (to the product). That which people lack and long for, is exactly that which they lose in their continuous consumption of products, be they cultural or not. The culture industry makes the masses forget they are individuals and have the capacity to change, and it does this by making them internalize the current state of being as the only way life is or can be.
Horkheimer and Adorno basically reduce the whole of western civilization – then and now, here and there – to a dialectic of losing our individuality through individualization. Through producing and consuming we are kept in a perpetual state of mind in which we believe we are someone, while in reality we are all cogs in a giant machine – dehumanized, depersonalized, and deluded. Capitalism thrives off the total subjugation of all human beings and it needs these human beings to believe they are free individuals in order to succeed. All its mechanisms, its products, its social dynamics, everything is aimed at creating this state and ensuring it stays this way. The domination of capitalism over us is literally the domination we sought over nature. In the process we lost our own nature and the world around us.
Considering Horkheimer and Adorno were Jewish and had experienced decades of trouble and the rise of fascism, I can be sympathetic to their analyses and their interpretations of contemporary events. But like I said in my review of Adorno’s The Culture Industry (1991), I find this way of looking at the world also very reductionistic, generalizing, one-sided and myopic. But most of all, I find it highly problematic. Critical theory has become very influential and popular, especially in academic circles, with many sickening consequences. Generations of students have mistaken theorizing about society for scientifically studying society, i.e. have mistaken political activism for science. And worse of all, it is Marxist theory which is preached as truth…
Both Marxism and critical theory promote the reduction of the world to the dichotomy ‘oppressor-oppressed’ and the viewing of the world solely in terms of power-relations (be they economic, cultural, or otherwise). In practice, it generates resentment and depression, mirroring perfectly the mental state of mind of the founders of critical theory. Like I said in the earlier mentioned review: the world would have been spared a great ill if Adorno and Horkheimer had been professionally treated for the clinical depression. Instead, they externalized their problems and blamed the (western) world for it.
Also, these essays are simply awfully written. Lots of repetition, lots of not-getting-to-the-point, lots of irrelevant and pompous jargon, lots recycling of old ideas. So, as a literary product, I cannot be much happier than with its content...
In the first essay Horkheimer and Adorno develop the theoretical framework, while the following essays all explore certain social and economic phenomena from this perspective.
With the risk of oversimplifying and distorting their ideas, I will only summarize the essays in the most accessible way possible.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, writing in the 1940s, the rise of fascism is only a logical consequence of capitalism. Capitalism itself is a way society has structured itself according to a certain rationale (creating value through exploitation of human being in an ever-growing fashion). In other words, capitalism is a social order which is enforced through power-relations, violence and propaganda.
The way capitalist society is ordered is literally a pattern of thought which is characteristic of western civilization. This way of thinking goes all the way back to Ancient Greece when mankind substituted myth for rationality – reversing mankind’s relationship with nature. We went from accepting nature’s power of us to growing our power over nature. The former way of life we associate with mythology, the latter way of life with Enlightenment – i.e. using our reason to investigate, understand and control nature.
Enlightenment is often viewed as a struggle in which we freed ourselves from nature, yet in reality – or so Horkheimer and Adorno claim – the more our power over nature grew, the more we’ve lost our freedom. Capitalism is the culmination of our enslavement to rationality. In this sense, Enlightenment is itself a myth, whose essence is the rejection of myths. In other words: we moderns live in self-denial. We celebrate reason as our means to freedom, while all it does is enslave us to a totalitarian system and way of life and drive us further and further from our own nature.
Fascism is nothing but the culmination of the Enlightenment, in the sense that it perfects the ordering of society and the necessary subjugation of all individuals to the collective. Its rationale is exactly that of the Enlightenment and it uses all the products of the Enlightenment - from bombs and machine guns to propaganda through advertisements and radio programmes – to perfect its totalitarian grasp over society.
The above comprises the main theses of Horkheimer and Adorno’s essays. As said, the first essay sets out this thesis while the latter essays all explore certain social aspects through this framework. For example, in the fourth essay, titled The Culture Industry, they explore modern culture as the expression of Enlightenment way of thinking: calculating effects of cultural products, perfecting techniques of production and distribution of cultural products, etc. And as another example, in the fifth essay, titled Elements of Antisemitism, Horkheimer and Adorno they use the phenomenon of antisemitism to explain the inherent tendency in western society to self-destruct, to regress to a state of barbarism.
Throughout the work, both authors use Hegelian dialectics to describe and explain their theories. This way of thinking lives off contradictions, which are seen not as problems but as the way reality is. For example, the tendency towards self-destruction of western civilization is a typical Hegelian analysis: through ever-increasing organisation and administration, the Holocaust – as a purely rational process in terms of its origin, its design and its execution - becomes only a logical consequence. And this is how the idea of progress and the idea of regress (Holocaust) are both synthesized into something new.
In a similar vein, Horkheimer and Adorno explain how cultural products offer exactly that which they want to eradicate: they offer hope, the illusion of something more (to the product). That which people lack and long for, is exactly that which they lose in their continuous consumption of products, be they cultural or not. The culture industry makes the masses forget they are individuals and have the capacity to change, and it does this by making them internalize the current state of being as the only way life is or can be.
Horkheimer and Adorno basically reduce the whole of western civilization – then and now, here and there – to a dialectic of losing our individuality through individualization. Through producing and consuming we are kept in a perpetual state of mind in which we believe we are someone, while in reality we are all cogs in a giant machine – dehumanized, depersonalized, and deluded. Capitalism thrives off the total subjugation of all human beings and it needs these human beings to believe they are free individuals in order to succeed. All its mechanisms, its products, its social dynamics, everything is aimed at creating this state and ensuring it stays this way. The domination of capitalism over us is literally the domination we sought over nature. In the process we lost our own nature and the world around us.
Considering Horkheimer and Adorno were Jewish and had experienced decades of trouble and the rise of fascism, I can be sympathetic to their analyses and their interpretations of contemporary events. But like I said in my review of Adorno’s The Culture Industry (1991), I find this way of looking at the world also very reductionistic, generalizing, one-sided and myopic. But most of all, I find it highly problematic. Critical theory has become very influential and popular, especially in academic circles, with many sickening consequences. Generations of students have mistaken theorizing about society for scientifically studying society, i.e. have mistaken political activism for science. And worse of all, it is Marxist theory which is preached as truth…
Both Marxism and critical theory promote the reduction of the world to the dichotomy ‘oppressor-oppressed’ and the viewing of the world solely in terms of power-relations (be they economic, cultural, or otherwise). In practice, it generates resentment and depression, mirroring perfectly the mental state of mind of the founders of critical theory. Like I said in the earlier mentioned review: the world would have been spared a great ill if Adorno and Horkheimer had been professionally treated for the clinical depression. Instead, they externalized their problems and blamed the (western) world for it.
Also, these essays are simply awfully written. Lots of repetition, lots of not-getting-to-the-point, lots of irrelevant and pompous jargon, lots recycling of old ideas. So, as a literary product, I cannot be much happier than with its content...
February 19, 2016
I'm sympathetic to the themes, but this book was the high water mark of continental philosophy for me. If the Enlightenment, rationality, and language have codified and standardized experienced and reduced human capacity for magic in modernity, then okay. That point is able to be made and contains some truth. But distrusting language does not mean one needs to write like an obscurantist poet, nor quote Homer instead of explaining one's ideas in clear prose.
I resented this book for pushing me toward the analytic tradition's frustration with continental philosophy. At the time of reading this I was frustrated with the lack of continental understanding within the analytic circles in which I traveled, but this book cured me of that inclination.
I resented this book for pushing me toward the analytic tradition's frustration with continental philosophy. At the time of reading this I was frustrated with the lack of continental understanding within the analytic circles in which I traveled, but this book cured me of that inclination.
July 15, 2020
Just like how Kant endeavours to set a limit to our reason, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE) Horkheimer and Adorno (H&A) wish to lay down a limit to enlightenment. As with other works in continental philosophy, this book is punctuated with jargons and difficult metaphors (esp. pertaining to Greek mythology which Adorno pretty much adores) - much to the dismay of analytically-oriented readers. Nonetheless, the central thesis of the entire book can be summarised in few sentences: enlightenment, which envisions liberation of man from his self-imposed tutelage, forgets that 'reason', the main appendage of an enlightened mind, is never free. There is a price - the 'sacrifice' - that we must pay to achieve enlightenment. If primordial societies use animals as sacrifices to their gods, us enlightened sacrifice our internal nature in order to tame the external nature (notice the epistemological contribution of materialist philosophy): "Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power" (DE, 9). Reason - the main instrument of liberated mind - fades into the compulsory of our obsessive unconscious and emancipation drowns into the abyss of nihilism. Libido - the source of energy which opens a space for aesthetic emancipation - has been permanently incapacitated in its contact with capitalism; culminating in a schizophrenic world-order wherein objects are fetishised and tastes are dictated. DE intends to expose the irrationality of enlightenment and the contradiction inherent in its false promise to emancipate humanity. As one of the earliest works that utilises Freud-Marx "sexuality-economic" framework, DE is definitely one of the most radical contemporary books on Ethics that is ever written.
