Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human
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“The idea of a legal war or, indeed, a just war, relies on the controllability of instruments of destruction. But because uncontrollability is part of that very destructiveness, there is no war that fails to commit a crime against humanity, a destruction of civilian life. In other words, the international law that prohibits crimes against civilians presupposes that there can be a war without such crimes, reproduced the idea of a “clean” war whose destruction has perfect aim. Only on such a condition can we distinguish between war and crimes of war. But if there is no stable way to distinguish permissible collateral damage from the destruction of civilian life, then such crimes are inevitable, and there is no non-criminal war. In other words, wars become permissible forms of criminality, but they are never non-criminal.”
― Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
― Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
“In his inaugural lecture, Horkheimer opposed positivism because it ‘sees only the particular, in the realm of society it sees only the individual and the relations between individuals; for positivism, everything is exhausted in mere facts’.10 Positivism, an approach to social theory devised in the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held that society, like the physical world, operates according to laws. In philosophy, logical positivism holds that all we can reasonably claim to know is based on reports of sensory experience, along with logical and mathematical operations. Propositions not based on such reports or operations are metaphysical and hence nonsense, and even aesthetic or moral judgements, rightly understood, are not genuine judgements but more or less sophisticated grunts of approval or disapproval. Such a philosophy was developed almost contemporaneously with the Frankfurt School. The so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivism, founded by Moritz Schlick in 1922, consisted of a group of philosophers and scientists who met until 1936 at the University of Vienna. Some former members of the Circle went into exile from Austria around the time of the Nazi Anschluss of 1938, and the Circle went on to greatly influence philosophy departments in Britain and the United States, in part because their intellectual trajectory (they took most of Hegel to be metaphysical and therefore nonsense) was more amenable to the Anglophone universities.”
― Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
― Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
“There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they had never been born. Therefore all parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
“the task of the propagandist is that of inventing goal symbols which serve the double function of facilitating adoption and adaptation. The symbols must induce acceptance spontaneously…. It follows that the management ideal is control of a situation not by imposition but by divination…. The propagandist takes it for granted that the world is completely caused but that it is only partly predictable….[107]”
― Orientalism
― Orientalism
“But the opening ceremonies of the Third Reich also heralded its death. In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, written in American exile, Adorno, that virtuoso of immanent critique, wrote: ‘No one who observed the first months of National Socialism could fail to perceive the moment of mortal sadness, of half-knowing surrender to perdition, that accompanied the manipulated intoxication, the torchlight processions and the drum-beating.’7 This leitmotif – sadness in intoxication, catastrophe foreshadowed in the very moment of exultation, death figured in birth pangs – is, for Adorno, utterly German, and it had an historic parallel. In 1870, he notes, as the German Empire was born in victorious military campaign, Wagner wrote Götterdämmerung, ‘that inflamed spirit of the nation’s own doom … In the same spirit, two years before the Second World War, the German people were shown on film the crash of their Zeppelin at Lakehurst. Calmly, unerringly, the ship went on its way, then suddenly dropped like a stone.’8 Like Benjamin, Adorno reimagined history as breaking through what the former called empty, homogeneous time, establishing resonant constellations of disasters or hopes, assembling them into allegories of their own demise.”
― Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
― Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School
Political Philosophy and Ethics
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Study and discussion of the important questions of ethical and political philosophy from Confucius and Socrates to the present. Rules (see also the ...more
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