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Loading... Dialectic of Enlightenment (original 1947; edition 1976)by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, John Cumming (Translator)
Work InformationDialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer (1947)
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   luvucenanzo06 | Sep 8, 2023 |  Enlightenment takes no account of itself at all; it erases all traces of its self-consciousness. Die Hitler Jugend, the swagger of the rabble, did not regress to barbarism, but was a triumph of mandatory equality, which developed just equality into equal injustice. The individual is reduced to a collection of habitual reflections and actually desired ways of behaving. Animism spiritualizes the object, whereas industrialization objectifies the human soul. In the earliest known stages of mankind, there was an obscure religious code called Mana, which existed in the splendid Greek religious world. All that is unfamiliar and unknown is original, undifferentiated, and beyond the sphere of experience; Everything has more implications than we have previously known. In this sense, what the primitive people experienced was not a spiritual entity corresponding to the physical entity, but a die Nature corresponding to the individual. Throughout the centuries of Christian history, love for one's neighbour has always covered up a latent hatred of the woman, which is now forbidden by coercive means - the woman is only the object used to reclaim that futile fact. This hatred compensates for the worship of the Virgin through the persecution of witches, a form of revenge that survives in the memory of pre-Christian prophetess, a vestige of a latent suspicion of a deified patriarchal ruling order. Part.2 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception Under monopoly, all mass culture is consistent, and the framework it produces through the way it thinks begins to manifest itself clearly. Those at the top no longer consciously shy away from monopoly: violence has become more public and power has ballooned. Movies and radio no longer have to pretend to be art; they have become fair trade, truth transformed into ideology in order to judge the rubbish they produce. They call themselves industries. However, the paradise of the culture industry is also a kind of drudgery. Escapes and elopements are pre-programmed to come back in the end. Pleasure is supposed to help people forget to submit, but instead it makes people more submissive. The desperate search for consistency is bound to lead to failure. In order to avoid this failure, all great works of art stylistically achieve a self-denial, while bad ones often rely on similarity to other works, on a coherence with an alternative character. Maristot | Jul 17, 2023 |  ) d.v. | May 16, 2023 |  ) Wolfseule23 | Aug 6, 2022 | Horkheimer & Adorno's pessimism can easily be excused, as can their missed calls on jazz music and Hollywood film. But in the end, their overarching narrative reaches too far, sees no hope, and turns absurd as even Donald Duck is seen as an instrument of totalitarianism. ( ) poirotketchup | Mar 18, 2021 | no reviews | add a review
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Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)193Philosophy & psychology Modern western philosophy Philosophy of Germany and AustriaLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.11)
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