The epistemology of DE can be thought as an effort to cover the analytical deficiency in the argument of Marx, especially with regards to his theory of ideology, by seeking a refuge in psychoanalytic thought to schematise the trajectory of 'human nature' - if there exists any - that has been irrevocably purged by instrumental reason and stupefied by modernity. The history of reason progresses not only through a dialectical materialist fashion, but also through a psychological confrontation with the nature (notice that this is among the earliest application of Freudo-Marxism framework). This can be juxtaposed as a transition through three mimetic phases: (1) the pre-mimetic stage, where men submit to nature for his incapability in comprehending its angst; just like how a prey plays dead in the face of its predator, (2) the mimetic stage, where men relationship to nature is symmetrical one conjured by the act of mimesis; such is expressed by H&A through an anthropological metaphor: "Magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures" (DE, 9), and (3) the enlightened stage, where men are ultimately capable to utilise reason to dominate nature (in other word, the phase where the radical separation between subject and object is finally realised). In this stage, the need for mimetic act is abandoned as our fear of the nature has been overcome through reason. The world is now seen as a panorama filled with objects, unknowns, pandora, aporia, etc. waiting to be analytically saturated. The world is like a patient on the operating table waiting to be dissected by us intellectual surgeons using the tool of reason.
This third phase, conventionally thought to be the ultimate liberation from fear by modernist scholars, is counterintuitively argued by H&A as the manifestation of fear itself; or to put it in Seyla Benhabib word, it "...is not self-actualisation but self-denial disguised as self-affirmation". The key to meaningful life has been sacrificed in order to inaugurate the genesis of 'new' self, a self imbued with enlightened reason but devoid higher meaning essential for the realisation of emancipation (think of Hegel, who theorises the journey of Spirit that discovers the ultimate understanding of the Absolute in the form of Art, Religion, and Philosophy). The result is the banal face of our nature that resurfaces - fascism, commodity fetish, indoctrination, submission to the 'culture industry' (DE Chapter 4).
What can be delineated from this literary criticism qua philosophical text? Simply, and frankly; Enlightenment is a deception. The enlightened mind can never comprehend the source of "true" emancipation, that is to be found in the "aesthetic ecstasy" (think of the feeling of seeing the birth of your children for the first time). Instead, enlightened mind tries to logicise and dissect everything through logic instead of adoring the beauty of the aesthetic Absolute. Similarly, liberalism - the seemingly undisputed intellectual champion of human liberation - produces a false picture of emancipation as it foregone aesthetic in favour of "free will".
However, is there such thing as "free will" that is completely free from politicisation? When a proud liberal cries “I think therefore I am”, we ask: who am even “I”? Before “I” exist as a thinking being, “I” am a product of capitalism, of patriarchy, of culture industry that begets Narcissistic Personality Disorder, of perverted familial construct despises by the ascetic Gautama. Even in a radical meditative realm, Descrates’ attempt to champion the power of thinking failed to notice the possible cognitive blindspot wherein “I” is a mere byproduct of bourgeois imagination. Hence, only Aesthetic Mimesis: the antithesis of thinking being, the act of pure adoration of the purity of the nature, and the uncolonised manifestation of our subjectivity, is the "truest" source of emancipation.
Reader can immediately infer that DE attempts to reify Marx's critique of capitalism, albeit with a strong Freudian flavour with a much embedded skepticism (Lukács' work is a similar reference). So where can liberation be found? Certainly not in the enlightenment. And it is not to be found in the social humanisation of labour through the realisation of communist society, as claimed by Marx and Engels. DE claims that liberation itself is a dialectical process of retraction - a retraction of the trajectory of human nature that has been purged. Ambiguously, H&A signal that emancipation is to be found in the act of aesthetic mimesis, the act which delineates purity that allows us to encounter the Absolute; the capital T-Truth of our life. Yet, such possibility has been shattered as the genesis of enlightenment implies that the way we think about this world has been made inseparable from our 'unconscious desire' (to borrow Freud) to seek meanings solely in 'instrumental reason' (to borrow Weber). For H&A, emancipation is thus impossible with the current configuration of our world.
This ethical dead-end; the rejection of the possibility of emancipation, is viewed negatively by the later generations of Frankfurt School; such as Habermas and Honneth. Lacking intersubjectivity dimension, these scholars view H&A's emphasis on subject-object dialectic as ignoring the dynamic of subject-subject dialectic that can pave an alternative path towards emancipation.
Overall, the ethical critique to H&A pessimistic diagnostic is largely valid. Indeed, H&A did not account that 'emancipation' is not only subjective (figuratively depicted as a dialectical pilgrimage to discover the Absolute), but also 'inter'-subjective, which implies that emancipation can also be reached through democratic consolidation and rational communication (Habermas) or symmetric recognition of oneself by others (Honneth). However, I argue that this ethical void is, at the same time, the strongest point of DE. DE's main ethical endeavour is to illuminate the problematic when our subjectivity is hypostasised. The utilisation of psychoanalysis in reversing the conventional thinking of the domination of object by subject is original and influential in introducing a psychological dimension to Marxist thought, a permanent legacy that has left a distinctive analytical scar in the epistemology of Frankfurt School. Indeed, before we even talk about subject-subject dialectic, a reconciliation of subject-object relationship is a must. Precisely, how subject's desire to dominate the object is libidinally reversed - culminating in the psychological domination of subject by the very object they aim to dominate. Although the thesis posed by H&A lacks the consideration of subject-subject dialectic, the emphasis on subject-object dialectic is the dimension that their successors lack in their respective thesis.
In conclusion, despite its failure to envision emancipation, DE is nevertheless an indispensable work in the history of continental philosophy. Despite its obscurantist language that makes DE incredibly difficult to read by those without prior background in literature or philosophy (me included when I first read this book), its status as one of the most celebrated works in the history of Critical Theory signals DE's integral scholarly contribution to the discipline. DE is an essential introductory reading for anyone who wishes to learn about critical theory or continental philosophy at an advanced level. However, juvenile readers must be cognisant that comprehending this book is almost impossible without prior understanding of Marx, Freud, or Weber; whereas the understanding of the latter two thinkers can merely be rudimentary (e.g.: Freud on unconscious ego and Weber on instrumental reason), the comprehensive understanding of Marxism at an intermediate level is, at the very least, imperative.
The epistemology of DE can be thought as an effort to cover the analytical deficiency in the argument of Marx, especially with regards to his theory of ideology, by seeking a refuge in psychoanalytic thought to schematise the trajectory of 'human nature' - if there exists any - that has been irrevocably purged by instrumental reason and stupefied by modernity. The history of reason progresses not only through a dialectical materialist fashion, but also through a psychological confrontation with the nature (notice that this is among the earliest application of Freudo-Marxism framework). This can be juxtaposed as a transition through three mimetic phases: (1) the pre-mimetic stage, where men submit to nature for his incapability in comprehending its angst; just like how a prey plays dead in the face of its predator, (2) the mimetic stage, where men relationship to nature is symmetrical one conjured by the act of mimesis; such is expressed by H&A through an anthropological metaphor: "Magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures" (DE, 9), and (3) the enlightened stage, where men are ultimately capable to utilise reason to dominate nature (in other word, the phase where the radical separation between subject and object is finally realised). In this stage, the need for mimetic act is abandoned as our fear of the nature has been overcome through reason. The world is now seen as a panorama filled with objects, unknowns, pandora, aporia, etc. waiting to be analytically saturated. The world is like a patient on the operating table waiting to be dissected by us intellectual surgeons using the tool of reason.
This third phase, conventionally thought to be the ultimate liberation from fear by modernist scholars, is counterintuitively argued by H&A as the manifestation of fear itself; or to put it in Seyla Benhabib word, it "...is not self-actualisation but self-denial disguised as self-affirmation". The key to meaningful life has been sacrificed in order to inaugurate the genesis of 'new' self, a self imbued with enlightened reason but devoid higher meaning essential for the realisation of emancipation (think of Hegel, who theorises the journey of Spirit that discovers the ultimate understanding of the Absolute in the form of Art, Religion, and Philosophy). The result is the banal face of our nature that resurfaces - fascism, commodity fetish, indoctrination, submission to the 'culture industry' (DE Chapter 4).
