Horkheimer and Adorno on Enlightenment 

Thank you for this pun

Right. By exposing the domination of human labour and nature in class divided societies as an ideology fit for justifying the bondage of the many by the few, they hoped for a self-conscious praxis of emancipation to emerge. The critique of scientism is tied to the critique of religion and Idealism in general: the reversal of the subject/object power relation in the mind, a reversal which has resulted in mass murder and other manifestations of unfreedom within what has passed so far as "civilisation".

@monsieur bertillon The video says (with citations) that your interpretation is idiosyncratic at best. What evidence (citations from primary sources!) do you have to offer ud in favor of your proposed intepretation?

@@kmickelson3738 From the preface written by Adorno and Horkheimer: "The critique of enlightenment given in this section is intended to prepare a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination." ('Dialectic of Enlightenment' Stanford University Press 2002 trans Edmund Jephcott p xviii)

77 from MINIMA MORALIA Auction. - Unfettered technics eliminates luxury, not by declaring privilege as a human right, but by severing the possibility of fulfilment in the midst of raising general living standards. The express train which races through the continent in three nights and two days is a miracle, but the trip in it has nothing of the faded glory of the train bleu [French: blue train]. What comprised the voluptuousness of travel, which began by waving farewell through the open window, the friendly concern of those who accepted tips, the ceremonial meals, the unalloyed feeling of being favored, which does not take anything away from anyone else, has disappeared along with the elegant people who were wont to promenade before the departure on old-fashioned platforms, and who will henceforth be sought for in vain in the halls of the most prestigious hotels. That the steps of the train are drawn in, signifies to travelers on even the most expensive express that they must obey the terse instructions of the company like prisoners. They are given indeed the exactly calculated value for their money, but nothing which isn’t already included in the statistically average claim. Knowing such conditions, whoever would have the idea of setting out with his beloved, as formerly was done from Paris to Nice? But one cannot shake off the suspicion that even the deviant luxury, which noisily proclaims itself as such, has an element of something capricious, of something artificially gotten up. As per Veblen’s theory, it is more about permitting those who can pay, to prove to themselves and others their status, than about meeting their in any case increasingly undifferentiated needs. While the Cadillac is surely superior to the Chevrolet, since it costs more, this superiority, otherwise than in the old Rolls Royce, is derived from a total plan, which cleverly equips the first with better cylinders, brakes, and accessories the second with worse ones, without changing anything in the basic schema of the mass product: one need only make small changes in production to transform a Chevrolet into a Cadillac. Thus luxury is being hollowed out. For in the middle of general fungibility, happiness clings without exception to what is not fungible. No exertion of humanity, no formal reasoning can alter the fact that the clothing which shimmers like a fairy-tale is worn by the one and only, not by twenty-thousand others. Under capitalism, the utopia of the qualitative - what by virtue of its difference and uniqueness does not enter into the ruling exchange relationship - flees into the fetish character. But this promise of happiness in luxury presupposes once more privilege, economic inequality, precisely a society based on fungibility. That is why the qualitative itself turns into a special case of quantification, the not-fungible into the fungible, luxury into comfort and in the end into senseless gadgets. In such a circle the principle of luxury goes to pieces even without the leveling tendency of mass society, over which the reactionaries sentimentally fuss and fume. The inner composition of luxury is not indifferent to what useless things, through their total embedding in the realm of usefulness, experience. Its remainders, even objects of the greatest quality, already look like junk. The delicacies with which the super-rich fill up their homes, call out helplessly for a museum, yet this latter would, as per Valery’s insight, kill the meaning of statues and paintings; only their mother, architecture, points to their proper place. Held fast however in the houses of those to which nothing binds them, they are a slap in the face of the mode of existence which private property has developed into. If the antiquities with which millionaires before the WW I surrounded themselves still mattered, because they raised the idea of the bourgeois dwelling to a dream - the fearful dream - without exploding it, then the chinoisieries [French: ticky-tacky luxuries] which they meanwhile have turned to, sullenly tolerate the private owner, who is only at ease in the light and air which are locked away by luxury. Functionalist luxury is a nonsense, on which false Russian princes who work as interior decorators for Hollywood may earn their keep. The lines of advanced taste converge in asceticism. The child reading A Thousand and One Nights, intoxicated by rubies and emeralds, asked the question, what indeed is so wonderful about the possession of such stones, given that they are described not as a means of exchange, but as a hoard. The entire dialectic of enlightenment is at work in this question. It is as reasonable as unreasonable: reasonable, in becoming aware of idolization, unreasonable, in turning against its own end, which is present only there, where it is not held accountable to any authority, or indeed to any intention: no happiness without fetishism. By and by, however, the skeptical child’s question has spread to every luxury, and even naked sensual pleasure is not immune to it. To the aesthetic eye, which represents what is not useful against utility, what is aesthetic - when violently cut off from purpose - turns into what is anti-aesthetic, because it expresses violence: luxury turns into brutality. In the end it becomes swallowed up by drudgery or conserved as a caricature. Whatever of the beautiful flourishes under horror, is a mockery and ugly to itself. Nevertheless its ephemeral shape stands for the avoidability of horror. Something of this paradox lies in the basis of all art; today it is expressed in the fact that art still exists at all. The firmly held idea of the beautiful demands, that happiness be cast off and at the same time maintained.

