TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY: Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes

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TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Intellectual
Heroes and Key Themes

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LECTURES

1. The pariah as rebel.
2. The hope of the hopeless.
3. Message in a bottle.
4. Absolute free.
5. Genealogy as critique.
6. Human flourishing.

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MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
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• PHILOSOPHY AFTER AUSCHWITZ
• How should philosophy look like after the
  holocaust?
• 2. A PRODUCTIVE ANTITHESIS
• What does freedom mean?
• 3. CULTURE INDUSTRY AND AVANTGARDE
• To what extent is culture the object and
  resource of critique?

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1. PHILOSOPHY AFTER AUSCHWITZ
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THEODOR W. ADORNO

• BIOGRAPHICAL DATA
• 1903 Born September 11, in Frankfurt am Main.
• 1921-1924 Studies philosophy, philosophy and
  musicology in Frankfurt am Main.
• 1924 Phd on Husserl.
• 1925 Studied composition with Alban Berg in
  Vienna.
• 1931 Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard.
• 1931-33 Private lecturer in philosophy and
  cooperation with the Institut für
  Sozialforschung (of the Frankfurt School).
• 1934 Leaves Germany because of the Nazis.
• 1937 Marriage to Margarete Karplus.
• 1949 Returns to Germany.
• 1959 Becomes director of the Institut für
  Sozialforschung.
• 1961 Positivism dispute with Karl Popper.
• 1969 Died August 6, in Visp (Switzerland).

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MAJOR WORKS

• Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische
  Fragmente (with Max Horkheimer) (1947).
• Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949).
• The Authoritarian Personality (with others)
  (1950).
• Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten
  Leben (1951).
• Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (1955).
• Noten zur Literatur (1958, 1961, 1965 and 1974).
• Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1964).
• Negative Dialektik (1966).
• Ästhetische Theorie (1970 published
  posthumously).

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THE PARADOX OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

• Adorno was a member of the so-called Frankfurt
  School.
• The paradox of the critical theory developed by
  the Frankfurt School gt although its members
  adhere to the project of Enlightenment
  (emancipation of the oppressed, exploited and
  marginalized people) they criticize it radically.
• Therefore they are interesting for postmodern
  philosophers (for instance Jean-François Lyotard)
  who want to give up the project of Enlightenment.
• The project of Enlightenment is the promise of
  individual happiness and political freedom.

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CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVES

• Auschwitz is the epicentre of Adornos
  philosophy.
• Because of Auschwitz and inspired by Kant en Marx
  he formulates his own categorical imperative.
• Kant gt Act only according to that maxim whereby
  you can, at the same time, will that it should
  become a universal law.
• Marx gt To overthrow all those conditions in
  which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned,
  contemptible being.
• Adorno gt Hitler imposes a new categorical
  imperative on human beings in their condition of
  unfreedom to arrange their thought and action
  that Auschwitz would not repeat itself, that
  nothing similar would happen.

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RADICAL CRITIQUE

• Adornos categorical imperative implies that
  critique should be radical.
• Critique only serves the truth if it is
  uncompromisingly.
• Those who are in power want to silence critics by
  arguing that they should present an alternative
  if they are so critical, i.e. that their critique
  should be constructive and not destructive.
• Adorno resists the idea that critique should be
  constructive.
• Critique will not lose its legitimacy if one
  doesnt present an alternative.

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IN SEARCH OF A NEW LANGUAGE

• Adorno Writing poems after Auschwitz is
  barbarian.
• This sentence should not be interpreted as a
  prohibition.
• Auschwitz is standing for the attack on human
  dignity and means a rupture in modern culture.
• The aim of Adornos philosophy gt to understand
  what cannot be understood.
• The challenge of poetry and other forms of art is
  trying to express what cannot be expressed.
• Art after Auschwitz gt in search of a new
  language.
• Good examples of such a new language the poems
  of Paul Celan and the plays of Samuel Beckett.