What can be delineated from this literary criticism qua philosophical text? Simply, and frankly; Enlightenment is a deception. The enlightened mind can never comprehend the source of "true" emancipation, that is to be found in the "aesthetic ecstasy" (think of the feeling of seeing the birth of your children for the first time). Instead, enlightened mind tries to logicise and dissect everything through logic instead of adoring the beauty of the aesthetic Absolute. Similarly, liberalism - the seemingly undisputed intellectual champion of human liberation - produces a false picture of emancipation as it foregone aesthetic in favour of "free will".
However, is there such thing as "free will" that is completely free from politicisation? When a proud liberal cries “I think therefore I am”, we ask: who am even “I”? Before “I” exist as a thinking being, “I” am a product of capitalism, of patriarchy, of culture industry that begets Narcissistic Personality Disorder, of perverted familial construct despises by the ascetic Gautama. Even in a radical meditative realm, Descrates’ attempt to champion the power of thinking failed to notice the possible cognitive blindspot wherein “I” is a mere byproduct of bourgeois imagination. Hence, only Aesthetic Mimesis: the antithesis of thinking being, the act of pure adoration of the purity of the nature, and the uncolonised manifestation of our subjectivity, is the "truest" source of emancipation.
Reader can immediately infer that DE attempts to reify Marx's critique of capitalism, albeit with a strong Freudian flavour with a much embedded skepticism (Lukács' work is a similar reference). So where can liberation be found? Certainly not in the enlightenment. And it is not to be found in the social humanisation of labour through the realisation of communist society, as claimed by Marx and Engels. DE claims that liberation itself is a dialectical process of retraction - a retraction of the trajectory of human nature that has been purged. Ambiguously, H&A signal that emancipation is to be found in the act of aesthetic mimesis, the act which delineates purity that allows us to encounter the Absolute; the capital T-Truth of our life. Yet, such possibility has been shattered as the genesis of enlightenment implies that the way we think about this world has been made inseparable from our 'unconscious desire' (to borrow Freud) to seek meanings solely in 'instrumental reason' (to borrow Weber). For H&A, emancipation is thus impossible with the current configuration of our world.
This ethical dead-end; the rejection of the possibility of emancipation, is viewed negatively by the later generations of Frankfurt School; such as Habermas and Honneth. Lacking intersubjectivity dimension, these scholars view H&A's emphasis on subject-object dialectic as ignoring the dynamic of subject-subject dialectic that can pave an alternative path towards emancipation.
Overall, the ethical critique to H&A pessimistic diagnostic is largely valid. Indeed, H&A did not account that 'emancipation' is not only subjective (figuratively depicted as a dialectical pilgrimage to discover the Absolute), but also 'inter'-subjective, which implies that emancipation can also be reached through democratic consolidation and rational communication (Habermas) or symmetric recognition of oneself by others (Honneth). However, I argue that this ethical void is, at the same time, the strongest point of DE. DE's main ethical endeavour is to illuminate the problematic when our subjectivity is hypostasised. The utilisation of psychoanalysis in reversing the conventional thinking of the domination of object by subject is original and influential in introducing a psychological dimension to Marxist thought, a permanent legacy that has left a distinctive analytical scar in the epistemology of Frankfurt School. Indeed, before we even talk about subject-subject dialectic, a reconciliation of subject-object relationship is a must. Precisely, how subject's desire to dominate the object is libidinally reversed - culminating in the psychological domination of subject by the very object they aim to dominate. Although the thesis posed by H&A lacks the consideration of subject-subject dialectic, the emphasis on subject-object dialectic is the dimension that their successors lack in their respective thesis.
In conclusion, despite its failure to envision emancipation, DE is nevertheless an indispensable work in the history of continental philosophy. Despite its obscurantist language that makes DE incredibly difficult to read by those without prior background in literature or philosophy (me included when I first read this book), its status as one of the most celebrated works in the history of Critical Theory signals DE's integral scholarly contribution to the discipline. DE is an essential introductory reading for anyone who wishes to learn about critical theory or continental philosophy at an advanced level. However, juvenile readers must be cognisant that comprehending this book is almost impossible without prior understanding of Marx, Freud, or Weber; whereas the understanding of the latter two thinkers can merely be rudimentary (e.g.: Freud on unconscious ego and Weber on instrumental reason), the comprehensive understanding of Marxism at an intermediate level is, at the very least, imperative.
February 16, 2018
Δεν διαθέτω την απαραίτητη θεωρητική, φιλοσοφική "σκευή" ώστε να κρίνω επαρκώς το αριστουργηματικό αυτό βιβλίο που έθαλψε κάποια βράδια της φοιτητικής μου ζωής, πολλά χρόνια πριν. Μέχρι σήμερα όμως με έχουν συνοδεύσει θραύσματα σκέψεων και εντυπώσεις, με πιο χαρακτηριστική την εξής: Βαθιά -ελιτιστική, σαφώς- απαξίωση της μαζικής επικρατούσας κουλτούρας, με την οποία οι δύο αυτοί Γίγαντες της Σχολής της Φρανκφούρτης αναγκάστηκαν να έρθουν σε επαφή φεύγοντας εξόριστοι από τη χώρα τους, μακριά από τον απροσπέλαστο πύργο του Πνεύματος τον οποίο για δεκαετίες ενοικούσαν και υπηρετούσαν πιστά.
Για τους Theodor Adorno και Max Horkheimer, το κοινό που σε μια κατάμεστη κινηματογραφική αίθουσα απολαμβάνει με στεντόρειο γέλωτα την προβολή αποτελεί "παρωδία της ανθρωπότητας". Ομοίως, το σύνολο του λεγόμενου ελεύθερου χρόνου των εργαζομένων-μυρμηγκιών δεν είναι τίποτε περισσότερο από "μετείκασμα της εργασιακής διαδικασίας".
Είναι προφανώς αμέτρητα τα παραδείγματα, αν και δεν έχει νόημα να αναφερθούν μεμονωμένα, σε ένα κείμενο που βρίθει απαξιωτικών χαρακτηρισμών για το σύνολο της μαζικής κουλτούρας τής σύγχρονης εμπορευματικής κοινωνίας και της "εργαλειακής διάστασης του Διαφωτισμού".
Δεν έχει επίσης κάποια σημασία κατά πόσον την εποχή της νεότητάς μου ταυτιζόμουν άκριτα με το περιεχόμενο του έργου αυτού. Προφανώς έτρεφα (φρούδες) ελπίδες πως η "Βαλχάλλα της Κριτικής Θεωρίας" θα με δεχόταν στους κόλπους, έστω των θαυμαστών της. Φευ!
Πλέον, έχοντας απορρίψει τις υψιπετείς προσδοκίες και συμβιβαστεί με τις διαψεύσεις μου, δεν απομένει παρά να απολαύσω ένα κείμενο μεστό, ευφυές και μάλλον… εκτός πραγματικότητας. Όχι γιατί η σκέψη των συγγραφέων του ξεπεράστηκε, αλλά διότι δεν θα μπορούσαν οι Τιτάνες να χωρέσουν στην Προκρούστεια κλίνη τής εποχής της "ασημαντότητας".
Και αν το σύγχρονο κοινό δεν δύναται να αναγνωρίσει τον εαυτό στο βιβλίο αυτό, ίσως πρέπει να θυμίσω τον Hegel: "Κανένας δεν είναι ήρωας για τον υπηρέτη του. Όχι επειδή ο ήρωας δεν είναι ήρωας, αλλά γιατί ο υπηρέτης είναι υπηρέτης."
Για τους Theodor Adorno και Max Horkheimer, το κοινό που σε μια κατάμεστη κινηματογραφική αίθουσα απολαμβάνει με στεντόρειο γέλωτα την προβολή αποτελεί "παρωδία της ανθρωπότητας". Ομοίως, το σύνολο του λεγόμενου ελεύθερου χρόνου των εργαζομένων-μυρμηγκιών δεν είναι τίποτε περισσότερο από "μετείκασμα της εργασιακής διαδικασίας".
Είναι προφανώς αμέτρητα τα παραδείγματα, αν και δεν έχει νόημα να αναφερθούν μεμονωμένα, σε ένα κείμενο που βρίθει απαξιωτικών χαρακτηρισμών για το σύνολο της μαζικής κουλτούρας τής σύγχρονης εμπορευματικής κοινωνίας και της "εργαλειακής διάστασης του Διαφωτισμού".