@@monsieurbertillon9570 yes. 92 MINIMA MORALIA Picture-book without pictures. - The objective tendency of the enlightenment, to abolish the power of all images over human beings, does not correspond to any subjective progress of enlightened thought towards imagelessness. After the idols were cast down, and metaphysical ideas irresistibly demolished concepts previous understood as rational and authentically thought, the thinking unleashed by the enlightenment and immunized against thinking is passing over into a second representativeness [Bildlichkeit], an imageless and biased one. Amidst a net of relationships in which human beings have become entirely abstract to each other and to things, the capacity of abstraction disappears. The alienation of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed under them, indeed the pure quantity of processed materials, which has become incommensurable to the circumference of individual human experience, constantly necessitates the archaic retranslation into sensuous signs. The little stick figures and houses, scattered in statistical texts like hieroglyphics, may appear in every specific case to be accidental, a mere means of assistance. But it is not for nothing that they look so similar to countless advertisements, newspaper stereotypes, and toys. In them the representation is victorious over what is represented. Its outsized, simplistic and thus false comprehensibility reinforces the incomprehensibility of the intellectual processes, from which their falseness - the blind, non-conceptual subsumption - cannot be separated. Ubiquitous pictures are nothing of the sort, because they simultaneously present the entire generality, the average, the standard model as something unique, something particular, while ridiculing such. Even the abolition of the particular is derisively turned into something particular. The demand for this has already sedimented itself as a need, and is reproduced everywhere by the mass culture, after the model of the “funnies” [in English in original]. What was once called Spirit [Geist], is dispelled by the illustration. It is not merely that human beings no longer have the capacity to imagine what has not been drilled into them and shown in abbreviated form. Even the joke, in which at one time the freedom of the Spirit [Geist] crashed into the facts and caused the latter to explode, has passed over into illustration. The pictorial jokes which fill the magazines, are for the most part pointless, empty of meaning. They consist of nothing other than a challenge to the eye of a competition with the situation. Schooled by innumerable prior cases, one is supposed to see “what’s happening” faster than the significant moments of the situation are developing. What such pictures act out, in anticipation of their completion by the well-versed observer, is the throwing of all meaning overboard like ballast in the snapshot of the situation, in the unresisting subjugation to the empty hegemony of things. The state-of-the-art joke is the suicide of intention. Whoever commits it, is rewarded by acceptance in the collectivity of laughter, which has horrifying things on its side. Even if one wanted to try to understand such jokes by thinking, one would remain helplessly behind the tempo of unleashed things, which race ahead even in the simplest caricature, like the concluding chase at the end of animated films. Sagacity turns immediately into stupidity in the face of regressive progress. No other understanding is left to thought than the horror of what is incomprehensible. Just as the sober-minded gaze, which meets the billboard smile of a toothpaste beauty, perceives the misery of torture in her manufactured grin, so too does the death-sentence of the subject, implicit in the universal victory of subjective reason, bristle from every joke and truly every visual representation.

Well then I don't find it very persuasive (no offense to the professor here, but rather the theory). All attempts at insight or intellection tautologically involve attempts at mastery of a subject; that is quite quotidian. One cannot seek insight (even of the theory espoused here) without seeking mastery. What appears to happen here (granted the theory will bear actual reading in full) is a conflation of mastery over ideas with capitalism etc., not quite sure how this elision is made. One could hold for example that communism seeks a mastery of economic arrangements just as ably. It is indeed difficult to think -- to bring the world into the lens of one's mind -- and not, in tightening one's acuity window, to be seeking some form of mastery over it, such that we are not merely protoplasmic entities, experiencing all phenomena as if an unformed child, or placental emanation...

Please do not refer your students to this video. If they need a scholarly overview then they should read Marcel Stoetzler's chapter "Dialectic of Enlightenment" in the SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory

I am aware that there are tons of scholarly overviews out there, and I usually assign the actual text of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. What is often lacking is something in a more accessible format that still adheres to rigorous standards -- as this whole podcast series does.

​@@rogermaioli The following is a highly accesible intro to the Frankfurt School: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6g5_tuXwOUg.html

@@spiritualpolitics8205 That's why Adorno was opposed to totalitarian communism too. He was against any sociocultural oppression

Its not a boogeyman. Critical theory in the 21st century is not used correctly. Because if it was, a lot of Jews would be losing seats on executive boards, and obviously they cant let that happen.