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BEYOND UNITARY THOUGHT

• The motive of Adornos philosophy the undeniable
  human suffering gt The need to let suffering
  speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering
  is objectivity that weights upon the subject
• Adorno criticizes false identifications gt while
  identifying something not doing justice to the
  nonidentical.
• Philosophy should resist unitary thought
  (Einheitsdenken), because it doesnt recognize
  the nonidentical, i.e. all those elements in the
  world that cannot be subsumed under the umbrella
  of certain categories.
• Task of the philosopher gt To use the strength of
  the subject to break through the deception of
  constitutive subjectivity.

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PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE

• The work of Adorno consists of scientific reports
  ( for instance The Authoritarian Personality),
  philosophical reflections (for instance Negative
  Dialektik) and essays (for instance Prismen) .
• Different intellectual activities gt essay,
  television-programmes and radio-programmes.
• Constellations gt specific presentation around a
  subject matter gt logical stringency and
  expressive flexibility should interact, so that
  the truth of the subject matter will manifest
  itself.
• Philosophy can unlock the historical dynamic
  hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the
  classifications imposed upon them.

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HEURISTIC VALUE

• Literature (Thomas Mann amongst others).
• Philosophy (Axel Honneth amongst others).
• Cultural studies (Susan Buck-Morss amongst
  others).
• Musicology (Carl Dahlhaus amongst others).
• Sociology (David Held amongst others).
• Psychology (Lars Rensmann amongst others).
• History (Martin Jay amongst others).

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2. A PRODUCTIVE ANTITHESIS
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TOTALITY

• Adorno argues that any critical theory has to
  construct a totality, i.e. the entire society.
• Hegel gt the individual is subsumed to the
  society, i.e. his construction of the totality gt
  The system as a whole is the truth.
• Adorno The system as a whole is untruthful.
• In order to show that Adorno has to get rid of
  the reification of the subject, the object and
  their relation.
• Negative dialectics gt a critique of all forms of
  thought that hypostasize the world.

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SUBJECT AND OBJECT

• Adorno is inspired by the dialectical thinking of
  Hegel.
• Dialectical thinking is a critique of identarian
  thinking.
• Adorno dialectics seek to say what something
  is, while identarian thinking says what
  something comes under, what it exemplifies or
  represents, and what, accordingly, it is not
  itself.
• Dialectical thing is a way to grasp the
  contradictions that are inherent to historical
  developments, in order to understand how what is
  possible becomes real.
• History is a process characterised by the
  divergence of subject and object, although they
  will always be mediated with each other.

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THE NONIDENTICAL

• Negative dialectics gt the attempt to recognize
  the nonidentity between thought and the object
  while carrying out the project of conceptual
  identification.
• The nonidentical is often subsumed by the use of
  concepts.
• Identification implies the fixation of a certain
  identity of someone or something and suppressing
  or ignoring differences.
• The imposition of a certain identity is driven by
  a society whose exchange principle demands the
  equivalence (exchange value) of what is
  inherently nonequivalent (use value).

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THE PRIORITY OF THE OBJECT

• Adorno wants to create space for the recognition
  of experiences that reveal the nonidentical of
  human and non-human beings.
• How to do that?
• Adornos answer admit at one and the same time
  the priority of the object and a more of the
  subject.
• Priority of the object (Vorrang des Objekts) gt to
  do as far as possible justice to the nonidentity
  of objects, i.e. their differences from the
  standardized identity imposed on them.
• In fact, Adorno criticizes idealism that
  prioritizes the knowing subject and affirms an
  identity between subject and object.

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A MORE OF THE SUBJECT

• Empiricism, in contrast to idealism, presupposes
  that the object is simply given.
• Adorno argues that any object pressuposes a
  subject and that empiricism doesnt take into
  account how the subject and the object change
  over time.
• A more of the subject (ein Mehr an Subjekt) gt to
  do justice to the inner nature of the subject
  (suppressed desires) and recognize that it is an
  agent with megalomaniac fantasies of sovereignty
  that will never come true.

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AUTHORITARIANISM

• The Authoritarian Personality (1950) gt part of a
  larger project entitled Studies in Prejudice.
• How to explain the affirmative character of
  people, i.e. the fact that people support
  authoritarian regimes?
• Ideologies that appeal to the little man who
  seeks to be less lonely, threatened and isolated.
• F-scale gt so-called because it is concerned with
  the measurement of implicit prefascist
  tendencies.
• Authoritarian submission gt submissive, uncritical
  attitude towards idealized moral authorities of
  the in-group.