Δεν έχει επίσης κάποια σημασία κατά πόσον την εποχή της νεότητάς μου ταυτιζόμουν άκριτα με το περιεχόμενο του έργου αυτού. Προφανώς έτρεφα (φρούδες) ελπίδες πως η "Βαλχάλλα της Κριτικής Θεωρίας" θα με δεχόταν στους κόλπους, έστω των θαυμαστών της. Φευ!
Πλέον, έχοντας απορρίψει τις υψιπετείς προσδοκίες και συμβιβαστεί με τις διαψεύσεις μου, δεν απομένει παρά να απολαύσω ένα κείμενο μεστό, ευφυές και μάλλον… εκτός πραγματικότητας. Όχι γιατί η σκέψη των συγγραφέων του ξεπεράστηκε, αλλά διότι δεν θα μπορούσαν οι Τιτάνες να χωρέσουν στην Προκρούστεια κλίνη τής εποχής της "ασημαντότητας".
Και αν το σύγχρονο κοινό δεν δύναται να αναγνωρίσει τον εαυτό στο βιβλίο αυτό, ίσως πρέπει να θυμίσω τον Hegel: "Κανένας δεν είναι ήρωας για τον υπηρέτη του. Όχι επειδή ο ήρωας δεν είναι ήρωας, αλλά γιατί ο υπηρέτης είναι υπηρέτης."
June 15, 2020
يجيب الكتاب على تساؤل محوري: ما الذي دفع الإنسان إلى البربرية بعد وعود التنوير بخلاصه من أوهام الأساطير والأديان؟
لقد نشأت مدرسة فرانكفورت ردًا على ظواهر شمولية أوروبية مثل الهولوكوست في ألمانيا النازية والرقابة الشمولية على المجتمع في الدول الرأسمالية الحديثة، وكان فلاسفتها من اليهود الألمان، الذين هجِّروا من أوطانهم تحت سوط البطش النازي، وقد كتب ماكس هوركهايمر وثيودور أدورنو هذا الكتاب، بغية التفكير جدليًا في التنوير، لا بوصفه مرحلة مضيئة في تاريخ متخلُّف، بل بوصفه أي دعوى للتقدُّم في أي زمن منذ اليونان وحتى سقود النازية.
يجادل الفيلسوفان في هذا الكتاب أن التنوير يحتوي على بذور الشمولية في مضمونه أساسًا، فليست الشمولية ظاهرة عارضة على التنوير أو غير مخلصة له، بل تقع الشمولية في صُلب الفلسفات التنويرية بالذات. لقد وضع تراث التنوير نفسه في تباين مع الأسطورة منذ البداية، ولكي يتخلَّص تمامًا من أي أفكار أسطورية، عقد تحالفًا مع الوضعية، مختزلًا كل الظواهر البشرية إلى نظرية علمية حسابية، وعبر ذلك تقلَّص الإنسان إلى رقم وسط أرقا�� أخرى عديدة، دون التفات للقيم الأخرى. فهذا يعني أن العقل انتقل من نطاق التفكير في الغايات والقيم، وتحول إلى عقل أداتي كما يطلق عليه هوركهايمر، العقل الأداتي لا يفكر سوى بالوسائل، عقل مصمت يفعل أمورًا لا يعرف ما الغاية النهائية منها ولا القيمة التي ستحققها، فينحدر من العقلانية إلى اللاعقلانية.
وإذا كانت الأسطورة تهدف لفهم الطبيعة عبر الحكايات، يهدف التنوير لفهم الطبيعة عبر الحسابات، وإذا كانت الأسطورة في موضع الخائف من براثن الطبيعة، فإن التنوير قدَّم نفسه باعتباره سلاح البشر في الهيمنة على الطبيعة والسيطرة عليها، وتسخيرها لصالح الإنسان، وكما يرى فرانسيس بيكون، فإن اللذة المحضة من المعرفة لذة حيوانية لا تتوافق مع الإنسان، فعليه أن يسخِّر معارفه للسيطرة على الطبيعة وفهمها.
ولهذا فإن أخلاقيات كانط، الذي كتب رسالته الشهيرة "ما التنوير" ليست إلا خديعة بورجوازية أخرى تهدف إلى فرض معايير الطبقة البورجوازية في صورة أخلاقيات فلسفية تكتسب صبغة العقل والمنطق. فليس كانط قديس يردي قناع فيلسوف، بل بورجوازي يرتدي قناع الفيلسوف. وإذا كان التنوير يهدف إلى السيطرة على الطبيعة، والإنسان كائن طبيعي وليس مختارًا من الإله، فإن التنوير ينتهي إلى نتيجة منطقية: السيطرة على الإنسان أيضًا. لقد أطلق الإنسان صفات إنسانية على الطبيعة في الأساطير، وفي التنوير يُطلق الصفات الطبيعية على الإنسان.
في الفصل الرابع المسمى بعنوان الصناعة الثقافية، يناقش الفيلسوفان كيف يعمل المجتمع الرأسمالي على خداع الجماهير. يرى أدورنو أن هوليوود مصنع الشر في أميركا؛ فمع انتقال وسائل التواصل من التليفون إلى الراديو في عصر أدورنو، انتقلت صناعة الأيديولوجيا، أو صناعة الثقافة كما يقول أدورنو من الحالة التواصلية بين البشر، التي لا يهيمن أحدهما فيها على الآخر، أو على الأقل تختفي بينهما المصالح الأديولوجية التي تخدم أوضاعًا اجتماعية معينة، إلى الراديو والتلفيزيون والسينما، وجميعها تعمل على صناعة ثقافة غير ديمقراطية، فقد حولت تلك الوسائل المتلقي من نشط متحدِّث إلى سلبي. يمكن النظر إلى تلك الرؤية بصورة معكوسة الآن في إطار تطوير وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي التي تمنح للجميع حق التعبير عن رأيه بحرية وديمقراطية، ��لكنها في آن تجمِّع كل الفئات والطوائف معًا في مجتمعات مغلقة، فتزيد من الفجوة بين الذات وبين الآخر. يقول أحد المفكرين أن مستخدم وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي الشاب اليوم أكثر غضبًا من غيره، وأكثر ميلًا لشكوى زميله الذي يلقي عليه النكات عن ما قبل.
لقد كانت صناعة الثقافة الأميركية صناعةً للتسلية بصورة أساسية، أو التعمية إن شئت القول، وكان شغلها الشاغل العبارة الإنجليزية الشهيرة "لا تفرط في التفكير Don't Overthink" ودعنا نحظى ببعض المرح ولا تكن شديد الجدية هكذا "Let's have fun"
كانت تلك الشعارات إيذانًا بأفول ملكة العقل والتفكير الذاتي والأحكام الواعية على الأمور، ولماذا نفكِّر بأنفسنا إن كان البرنامج التليفيزيوني يفكِّر بدلًا مني؟ جاء كل ذلك في ظل حضارة تسمي وقت الفراغ باللغة الإنجليزية بالوقت الحر Free Time ما يعني أن الإنسان ليس حرًا في وقت عمله.
وبذلك تحول الإنسان من الأنوار التي وعد بها فلاسفة أوروبا إلى ظلمات الشمولية والغرق في التسلية الرأسمالية والاستهلاك الأعمى، وتحول من الحيوان العاقل الذي رآه أرسطو، إلى التابع أو المُستهلك في العصر الرأسمالي.
الكتاب أصعب من جمعه في مراجعة واحدة، فقد كُتب على هيئة شذرات متفرقة غير مترابطة في وحدة، في إطار نقد وحدة الأنساق الفلسفية الموحدة للتنوير أصلًا، ولا تعبر هذه المراجعة سوى عن انطباعاتي.
الترجمة رديئة للغاية وكنت أستعين في بعض المواضع بالترجمة الإنجليزية.
لقد نشأت مدرسة فرانكفورت ردًا على ظواهر شمولية أوروبية مثل الهولوكوست في ألمانيا النازية والرقابة الشمولية على المجتمع في الدول الرأسمالية الحديثة، وكان فلاسفتها من اليهود الألمان، الذين هجِّروا من أوطانهم تحت سوط البطش النازي، وقد كتب ماكس هوركهايمر وثيودور أدورنو هذا الكتاب، بغية التفكير جدليًا في التنوير، لا بوصفه مرحلة مضيئة في تاريخ متخلُّف، بل بوصفه أي دعوى للتقدُّم في أي زمن منذ اليونان وحتى سقود النازية.
