Theodor W. Adorno

[Jazzman]

Well, that's the funny guy on my avatar He's one of the most important and of course most interesting german philosophers in the 20th century. He worked in several disciplines such as philosophy of history, social philosophy and esthetics. His work is characterized by the scare of national socialism and 2nd world war. In the 1920s he joined the "Institut für Sozialforschung" (Institute for Social Research) where philosophers and sociologists did critical research together with psychoanalysts and economists. That project was later called "critical theory" or "Frankfurter Schule". They had to emigrate to the USA when the Nazis came to power. There they did research about the coherence between capitalism and dictatorship. Besides they did empirical research about the german workers class and found out that there was no certain social character of the german workers which could determine a socialistic revolution. Under this influence Adorno developed a negative theory of the history of modern age. In their key work "Dialektik der Aufklärung" Adorno and Horkheimer located the enlightment itself as the driving force of inhuman rationalization. The uncritical use of rationality, the "instrumental reason", would lead to a cruel form of society and induce catastrophes of civilisation as the Nazi mass murder.

Is someone interested in the Frankfurt School and their critical theory of capitalism?

[Didymos Thomas]

Sounds very interesting. With untrue premises, all the reason in the world will still lead to falsehood. Moral reasoning seems to be done after a decision is already made; we have an emotional reaction, and then devise some logic to support our reaction.

I'd be very interested in some articles on this subject.

[Jazzman]

I found a good passage in the wikipedia article on Adorno:

In this book, [Dialektik der Aufklärung,] which was virtually ignored until republished in 1969, Adorno and Horkheimer posit a dynamic within civilization that tends towards self-destruction. They argue that the concept of reason was transformed into an irrational force by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humanity itself. It is this rationalization of humanity that was identified as the primary cause of Fascism and other totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not consider rationalism a path towards human emancipation. For that, he looked toward the arts.

Maybe that's more incisive than my bad english Although I don't really agree with Adorno but I think that his thoughts are considerable for anyone who tries to understand and rate the present.

[Quesalid]

Hi Jazzman,
As part of my thesis, I am researching the applicability of Dialectic of Enlightenment to instances of cultural negotiation of rationalities.

The case I am thinking of is the 1992 Indian mosque disaster. To simplify a very long story: Hindu radicals in India burned down a mosque, claiming that it was built on the site of the birthplace of one of their deities and therefore that a temple should be put there instead. Their belief that the deity was born on that spot is grounded in myth. But in order to make their claim appear legitimate to the modern secular government, they are having to construct scientific/historical arguments through enlightenment logic.

I would be interested to know, do you think that Adorno and Horkheimer's model can be applied to cases such as this, in which "pre-enlightenment" or "pre-disenchantment" societies are are forced to adopt disenchanted enlightenment logic?

[Fairbanks]

Originally Posted by Jazzman

. . . Is someone interested in the Frankfurt School and their critical theory of capitalism?

For reasons unknown, 300,000 copies of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man were sold. I suspect that most were not read past the first chapter. That is also the first philosophy book I read (after Hume many years ago). I think that Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse is an excellent place to start researching the nature of the modern state, and I don't classify them as Marxists, but some resemblance in vocabulary is unavoidable. You'll have to read their cites, etc., and will possibly want to follow Derrida and some of that deconstruction criticism or American pragmatism although it gets away from theory of the state in some ways.