Modern European Intellectual History

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Modern EuropeanIntellectual History

• Lecture 26
• The Frankfurt School Modernism between Program
  and Utopia

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outline

• Intro
• The Origins of Western Marxism and the Frankfurt
  School
• The Explanation for Fascist Submission (and
  American Conformism) Individual Freedom without
  Social Change
• Theodor Adorno The Administered World and the
  Refuge of Modernist Art
• Conclusion

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The Frankfurt School
Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
T.W. Adorno (1903-1969)
Erich Fromm (1900- 1980)
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origins and diffusion

• Georg Lukács (1885-1971)
• History and Class Consciousness (1923)
• Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
• Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69)
• Others Walter Benjamin, Franz Neumann, Herbert
  Marcuse, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal
• Nicholas Murray Butler
• 429 W. 117th St.
• Pacific Palisades, California

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Fromms synthesis

• Escape from Freedom (1941)
• Studies on Authority and the Family (1930s)
• Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality
  (1950)
• Methodology The Marriage of Marx and Freud
• The most beautiful as well as the most ugly
  inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and
  biologically given human nature, but result from
  the social process.
• human nature not infinitely malleable

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a history of individualism

• problem how did an age of slavery European
  fascism and American conformism follow from a
  long period of increasing freedom?
• -history as the abolition of primary ties
• primary ties imply a lack of individuality, but
  they also give security and orientation to the
  individual.
• -history as the loss of belonging
• -the possible responses to aloneness vary in
  different modern societies
• one side of the growing process of individuation
  is the growth of self-strength. The limits of the
  growth of individuation and the self are set,
  partly by individual conditions, but essentially
  by social conditions. For although the
  differences between individuals in this respect
  appear to be great, every society is
  characterized by a certain level of individuation
  beyond which the normal individual cannot go.
• He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.
  The newly won freedom appears as a curse he is
  free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he
  is not free to govern himself, to realize his
  individuality. The growing individuation means
  growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby
  growing doubt concerning ones own role in the
  universe, the meaning of ones life, and with all
  that a growing feeling of ones own powerlessness
  and insignificance as an individual.

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moral aloneness and capitalism

• moral aloneness is as intolerable as the
  physical aloneness, or rather physical
  aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies
  also moral aloneness.
• When one has become an individual, one stands
  alone and faces the world in all its perilous and
  overpowering aspects.
• if the economic, social, and political
  conditions on which the whole process of human
  individuation depends, do not offer a basis for
  the realization of individuality, while at the
  same time people have lost those ties which gave
  them security, this lag makes freedom an
  unbearable burden.
• -capitalism versus socialism
• Once man was ready to become nothing but the
  means for the glory of a God who represented
  neither justice nor love, he was sufficiently
  prepared to accept the role of a servant to the
  economic machine and eventually a Führer.
• monopolistic capitalism
• the analysis of participation in production and
  consumption
• As a matter of fact, these methods of dulling
  the capacity for critical thinking are more
  dangerous to our democracy than many of the open
  attacks against it

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alternative views of capitalism?

• The Wall Street Journal adventures in
  capitalism
• consumerism as living out the infinite or
  multiple self through serial consumption
• This feeling of individual isolation and
  powerlessness is nothing the average normal
  person is aware of. It is too frightening for
  that. It is covered over by the daily routine of
  his activities, by the assurance and approval he
  finds in his private or social relations, by
  success in business, by any number of
  distractions, by having fun, making contacts,
  going places. But whistling in the dark does
  not bring light. Aloneness, fear and bewilderment
  remain people cannot stand it forever.

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Germany escape mechanisms

• sado-masochism
• masochism the loss of self
• sadism the illusion of mastery
• the solutions fail The masochistic strivings
  are caused by the desire to get rid of the
  individual self with all its shortcomings,
  conflicts, risks, doubts, and unbearable
  aloneness, but they only succeed in removing the
  most noticeable pain or they even lead to greater
  suffering.
• Manns Mario and the Magician
• Destructiveness
• Sadism aims at the incorporation of the object
  destructiveness at its removal.
• Fromm historicizes the death instinct The
  assumption of the death instinct is satisfactory
  inasmuch as it takes into consideration the full
  weight of destructive tendencies, which had been
  neglected in Freuds earlier theories. Bu it is
  not satisfactory inasmuch as it resorts to a
  biological explanation that fails to take account
  sufficiently of the fact that the amount of
  destructiveness varies enormously among
  individuals and groups.

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American escapism

• automaton conformism
• pseudo-individualism
• inner restraints, compulsions, and fears tend
  to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom
  has won against its traditional enemies.
• problem how to tell whether or not any
  particular person is truly an individual
• Although there are true individuals among us,
  this belief is an illusion in most cases and a
  dangerous one for that matter, as it blocks the
  removal of those conditions that are responsible
  for this state of affairs.
• Most people are convinced that as long as they
  are not overtly forced to do something by an
  outside power, their decisions are theirs, and
  that if they want something, it is they who want
  it. But this is one of the great illusions we
  have about ourselves.
• We know of individuals who are or have been
  spontaneous, whose thinking, feeling, and acting
  were the expression of their selves and not an
  automaton. These individuals are most known to us
  as artists. As a matter of fact, the artist can
  be defined as an individual who can express
  himself spontaneously.

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Is Fromm an existentialist?

• one of the most difficult problems any human
  being has to solve, a task we frantically try
  to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though
  they were our own.
• Our own era simply denies death and with it one
  fundamental aspect of life. Instead of allowing
  the awareness of death and suffering to become
  one of the strongest incentives for life, the
  basis of human solidarity, and an experience
  without which joy and enthusiasm lack intensity
  and depth, the individual is forced to repress
  it.

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Is it plausible?

• What to Reject from Fromms View
• -the apparent equation of German Nazism and
  American conformism
• -the reduction of social psychology to solely
  economic factors
• -no institutions after all
• What to Take from This View
• -modernism as wrapped up in a much larger story
  of the history of Western individualism
• -modernism and isolation look for a
  relationship that connects the individual with
  the world without eliminating his individuality.
• -the validity of the criticism of American
  society?
• -critique of Keynes the problems with attempting
  to realize modernism within liberal capitalism

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Adorno administered world and the refuge of art

• Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
  (co-written with Horkheimer)
• Negative Dialectics
• Aesthetic Theory
• the culture industry.
• an administered world
• Musicology late Beethoven, Stravinsky, jazz

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modernism as a message in a bottle

• The uncompromisingly critical thinker, who
  neither subordinates his conscience nor permits
  himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth
  the one who does not give up Open thinking
  points beyond itself. For its part, such thinking
  takes a position as a figuration of praxis which
  is more closely related to a praxis truly
  involved in change than is a position of mere
  obedience for the sake of praxis.
• Jürgen Habermas Adorno as offering a strategy
  of hibernation.
• Adornos interpretation of modernism difficulty
  as the last refuge of utopia
• A splinter in your eye is the best magnifying
  glass.
• a message in a bottle

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Adornos last word

• Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on
  because the moment to realize it was missed.