يجادل الفيلسوفان في هذا الكتاب أن التنوير يحتوي على بذور الشمولية في مضمونه أساسًا، فليست الشمولية ظاهرة عارضة على التنوير أو غير مخلصة له، بل تقع الشمولية في صُلب الفلسفات التنويرية بالذات. لقد وضع تراث التنوير نفسه في تباين مع الأسطورة منذ البداية، ولكي يتخلَّص تمامًا من أي أفكار أسطورية، عقد تحالفًا مع الوضعية، مختزلًا كل الظواهر البشرية إلى نظرية علمية حسابية، وعبر ذلك تقلَّص الإنسان إلى رقم وسط أرقا�� أخرى عديدة، دون التفات للقيم الأخرى. فهذا يعني أن العقل انتقل من نطاق التفكير في الغايات والقيم، وتحول إلى عقل أداتي كما يطلق عليه هوركهايمر، العقل الأداتي لا يفكر سوى بالوسائل، عقل مصمت يفعل أمورًا لا يعرف ما الغاية النهائية منها ولا القيمة التي ستحققها، فينحدر من العقلانية إلى اللاعقلانية.
وإذا كانت الأسطورة تهدف لفهم الطبيعة عبر الحكايات، يهدف التنوير لفهم الطبيعة عبر الحسابات، وإذا كانت الأسطورة في موضع الخائف من براثن الطبيعة، فإن التنوير قدَّم نفسه باعتباره سلاح البشر في الهيمنة على الطبيعة والسيطرة عليها، وتسخيرها لصالح الإنسان، وكما يرى فرانسيس بيكون، فإن اللذة المحضة من المعرفة لذة حيوانية لا تتوافق مع الإنسان، فعليه أن يسخِّر معارفه للسيطرة على الطبيعة وفهمها.
ولهذا فإن أخلاقيات كانط، الذي كتب رسالته الشهيرة "ما التنوير" ليست إلا خديعة بورجوازية أخرى تهدف إلى فرض معايير الطبقة البورجوازية في صورة أخلاقيات فلسفية تكتسب صبغة العقل والمنطق. فليس كانط قديس يردي قناع فيلسوف، بل بورجوازي يرتدي قناع الفيلسوف. وإذا كان التنوير يهدف إلى السيطرة على الطبيعة، والإنسان كائن طبيعي وليس مختارًا من الإله، فإن التنوير ينتهي إلى نتيجة منطقية: السيطرة على الإنسان أيضًا. لقد أطلق الإنسان صفات إنسانية على الطبيعة في الأساطير، وفي التنوير يُطلق الصفات الطبيعية على الإنسان.
في الفصل الرابع المسمى بعنوان الصناعة الثقافية، يناقش الفيلسوفان كيف يعمل المجتمع الرأسمالي على خداع الجماهير. يرى أدورنو أن هوليوود مصنع الشر في أميركا؛ فمع انتقال وسائل التواصل من التليفون إلى الراديو في عصر أدورنو، انتقلت صناعة الأيديولوجيا، أو صناعة الثقافة كما يقول أدورنو من الحالة التواصلية بين البشر، التي لا يهيمن أحدهما فيها على الآخر، أو على الأقل تختفي بينهما المصالح الأديولوجية التي تخدم أوضاعًا اجتماعية معينة، إلى الراديو والتلفيزيون والسينما، وجميعها تعمل على صناعة ثقافة غير ديمقراطية، فقد حولت تلك الوسائل المتلقي من نشط متحدِّث إلى سلبي. يمكن النظر إلى تلك الرؤية بصورة معكوسة الآن في إطار تطوير وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي التي تمنح للجميع حق التعبير عن رأيه بحرية وديمقراطية، ��لكنها في آن تجمِّع كل الفئات والطوائف معًا في مجتمعات مغلقة، فتزيد من الفجوة بين الذات وبين الآخر. يقول أحد المفكرين أن مستخدم وسائل التواصل الاجتماعي الشاب اليوم أكثر غضبًا من غيره، وأكثر ميلًا لشكوى زميله الذي يلقي عليه النكات عن ما قبل.
لقد كانت صناعة الثقافة الأميركية صناعةً للتسلية بصورة أساسية، أو التعمية إن شئت القول، وكان شغلها الشاغل العبارة الإنجليزية الشهيرة "لا تفرط في التفكير Don't Overthink" ودعنا نحظى ببعض المرح ولا تكن شديد الجدية هكذا "Let's have fun"
كانت تلك الشعارات إيذانًا بأفول ملكة العقل والتفكير الذاتي والأحكام الواعية على الأمور، ولماذا نفكِّر بأنفسنا إن كان البرنامج التليفيزيوني يفكِّر بدلًا مني؟ جاء كل ذلك في ظل حضارة تسمي وقت الفراغ باللغة الإنجليزية بالوقت الحر Free Time ما يعني أن الإنسان ليس حرًا في وقت عمله.
وبذلك تحول الإنسان من الأنوار التي وعد بها فلاسفة أوروبا إلى ظلمات الشمولية والغرق في التسلية الرأسمالية والاستهلاك الأعمى، وتحول من الحيوان العاقل الذي رآه أرسطو، إلى التابع أو المُستهلك في العصر الرأسمالي.
الكتاب أصعب من جمعه في مراجعة واحدة، فقد كُتب على هيئة شذرات متفرقة غير مترابطة في وحدة، في إطار نقد وحدة الأنساق الفلسفية الموحدة للتنوير أصلًا، ولا تعبر هذه المراجعة سوى عن انطباعاتي.
الترجمة رديئة للغاية وكنت أستعين في بعض المواضع بالترجمة الإنجليزية.
February 26, 2016
Fuck that was tough.
June 25, 2012
The Enlightenment sought to bring mankind out of the shadows of orthodox tradition and religion and into the light of reason. A step toward human freedom, right? Perhaps, no doubt in some ways. But relying on reason skewed basic civility based in tradition and replaced human and humane interaction with calculated management. It could lead to places that the Encyclopedists could never have imagined. It could lead to concentration camps.
So what's a person to do. Adorno is not known for optimistic answers to this question. He opposed Benjamin's occasional hope for committed theater and mass produced art as leading to just another form of cultural entrapment. Adorno had only one place that he wanted to go to for answers, and that was music, specifically, and the aesthetic moment in general. But he was the first to know that it was not an easy place to go. Adorno was accused of being an academic mandarin toward the end of his life and I would contend that it was undeniable that he was an elitist in that he thought very few could educate and discipline themselves for that possible creative moment of aesthetic awareness. Art is the opposite of comfort for Adorno and if it is comforting, then it is not art. His is not an aesthetics supported in many museums, I suspect. And it was rejected by
many committed students in the sixties. Adorno's way was the way of many in the philosophical tradition: you need the conventions to get you up to snuff, and then you have to destroy them. To not fall back into another convention is the rub. Alienating art might be the start of a possibility.
So what's a person to do. Adorno is not known for optimistic answers to this question. He opposed Benjamin's occasional hope for committed theater and mass produced art as leading to just another form of cultural entrapment. Adorno had only one place that he wanted to go to for answers, and that was music, specifically, and the aesthetic moment in general. But he was the first to know that it was not an easy place to go. Adorno was accused of being an academic mandarin toward the end of his life and I would contend that it was undeniable that he was an elitist in that he thought very few could educate and discipline themselves for that possible creative moment of aesthetic awareness. Art is the opposite of comfort for Adorno and if it is comforting, then it is not art. His is not an aesthetics supported in many museums, I suspect. And it was rejected by
many committed students in the sixties. Adorno's way was the way of many in the philosophical tradition: you need the conventions to get you up to snuff, and then you have to destroy them. To not fall back into another convention is the rub. Alienating art might be the start of a possibility.
July 26, 2022
Review 2022:
I went over the book again. I only read the first three chapters this time around, just because I couldn't devote myself to reviewing their views on anti-semitism (there are just others things I want to read, and if I want to go deep into anti-semitism, or racism in general, I might go back over Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and also finish the Hook et al. book on Race and Lacan. Let's just say I've read quite a bit about anti-semitism, and I am just a bit tired to go over it again.
Let's just say the Frankfurt School will always have a soft place in my heart. Reading them, I always feel like I am Winston in 1984 after picking up the book where he reads all the parts of history which have been suppressed. For most of the Frankfurt School, not including Erich Fromm, that seems to be the style of writing that I get. It's a sort of truth telling, that is radical and challenging to conventional norms.
That being said, the radicality of the truth telling is usually very challenging the first time around. This time around I was mainly interested in the thesis that Enlightenment is the root problem of Western civilization. I think the essay on the Odyssey is my favourite piece of the whole collection. I also really enjoy the Kant v. Sade essay, and I would be interested in comparing those ideas to Lacan's essay on Kant and Sade, I would also be interested in reading the Juliette book (in French).