Oh yeah? How's that going right now?

Not that this is helpful at this point, but there's a great collection by Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni on precisely this topic. Wolff's opening essay, "Anthropological Thought in the Enlightenment," is a lucid account of how exactly Enlightenment thinking anticipated the consolidation of anthropology as a discipline.

@@rogermaioli Just looked it up. This is a great recommendation! Thank you!

@@shyman3000 My pleasure!

Thank you! Dr. Anderson hasn't done any videos on Bataille yet, but worth considering for the future :)

Firstly, that is nowhere near a "fact". This is widely disputed among mathematicians and philosophers. Secondly, how? None of this is an argument.

I think a lot of the Adorno stuff was written fresh off the heels of WW2, right just after Nazis used rationality in the service of killing and stealing.

havent read them myself but I guess you could study those evidence in the new disciplines and thoughts that emerged from the Enlightenment + Capitalism hot pot ? Eugenism and other science based criminology, humanism and its hypocrisy when critiquing the rise of nazis while holding onto european colonies, anthropology and its early ethnocentrism... and I guess in general the rise of three "barbaric" behaviors : exploitation, extractivism, surveillance. I'm considering reading The dialectic of the Enlightenment soon enough, do they really not argue and point out evidence of such dangers ? I feel like it would indeed be a bit of a frustrating presentation..

So the left wants to push for its political project. How is that new? How is that even unique to the left?

The Dialectic of Enlightenment (excerpt from the Continental Philosophy Reader)

routledge.com/The-Continental-Philosophy-Reader/Kearney-Rainwater/p/book/9780415095266

One cannot think for himself and speak freely

@@enkor9591 At least certainly not these days!

Dunno about colonialism. We may call it something else (neoliberalism, for example) but it’s still going on.

I'll take it over your response any day, which doesn't seem to involve much thought at all.

@@fede2 ooh ouch I’m shattered. I’m so sorry to have let down your expectations in particular, A person who obviously doesn’t even understand the word “apt.”

@@spidgeb3292 Somebody's a little sensitive. Maybe next time add a touch of substance to your pissy put-down. Unless that's not what you meant to do, in which case it would be you struggling with basic definitions.

@@fede2 sorry you need more explanation. For most, it shouldn’t be necessary. I said precisely what I intended. It’s your prerogative to dislike it. And it’s my prerogative to dismiss your comment as frivolous. So we’re done here.

@@spidgeb3292 It's a tad ironic that you "dismiss my comment as frivolous" all the while stubbornly refusing to say anything even remotely of substance. Yeah, call me crazy, but I do dislike those kinds of things. And if this is all you can come up with then you're right, we are done here.

Adorno and Horkheimer do not oppose entlightenment. They warn about the fascistic/kapitalistic aspects.

@@elio1464 Since capitalism means the freedom of people to dispose of their property and their labor as they desire, it is a good thing.

Read some existentialists. The debate of free will and Determinism is useless. We have agency, we feel like we have free will therefore we do. Hence the notions of responsibility and guilt. You cant go around tell people “Everything you’ve done was predetermined”. Even if it was so, it doesn’t matter.

@@charbeldaher632 don't read anything. Instead , Look within . Detach yourself from everything and everyone. Or don't. Either way , i wish u well

To understand is to be free

​@@muhammadarif5623 How did you understand that you are free? Did you decide who your two parents should be? Did you decide where and in what conditions you were born? Why is humanity dissimilar and unequal? Are you saying that the destitute freely determined to be destitute, and the affluent freely determined to be affluent? And don't say as an answer: the affluent is a hard worker! Hard worker has to have circumstances in which to work hard! So, how does that circumstances come by? By Free Will?

@@Nemo-sz2qy Why would you wish someone to be well if their life is predetermined

I totally agree. Actually I had trouble grasping what she was saying at first but listened again since I'm aware the ideas underlie a lot of what passes these days for intellectual thought. I've heard of Adorno et al & the "Frankfurt School" before in the context of postmodernism, critical this&that etc & have formed the hypothesis that these guys - Adorno, Marcuse & so on - were some of the characters the "New Left" of the late 1960s turned to after Krushchev's Secret Speech of the mid-1950s & other exposes rendered Soviet socialism on the nose for many (although far from all) who nonetheless couldn't abandon their hatred of "capitalism" & (only western!) "imperialism". But if this apparently well-educated woman's account of their theories is correct, and given she seems enthusiastic about them, there's much to be worried about. What's that quote about "believing absurdities"?

They do not want to overcome entlightenment. They want us to be woke because of the myth in entlightenment.

what are solutions that they are offering?

Are you serious?

Wah shaheen e iqbal. That's all you could come up with?