Adorno Flashcards
Why utopia can be addressed just negatively?
- The social theorist can’t speak from outside society.
- Any blueprint for the good or just society would be an ideological product.
- If our consciousness is the product of historical apriori conditions, then its formulation of utopia would be stuck in its historical conditions & not the new.
When Hitler came to power in Germany?
1933
What is metacritique?
Even the most abstract concepts in philosophical texts necessarily contain sedimented traces of the social experience which had made them possible.
The thesis of metacritique about epistemology
Whereas epistemological critique asks what categories make the experience possible, metacritique asks what experiences make the epistemological categories possible.
(the social-critical content is extrapolated from Husserlian categories in Against Epistemology)
Dialectique of Enlightenment,
Date?
Main argument?
1947 - history of rationality
- Reason has become irrational bs of its attempt to expel every non-rational moment.
So reason cant understand what makes rationality possible (= non-rational element) - Rationality turns into a tool that is blindly applied wo any capacity to reflect on t ends. (instrumental reason)
Negative Dialectic,
Date?
How it differs from Hegel?
1966
Negative dialectic differs from Hegel in this sense that doesn’t claim to have access to absolute truth, But the possibility of such access lies in the possibility of a change in the social order.
ND aims to criticize the conceptual/real obstacles that impede our access to the absolute.
Dialectique of Enlightenment, Method
Not start from a distant hypothetical origin, But starts from where we are, our assumptions about t world, & asks how we got to these assumptions.
What should have happened for our thinking to have become what it is?
Dialectique of Enlightenment, 2 theses?
- Myth is already enlightenment
2. Enlightenment reverts to mythology
“Ancient” & “Modern” r not radically distinct categories but rely on each other.
What does it mean?
Modern society relies on the ancient - long history behind it.
Ancient society is explicated from a modern perspective. (W concepts/categories that belong to t modern society)
Why positivistic/rationalistic conceptions of enlightenment are not enlightened enough?
Because they offer a reason which is actually mythical (rather than fully rational) as it suppresses (rather than reflecting on) its own relation to myth & tradition.
Myth is already enlightenment.
Why?
Myth is a kind of rationality, a way of ordering, classifying & controlling the world.
What is enlightenment, a historical period?
No. A series of intellectual/practical operations that demythologize, secularize, or disenchant the mythical, religious, or magical interpretations of the world.
- protest against t anthropomorphic religions which project human qualities on God.
- modern positivists protest that t notion of essence is mystical, a subjective fiction.
Why this radical rationalization (demythologization) reverts to mythology?
to escape t charge that it is subjective - thought replicates what exists w no hidden extras and expels any non-rational element.
It becomes unable to grasp that it is not self-sufficient.
How Modern rationality has affected language?
Separation bw DISCURSIVE & MIMETIC language
- Science — language as a system of signs must limit itself to calculation in order to know nature & must abstain from claiming to be like nature.
- Art — language as image must limit itself to copy the nature, & must abstain from claiming to know nature.
What is the practical counterpart to the intellectual process of Skeptical Demythologization?
Conversion of nature into manipulable material
Domination of nature
Nothing remains sacred —
everything can be consumed & exchanged. Nothing is to be beyond thought, nothing is beyond price.
How domination of nature is related to other forms of domination?
Domination over nature goes together w self-domination (mastery over human nature, repression of impulse) & social domination (mastery over humans).
“Domination over nature is paid for w t naturalization of social domination.
Power over nature is paid for w impotent subjection to t social divisions & domination which grant that power.”
Why
the history of civilization is the history of the internalization of sacrifice?
Commodity Fetishism, subsumptive thinking, constitution of subject
were anticipated in sacrificial substitution
How the structure of sacrifice resembles commodity exchange, identity thinking & constitution of the subject?
- Commodity exchange — in it one object or creature is substituted for another incommensurable w it.
- Classificatory thinking: thinking which shows X come under what X is representative/example of — & therefore, what it is not itself.
- Constitution of subject: in sacrifice t victim is promised immortality - t ego owes its existence to t sacrifice of t present moment to t future — self-sacrifice
But both sacrifice & self-sacrifice r deceptive - self-sacrifice also promises immortality
What is negative utopianism?
Social theorist cant’ provide an image of what the good life would look like but only can examine what our damaged life is like.
Analyzing this damaged life will allow a glimpse of possible, undamaged life.
Weber vs Durkheim
Their merits & disadvantages for Adorno.
WEBER:
- Social institutions & processes to be understood through the subjective self-understanding of individuals.
- Without individuals social processes would be nothing.Merit (for Adorno)
- Refuses to present social relations (historical & produced) as though they were simply objects given to study in t same way that data r given to natural science.Disadvantage
- Underestimates to what extent social relations take on a life of their own (become autonomous & objective)
- Autonomy of social relations is not a mistake, it is a ‘real illusion’
DURKHEIM:
- Social facts should be treated like things. Society impacts the individuals
Merit
- Testifies to t preponderance of petrified social relations over individuals.
Disadvantage
- pays insufficient attention to t illusory character of t objectivity of social relations.
How to go beyond idealism wo lapsing into dogmatic invocation of an immediate access to transcendence? A fresh start that lays t foundations for a new certainty?
(idealism: thought constitutes, shapes, or is identical w its obj)
Such a new start will still depend on a tradition which comes before it & makes it possible - so will misunderstand itself as new.
A thought that doesn’t understand its relation to its own history repeats a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’
The idea that we can make a fresh start is itself IDEALISTIC — it has t illusion that t autonomous thinking subject produces or founds what it thinks of.
—> Whenever philo simply dismisses idealism by an act of will it is involved in an illusion that t thinking subj is self-sufficient (a kind of idealism)
“The problem of constitutive subjectivity cannot just be set aside” — it must be “broken using the strength of the subject itself.”