I do like the culture industry essay, I mean I like the spirit that art has been lost through fabrication and enlightenment knowledge. To use Hannah Arendt's terminology, I think the essay basically suggests that the culture industry, which is the work of homo faber, is of course catering to animal laboraans who don't elevate la vita contemplitiva. I think that's true, especially today when we think about the most recent Matrix movie, or yet another Spider Man movie (I mean is Hollywood really just trying to feed us the same garbage that it knows we liked before, and how many times do I have to hear these super heroes origin stories, repetition compulsion at its finest).
The critical nature of Adorno is what turns me off a bit to a certain extent. I am never one to not enjoy a good critique, but Adorno just goes after everyone (Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles). You really get a sense of Adorno sitting in an academic tower condemning cultural enjoyment in every which way. NO ONE WILL HAVE FUN ON ADORNO'S WATCH! I have not delved deep into Adorno... and I might one day, however he has a reputation for being critical of things like jazz, which seems unforgivable now a days, which makes it hard for me to get into his "Negative Dialectics". (Although I do think that Jazz sometimes has turned into a factory of sameness). That doesn't mean I don't think Adorno has some valuable insights, I just don't have the time to get into his mindset deeply. However, Negative Dialectics will probably be on my reading list one day.
All of this lends credence to Hegel's Phenomenology... It is called the Dialectic of Enlightenment right!? The critique on science, and where we have come from seems to be reminiscent of the Introduction to the Phenomenology. I mean, I really like the book, but, I prefer Hegel because it's less of a critique on the modernity and more of an insight into the human experience, and then Adorno and Horkheimer makes conclusions based on their interpretations of Hegel via Freud and Marx. I think I should probably finish my Hegel reading now. I have put it aside too long.
I keep it at 5 stars because, I like it enough that it should be given 5 stars.
Review 2016:
I like this book a lot. Very detailed analysis of Western Culture, and the age of enlightenment with all its faults. The first chapter on Odysseus, can't get much better than that. Juliette, the Culture Industry and Anti Semitism. Feels good to know that others thought similarly to the way I am thinking about the world. The ending notes and paragraphs are so good too, a little of everything.
I went over the book again. I only read the first three chapters this time around, just because I couldn't devote myself to reviewing their views on anti-semitism (there are just others things I want to read, and if I want to go deep into anti-semitism, or racism in general, I might go back over Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and also finish the Hook et al. book on Race and Lacan. Let's just say I've read quite a bit about anti-semitism, and I am just a bit tired to go over it again.
Let's just say the Frankfurt School will always have a soft place in my heart. Reading them, I always feel like I am Winston in 1984 after picking up the book where he reads all the parts of history which have been suppressed. For most of the Frankfurt School, not including Erich Fromm, that seems to be the style of writing that I get. It's a sort of truth telling, that is radical and challenging to conventional norms.
That being said, the radicality of the truth telling is usually very challenging the first time around. This time around I was mainly interested in the thesis that Enlightenment is the root problem of Western civilization. I think the essay on the Odyssey is my favourite piece of the whole collection. I also really enjoy the Kant v. Sade essay, and I would be interested in comparing those ideas to Lacan's essay on Kant and Sade, I would also be interested in reading the Juliette book (in French).
I do like the culture industry essay, I mean I like the spirit that art has been lost through fabrication and enlightenment knowledge. To use Hannah Arendt's terminology, I think the essay basically suggests that the culture industry, which is the work of homo faber, is of course catering to animal laboraans who don't elevate la vita contemplitiva. I think that's true, especially today when we think about the most recent Matrix movie, or yet another Spider Man movie (I mean is Hollywood really just trying to feed us the same garbage that it knows we liked before, and how many times do I have to hear these super heroes origin stories, repetition compulsion at its finest).
The critical nature of Adorno is what turns me off a bit to a certain extent. I am never one to not enjoy a good critique, but Adorno just goes after everyone (Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles). You really get a sense of Adorno sitting in an academic tower condemning cultural enjoyment in every which way. NO ONE WILL HAVE FUN ON ADORNO'S WATCH! I have not delved deep into Adorno... and I might one day, however he has a reputation for being critical of things like jazz, which seems unforgivable now a days, which makes it hard for me to get into his "Negative Dialectics". (Although I do think that Jazz sometimes has turned into a factory of sameness). That doesn't mean I don't think Adorno has some valuable insights, I just don't have the time to get into his mindset deeply. However, Negative Dialectics will probably be on my reading list one day.
All of this lends credence to Hegel's Phenomenology... It is called the Dialectic of Enlightenment right!? The critique on science, and where we have come from seems to be reminiscent of the Introduction to the Phenomenology. I mean, I really like the book, but, I prefer Hegel because it's less of a critique on the modernity and more of an insight into the human experience, and then Adorno and Horkheimer makes conclusions based on their interpretations of Hegel via Freud and Marx. I think I should probably finish my Hegel reading now. I have put it aside too long.
I keep it at 5 stars because, I like it enough that it should be given 5 stars.
Review 2016:
I like this book a lot. Very detailed analysis of Western Culture, and the age of enlightenment with all its faults. The first chapter on Odysseus, can't get much better than that. Juliette, the Culture Industry and Anti Semitism. Feels good to know that others thought similarly to the way I am thinking about the world. The ending notes and paragraphs are so good too, a little of everything.
December 26, 2016
کتاب دیالکتیک روشنگری نوشتهٔ آدورنو و هورکهایمره. این کتاب رو دونفری نوشته‌ند و توش گفته‌ند که روشنگری شکست خورده و به اون چیزی تبدیل شده که از آغاز به مبارزه باهاش برخاست. موضوعات اصلی کتاب دلایل شکست روشنگری و تاثیراتش بر روی فرهنگ و جامعه، اسطوره و اسطوره شدن علم و خود روشنگری و جالبتر از همه صنعت فرهنگه. تو فصل صنعت فرهنگ میاد می‌گه فرهنگ هم مثل بقیه صنایع سرمایه‌داری و عصر مدرنیته یک سری چیز شبیه هم تحویل می‌ده که کاملا خالی از معنا شده‌ند و همگی موید نظام موجودند و هرچقدر هم رادیکال باشند باز هم دارند تو زمین اون بازی می‌کنند. کتاب خیلی جالبیه و با اینکه ممکنه به نظر بدبینانه و شور بیاد مثلا آسیب‌هایی که به فرهنگ و کالاشدگی‌ش منسوب می‌کنه خیلی دقیق و به نظر من عین حقیقت‌اند. برا هرکسی که این چیزها براش جالبه و به نظرش کل ماجرا یکمی بو می‌ده واجب عینیه که این کتابو بخونه.
اما گاف کتاب اینه که متنش اصلا و ابدا روان نیست. کل این کتاب می‌شه گفت یک انشای بلنده، شعر می‌شه، اوج می‌گیره و خطابه می‌گه. مجبور می‌شی معانی رو از توش شکار کنی. واقعا انشاست. ممکنه یهو سجع داشته باشه. نمی‌شه هم گفت تماما تقصیر مترجمه، احتمالا همینقدر مبهم نوشته شده. من که به نظرم می‌رسید دارم چینی می‌خونم. ولی نکته مثبتش اینه که آدم می‌فهمه زرین‌کوب تنها نیست. همه‌جا انشانویس هست.
ولی هرجا که تونسته‌م از میان انشاها چیزی درآرم و بفهمم شگفت‌زده‌م کرده. مثلا این:
"تحت فشار تبلیغلا فراگیر، پودر صورت و رژ لب، با نفی خاستگاه‌شان در روسپیان درباری، به وسایل مراقبت از پوست بدل شدند، و حوله‌ی حمام به نشانه‌ی بهداشت. هیچ راه فراری نیست. حتی عشق نیز، صرفا به حکم این واقعیت که در بطن نظام سراسر سازماندهی‌شده‌ی سلطه رخ می‌دهد، مارک تجاری سیستم را بر چهره دارد."
اما گاف کتاب اینه که متنش اصلا و ابدا روان نیست. کل این کتاب می‌شه گفت یک انشای بلنده، شعر می‌شه، اوج می‌گیره و خطابه می‌گه. مجبور می‌شی معانی رو از توش شکار کنی. واقعا انشاست. ممکنه یهو سجع داشته باشه. نمی‌شه هم گفت تماما تقصیر مترجمه، احتمالا همینقدر مبهم نوشته شده. من که به نظرم می‌رسید دارم چینی می‌خونم. ولی نکته مثبتش اینه که آدم می‌فهمه زرین‌کوب تنها نیست. همه‌جا انشانویس هست.