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CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION

• The avoidance of authoritarianism should be the
  starting point of the education system.
• The education system should be directed to
  autonomy gt Education to maturity (Erziehung zur
  Mündigkeit).
• Education should help to develop a sense of
  freedom
• The dawning sense of freedom feeds upon the
  memory of the archaic impulse not yet steered by
  any solid I. Without an anamnesis of the untamed
  impulse that precedes the ego an impulse later
  banished to the zone of unfree bondage to nature
  it would be impossible to derive the idea of
  freedom, although that idea in turn ends up
  reinforcing the ego.

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3. CULTURE INDUSTRY AND AVANTGARDE
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OBJECT AND RESOURCE

• Adorno argues that culture can be
• 1. The object of critique gt culture industry.
• 2. A source of critique gt modern art.
• Main work concerning the culture industry gt
  Dialektik der Aufklärung.
• Main work concerning modern art gt Ästhetische
  Theorie.

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THE OBJECT OF CRITIQUE

• Adorns argues that culture can be affirmative or
  critical.
• Affirmative culture gt reproduces the status quo.
• Three aspects of culture as an object of
  critique
• 1. The production of a cultural products gt only
  for profit?
• 2. The cultural products itself gt only
  mainstream?
• 3. The reception of a cultural product gt only
  for fun?

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ENLIGHTENMENT

• Immanuel Kant gt What is enlightenment? (1784).
• Enlightenment is man's emergence from his
  self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the
  inability to use one's own understanding without
  the guidance of another. This immaturity is
  self-incurred if its cause is not lack of
  understanding, but lack of resolution and courage
  to use it without the guidance of another. The
  motto of enlightenment is therefore Sapere aude!
  Have courage to use your own understanding!
• Is is mainly associated with the emergence of the
  sciences.

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INSTRUMENTAL REASON

• Central question why mankind, instead of
  entering into a truly human condition, is sinking
  into a new kind of barbarism.
• Main object of criticism instrumental reason.
• Three forms of domination
• 1. The domination of ones self.
• 2. The domination of other individuals.
• 3. The domination of outward nature.
• Central thesis enlightenment turns against
  itself.
• Mythology and enlightenment have the same roots
  survival, self-preservation and fear.

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CULTURE AS MASS DECEPTION

• Culture industry
• Standardization.
• Pseudo-individualization.
• The production of goods that are profitable and
  consumable.
• Culture as means to defend the status quo.

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HIGH VERSUS LOW

• Literature
• James Joyce lt gt Heinz Konsalik
• Painting
• Pablo Picasso lt gt poster of gypsy.
• Cinema
• Federico Fellini lt gt Walt Disney
• Music
• Igor Stravinsky lt gt Jimi Hendrix

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ART AS SOURCE OF CRITIQUE

• Art that is not mainstream can evoke a critical
  perspective on several aspects of life.
• Good art changes the horizons of people.
• Music gt to make you hear what is unheard.
• Fine arts gt to make you sea what is unseen.
• Literature gt to present you a language you didnt
  know.

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AN ANTITHESIS

• Adorno gt good art is the best antithesis towards
  the status quo of society!
• The reason for this good art has a
  truth-function.
• Art can only fulfil this truth-function if it is
  relatively autonomous.
• Good art embodies the promise of happiness and
  freedom.

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THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS

• Adorno and Horkheimer suggest in Dialektik der
  Aufklärung that their philosophy is a message in
  a bottle.
• Leo Löwenthal (1900-1993) once said that this
  bottle became uncorked with a boom during the
  sixties.
• What is the message?
• The almost irresolvable task is not becoming
  dumb because of the power of others and not
  becoming dumb because of ones own powerlessness.
  There is no true life amid the untrue.

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RECOMMENDED

1. Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten
   Leben translations in several languages.
2. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische
   Fragmente translations in several languages.
3. Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie
   (2003).