ولی هرجا که تونسته‌م از میان انشاها چیزی درآرم و بفهمم شگفت‌زده‌م کرده. مثلا این:
"تحت فشار تبلیغلا فراگیر، پودر صورت و رژ لب، با نفی خاستگاه‌شان در روسپیان درباری، به وسایل مراقبت از پوست بدل شدند، و حوله‌ی حمام به نشانه‌ی بهداشت. هیچ راه فراری نیست. حتی عشق نیز، صرفا به حکم این واقعیت که در بطن نظام سراسر سازماندهی‌شده‌ی سلطه رخ می‌دهد، مارک تجاری سیستم را بر چهره دارد."
Read
February 9, 2009This, I feel, is a statement superlative to the Minima Moralia in the Adorno catalog. The classist overtones that damage so much of that book are less ingrained here, and we get what I feel to be a much more open philosophy. Whenever I read these old Frankfurt School dudes, there's this weird sense of tragedy, as if they were the last line of defense against the brutal forces of late capitalist alienation. And I've never felt that stronger than in here. That said, this is also the Frankfurt School's coming-of-age statement, admitting the culpability of the Enlightenment in the society of mass destruction. So there's this weird sort of liminality to it, but that's one of the things that makes it so interesting.
March 7, 2011
This translation, by John Cumming, is tough sledding - the textual equivalent of chopping onions, reducing the pungent-yet-aesthetically-Kremlinesque whole bulb into little blocky niblets that scatter and stick to the cutting board whilst still making your eyes water. Edmund Jephcott did such a lovely job with Walter Benjamin's Reflections and Adorno's Minima Moralia that I have little doubt his more recent rendering of DOE into English would be well worth spending the extra bucks.
September 17, 2019
In my dogged pursuit of a self-issued advanced degree in intellectualism, a parchment many covet, yet few possess, I figured I must needs read this book, for what cravat and smoking jacket aspiring pedant hasn't? It's a tough read, folks. Could the writing be more difficult to digest? An example, from p. 163,
I’m reminded of those art exhibits, where the museum provides a meaningless scrawl of words at the entrance to the hall and I stare at those words like a confused puppy back to its owner. I found a similar meaningless scrawl in one of Robert Parker's wine reviews, of a 2017 Hahn Lucienne Doctor's Vineyard,
I guess this style of writing is useful as a catalyst for a troupe of scholars seeking to tell the world what Horkheimer and Adorno really meant. In this sense, this book has been quite profitable and no doubt sustained many a career. For me this work reduces to a synthesis of the dangers to be found at the intersection of state power with ever evolving media/technology, where freedoms realized as individuals are consciously or unconsciously eroded and manipulated. This writing is a mere introductory chapter for today and a preamble for tomorrow. Of course, Horkheimer and Adorno were writing in the midst of an upside-down world, which provided rich fuel for their discourse. A couple quotes worthy of note:
Would this work be more understandable with a better translation? Now I’m off to shop for that cravat.
The developmental moment in thought, its whole genetic and intensive dimension, is forgotten and leveled down to what is immediately present, to the extensive.Say what?
I’m reminded of those art exhibits, where the museum provides a meaningless scrawl of words at the entrance to the hall and I stare at those words like a confused puppy back to its owner. I found a similar meaningless scrawl in one of Robert Parker's wine reviews, of a 2017 Hahn Lucienne Doctor's Vineyard,
Black olives and forest floor aromas waft up from the glass. Savory notes of dark fruit and dried sage attack the front of the palate while notes of black cherry and dark plum float on the long, elegant finish.Say what?
I guess this style of writing is useful as a catalyst for a troupe of scholars seeking to tell the world what Horkheimer and Adorno really meant. In this sense, this book has been quite profitable and no doubt sustained many a career. For me this work reduces to a synthesis of the dangers to be found at the intersection of state power with ever evolving media/technology, where freedoms realized as individuals are consciously or unconsciously eroded and manipulated. This writing is a mere introductory chapter for today and a preamble for tomorrow. Of course, Horkheimer and Adorno were writing in the midst of an upside-down world, which provided rich fuel for their discourse. A couple quotes worthy of note:
Everyone can be like the omnipotent society, everyone can be happy if only they hand themselves over to it body and soul and relinquish their claim to happiness.
Enlightenment is totalitarian.
Would this work be more understandable with a better translation? Now I’m off to shop for that cravat.
January 18, 2021
the chapter on the culture industry was really stimulating to me but most of the rest was confusing, over my head, or not very relevant to my current interests
EDIT: on re-read a couple years later it makes much more sense and I like it :) thank you A&H :)))
EDIT: on re-read a couple years later it makes much more sense and I like it :) thank you A&H :)))
February 17, 2023
seguramente me lo vuelva a leer dentro de poco porque es absolutamente increíble
Read
February 20, 2022Fuck, what a wild piece of work this is. I’d read DoE years earlier but I certainly did not get so much out of it that time around. Yes, it suffers from some nihilistic tendencies which I don’t abide by, but the general shape which Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique takes is very sound and picks up on a lot of themes that have been concerning me these past two years, particularly since the pandemic.
We typically see enlightened thinking understood as something both contrasting with or even opposing mythical thinking. It is understood that reason, or the reasoned thinking which Enlightenment birthed, was a contrast to the authority of tradition implied by myth, while also opposing the collective spell which myth places on a people, giving rise to the individual observer. In such a way the rational thinking of Enlightenment was meant to break away from myth and escape its power. And yet, due to the shared root of all thought, both mythical and rational, the split between the two is never so clear as we hope it to be in a functional sense.
Eventually, reason cannibalizes itself and in losing sight of its shared root with myth, becomes the myth itself. H & A put it this way—
“Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language.” [...] “this was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science.”
Thus, the dream of pure science is the demythologization wherein there is no longer anything to fear, for there is no longer a realm of the unknown. And yet, “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo.” H & A call this lapse of reason into the universal taboo as “instrumental reason.” Instrumental reason breaks down the barrier between truth and power and annihilates the fundamental difference between validity claims and self-preservation—that is, the preservation of its own system. And so, paradoxically, the process of gaining mastery over the mythical powers inevitably brings about a return to myth, or that Enlightenment reverts to mythology.
The upshot of all this is not just that the line between myth and reason is always much blurrier than we think, but that theoretical knowledge and the potential for technological exploitability are always nested within each other, and it is the refusal to accept this that creates the environment susceptible to the sort of purposive rationality that produces monsters. The amplification of this problem on such a scale only possible with modernity estranges us from reconciling ourselves to the common root of myth and reason, a danger which is not exactly unique to modernity, but is especially consequential due to its all-pervasive influence made possible through communication technologies.
I read this book mainly to tease out some further reflections on the ‘Odyssey,’ and this book did not disappoint in this regard. Indeed, DoE has given me some of the most incredible insight into the work I’ve read so far. But I won’t write about all that just now. For now, suffice to say that I am extremely intrigued by the possibility of such a reconciliation of reason and myth in our own time, and what that might mean, if only because “facticity” these past few years has become such a parody of itself that the illusion cannot be borne for much longer, surely. But I’m open to surprises. Still, it seems to me that the paradox of holding both views at once, that reason and myth are at all times intermixed, is ironically the only possible way out of the quagmire.
We typically see enlightened thinking understood as something both contrasting with or even opposing mythical thinking. It is understood that reason, or the reasoned thinking which Enlightenment birthed, was a contrast to the authority of tradition implied by myth, while also opposing the collective spell which myth places on a people, giving rise to the individual observer. In such a way the rational thinking of Enlightenment was meant to break away from myth and escape its power. And yet, due to the shared root of all thought, both mythical and rational, the split between the two is never so clear as we hope it to be in a functional sense.
Eventually, reason cannibalizes itself and in losing sight of its shared root with myth, becomes the myth itself. H & A put it this way—
“Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language.” [...] “this was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science.”
Thus, the dream of pure science is the demythologization wherein there is no longer anything to fear, for there is no longer a realm of the unknown. And yet, “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo.” H & A call this lapse of reason into the universal taboo as “instrumental reason.” Instrumental reason breaks down the barrier between truth and power and annihilates the fundamental difference between validity claims and self-preservation—that is, the preservation of its own system. And so, paradoxically, the process of gaining mastery over the mythical powers inevitably brings about a return to myth, or that Enlightenment reverts to mythology.
The upshot of all this is not just that the line between myth and reason is always much blurrier than we think, but that theoretical knowledge and the potential for technological exploitability are always nested within each other, and it is the refusal to accept this that creates the environment susceptible to the sort of purposive rationality that produces monsters. The amplification of this problem on such a scale only possible with modernity estranges us from reconciling ourselves to the common root of myth and reason, a danger which is not exactly unique to modernity, but is especially consequential due to its all-pervasive influence made possible through communication technologies.
I read this book mainly to tease out some further reflections on the ‘Odyssey,’ and this book did not disappoint in this regard. Indeed, DoE has given me some of the most incredible insight into the work I’ve read so far. But I won’t write about all that just now. For now, suffice to say that I am extremely intrigued by the possibility of such a reconciliation of reason and myth in our own time, and what that might mean, if only because “facticity” these past few years has become such a parody of itself that the illusion cannot be borne for much longer, surely. But I’m open to surprises. Still, it seems to me that the paradox of holding both views at once, that reason and myth are at all times intermixed, is ironically the only possible way out of the quagmire.
November 26, 2018
دوست داشتنی؛ تنها واژه ای که می توان درباره این کتاب نوشت
اصولا گرایش و علاقه من به نویسندگان و اهالی مکتب فرانکفورت، ناشی از نگاه جامع و فراتر از زمان آنها به وقایع و البته تجربیات تاریخی است
اصولا گرایش و علاقه من به نویسندگان و اهالی مکتب فرانکفورت، ناشی از نگاه جامع و فراتر از زمان آنها به وقایع و البته تجربیات تاریخی است
August 20, 2019
Dijalektika se tiče eksploatacije. Uglavnom je vezujemo za antologijsko poglavlje o kulturnoj industriji, ali se proširuje i na, doslovno, prostornu eksploataciju. Ključno je razgraničiti pojmove – prosvetiteljstvo je razmatrano ne kao istorijska formacija, koliko kao period koji je ustanovio pojmovno-teorijsku aparaturu, u kojoj se javlja jedno značajno misaono trenje – kontradikcija. Osloboditi svet od začaranosti postaje nova začaranost. Čak i verovanje. Kvantifikacija je oblik verovanja – proizilazi upravo iz pretpostavke da verodostojnije predstavlja svet. I nije prosvetiteljstvo ništa više ili manje krivo u odnosu na pretohne epohalne svetonazore.
Adorno i Horkhajmer se (Horkdorno) bave se pre svega posledicama protivrečnosti koje je prosvetiteljski okvir nametnuo. Paralele su ostvarene kako sa Odisejem i De Sadom, tako i sa potrošačkim društvom, propagandom, antisemitizmom i fašizmom. A još kad bismo dodali da je na temeljima i dubiozama istog tog prosvetiteljstva napravljena i Evropska unija, videli bismo da „Dijalektika” ne da nije zastarela, već da se i dalje ispisuje.
I samo da se osvrnem na početak – veoma su zanimljive crtice-zapisi na samom kraju dela. Na po stranici i po nalaze se teze intrigantne kao za čitavu knjigu. Meni svakako najbliža vezana je za (eksploatatorski) odnos prema prirodi; za izokretanje Lokove tabule rase – čovek je jedino biće koje ostavlja tabula rasu nakon sebe (234) – „čitava je domišljata mašinerija modernog industrijskog društva, samo priroda koja samu sebe kasapi” (268).
I da – ne valja se brecati, stiskati usne ili uzdahivati zbog neslobode. Post-prosvetiteljstvo je naša ušuškanost – kišobran za (malo)građane, potrošače – model bezbolnosti, šećer i ringišpil. Naš svet skrojen je od sitnih, palanačkih želja. Ili palanka, ili tragikomični ekstremi. Sredine nema. (Sredina je na prodaju.)
Adorno i Horkhajmer se (Horkdorno) bave se pre svega posledicama protivrečnosti koje je prosvetiteljski okvir nametnuo. Paralele su ostvarene kako sa Odisejem i De Sadom, tako i sa potrošačkim društvom, propagandom, antisemitizmom i fašizmom. A još kad bismo dodali da je na temeljima i dubiozama istog tog prosvetiteljstva napravljena i Evropska unija, videli bismo da „Dijalektika” ne da nije zastarela, već da se i dalje ispisuje.
I samo da se osvrnem na početak – veoma su zanimljive crtice-zapisi na samom kraju dela. Na po stranici i po nalaze se teze intrigantne kao za čitavu knjigu. Meni svakako najbliža vezana je za (eksploatatorski) odnos prema prirodi; za izokretanje Lokove tabule rase – čovek je jedino biće koje ostavlja tabula rasu nakon sebe (234) – „čitava je domišljata mašinerija modernog industrijskog društva, samo priroda koja samu sebe kasapi” (268).
I da – ne valja se brecati, stiskati usne ili uzdahivati zbog neslobode. Post-prosvetiteljstvo je naša ušuškanost – kišobran za (malo)građane, potrošače – model bezbolnosti, šećer i ringišpil. Naš svet skrojen je od sitnih, palanačkih želja. Ili palanka, ili tragikomični ekstremi. Sredine nema. (Sredina je na prodaju.)
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April 3, 2018Adorno takip etmesi ve düşünce dünyasını kavraması biraz çetrefilli bir yazar ve düşünür. Ama zorluğu oranında da farklı düşünme imkanları sunduğu için, o dünyaya zorlayarak da olsa girmeye değiyor bence.
Kitap doğrusal olarak okunup bitirmeye pek uygun bir kitap değil. Bölüm bölüm zamana ve meraka yayarak okumak daha anlamlı olur diye düşünüyorum.
İlk bölüm; 'Aydınlanma Kavramı', adından da anlaşılacağı üzere Aydınlanma döneminden bahsediyor.
İkinci bölüm; 'Odysseus ya da Mitos ve Aydınlanma' Odessa'yı okuyan ve ilgi duyan herkese tavsiyemdir. Farklı bir okuma pratiği ve anlama imkanı sağlıyor kesinlikle.
Üçüncü bölüm; 'Juliette ya da Aydınlanma ve Ahlak', Sade'e zaten ilgi ve merakım var, Juliette'i okuduktan sonra bu bölüme tekrar döneceğim.
Dördüncü bölüm; 'Kültür Endüstrisi' kitabın bu bölümü İletişim Yayınları tarafından ayrıca bir kitap olarak basılı, daha önce okumuştum. İletişim çevirisi daha akıcı bana kalırsa. Bu kitabı da ayrıca öneririm.
Diğer bölüm de; 'Antisemitizm ve Ögeleri' ve kitabın sonunda da Adorno'nun birçok şeye dair taslakları ve notları var.
Kitap doğrusal olarak okunup bitirmeye pek uygun bir kitap değil. Bölüm bölüm zamana ve meraka yayarak okumak daha anlamlı olur diye düşünüyorum.
İlk bölüm; 'Aydınlanma Kavramı', adından da anlaşılacağı üzere Aydınlanma döneminden bahsediyor.
İkinci bölüm; 'Odysseus ya da Mitos ve Aydınlanma' Odessa'yı okuyan ve ilgi duyan herkese tavsiyemdir. Farklı bir okuma pratiği ve anlama imkanı sağlıyor kesinlikle.
Üçüncü bölüm; 'Juliette ya da Aydınlanma ve Ahlak', Sade'e zaten ilgi ve merakım var, Juliette'i okuduktan sonra bu bölüme tekrar döneceğim.
Dördüncü bölüm; 'Kültür Endüstrisi' kitabın bu bölümü İletişim Yayınları tarafından ayrıca bir kitap olarak basılı, daha önce okumuştum. İletişim çevirisi daha akıcı bana kalırsa. Bu kitabı da ayrıca öneririm.
Diğer bölüm de; 'Antisemitizm ve Ögeleri' ve kitabın sonunda da Adorno'nun birçok şeye dair taslakları ve notları var.
July 5, 2019
A wonderful introduction to the critique of instrumental reason. If you are a marxist however, you may have some critical stances towards Adorno+Horkheimers seeming reduction of domination to elements of ideological domination. They do pay lip service to economic forms in their analyses of commodified society, but latent throughout their analyses is always what I consider the wrong theoretical formulation of the existence bureaucratic/keynesian capitalism as a qualitatively different capitalism that justifies a relatively suspended discussion of economic mediation. It runs the risk of visualizing "state capitalism" as just the emergence of a "consciously willed" domination for the sake of domination.
Nonetheless, A+H's wonder interventions on aesthetics, unfettered formalism in language and the fascistic urge underlying mechanized self-denial of desire are still pertinent and valuable!
Nonetheless, A+H's wonder interventions on aesthetics, unfettered formalism in language and the fascistic urge underlying mechanized self-denial of desire are still pertinent and valuable!
November 14, 2022
Overall this was excellent, though on this read-through I found the section on the culture industry underwhelming. But much of the argument remains striking and new.
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