Critique 7/13: Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno
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- Опубліковано 17 гру 2019
- Martin Saar and Bernard E. Harcourt at The Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS) at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main.
December 18, 2019
Well that was... productive
Is this sarcasm? Wondering because I'm trying to decide whether to invest the time here or not. Seems boring so far.
Did my PhD on Adorno in 1981 . Effected heavily by Horkheimer and Adorno I was enamored by The negative dialectic . My title. “ The Role of the critic and the logic of criticism in Hegel, Bruno Baruta and The Frankfurt School “ that was my dissertation from The American University .
I gave up philosophy to pursue a successful career as a tennis teacher , keeping critical thinking as the lode star . In this pursuit I became very successful as a tennis teacher , but I ruined my ability to have. Areal understanding of philosophy as an ontological reduction . In my life I did not understand the negativity in the dialectic as always a positive . I rejected the import of practical due diligence in favor of theory as alienated , and stressed that my children stay away from instrumental mistake , not realizing that the entire schemata of negative dialects is a misappropriation of the dialectic imported from The Indic civilization without without understanding that the unity of theory and practice are already coexisting. The miseffects of The Frankfurt school and its charm has permeated into the likes of. Derrida and Foucault . Now it has turned into woke philosophy.
Reduction of philosophy to pure critical criticism ala Bruno Bauer is too much a part of Adorno.
I supported Adorno over Heidegger but now I believe I was in my youthful error , where Heidegger and Adorno needed to be understood as two poles of the dialectic.
Adorno is quite narcissistic in isolating the German fascism as a unique event in history .
My life was very effected with my non critical approach to the very presupposing the veridicality of “ critical thinking”.
This flaw comes from Hegel’ s misunderstanding of the dialectic as a pure negativity or struggle. I now understand that the very designation of the dialectic as always as a struggle is the atavistic urge to be theological , in a world of evil . The Frankfurt school Ned’s a reevaluation where negativity is to be understood as a positive. Science is not different from art in two aspects, one that due diligence is essential to both,secondly a pleasure one gets from a passion to to be dispassionate . I am reworking the uncritically established premises of critical theory , in my real life. Yielding to Heidegger in infringing the first person I think it is necessary to see the human being as an ontological reality confronting the world as a possibility.In other words back to Parmenides , and bypassing Aristotle , something that the phenomenologists are not able to do.
They too have a theological respect for Aristotle who ruined philosophy forever , never giving relevance to mind experiments , that are essential to philosophy.
Adorno and Athens Frankfurt school need to be sublated .
Any suggestions?
You know 100x more than me about this, so perhaps I have nothing to bring here, but here's an idea.
One of the key ideas of the Frankfurt School is that we should abandon ideas which, when applied, result in a worse outcome on what they're trying to achieve in the first place, which they called "Immanent Critique" I think? And one of the major goal of the Frankfurt School was to move politics towards progressivism.
And now, some of the highly critical ideas from the Frankfurt School - especially the ones that consider mainstream discourse as irremediably coopted by money and power and deeply tainted - are making it into the broad zeitgeist, and it's a disaster. It comes out as a kind of shrill moralism that denounces all and everything as patriarchal, colonialist and homophobic, to the point that it's putting off a lot of people from the very progressivism it's trying to promote, and there's no shortage of people who loathe billionaire rule but join pro-corporate conservative movements because they hate self-flagellation and permanent self-guilt-tripping.
It's also totally failing at its goal of reducing the level of cooption of progressive movements by money and power, and there's no shortage of totally cynical corporate diversity and inclusion drives that use the ideas of the Frankfurt School but do nothing to reduce the rapaciousness of the overall system. If anything, self-criticality in the world of ideas seem to just result in an disoriented ideological mash that leaves the rich even more powerful. It's almost as if we were doing Vladimir Putin-style "White Noise Propaganda" on ourselves. Adorno would be horrified at seeing his ideas used to prop up the very system of corporate domination he spent his whole life trying to fight.
In short, we need to go back to the culture of Enlightenment and Modernity and strict logic and truth, not because it was perfect or impervious to slides towards Fascism, but because we tried alternatives with less defined truth and high cognizance of the sources of bias due to power, and they just don't work in practice.
How does Adorno isolate German Fascism as a unique event in history? If anything, in Minima Moralia, one of his main goals is warning against the increase of man-made horrors. "Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind." pg.249. The advice falls on deaf ears but this is not his doing.
i would love it if you uploaded a video expanding on this
@@williamwells5263If I ended up doing a video on this it would come out as a hit job. ^^;
@@williamwells5263 great debate here.the error is inherent in western philosophy that describes veridicality as entirely objective.This was the error the phenomenologists wanted to eliminate, but failed because by reintroducing relativism they forgot that any truth derived at is relatively true from the objective standard , but quasi absolutely true from the perspective of the subject. Frankfurt as cool is too reductive on objective categories to understand the subject Here is an example .Al Ghazzali and Kierkegaard both understood the importance of the living of the believing subject , thus Christ or Mohammad as real historical figures are not important but Christianity and Islam are . What they do not realize is that they support an immanent God , but erroneously believe in the sanctity of the Koran or the Bible , and that is why they become dangerous philosophers . Jordan Oetrson is such a dangerous philodpher effecting us
i wish we got to see the adorno pics at the end
Exhilaratingly depressing.
I am with Michael Heinrich in his assesment of Adorno's negativity, the alternative to capitalism needs a vision, it needs an articulation, it needs to be discussed openly and not in a coy 'maybe someday' kind of way. It is extremely dangerous to make precise discussion about the future society a taboo. A project the right and the critical theory tradition seem to share with one another. I like the poetic pure negation of revolt without hope as much as the next man but when the very next day all we have to look forward to is our practical return to cold capitalist social life, the need for a totalized POSITIVE alternative becomes very apparent. I wish what was taken serious as worthy of intellectual public consideration was the rich history of libertarian communism Pannekoek, Mattick etc. That being said super interesting talk!
I think what is at stake is exactly what is happening between "talking about the future" and "talking about a future society". The first is compatible with materialist thinking. The second one isn't. We can think about what the notion of freedom might gain if things were different, but talking about a whole different society implies gnosticism. It has to be.
Very insightful
Das Unbehagen in der Kritik.
I don't think they know.....it seems..
lol is that a decorative pomegranate sitting there?
"Critical theory,
Horkheimer and Adorno would later emphasize in their new preface in April 1969,
“holds that the core of truth is historical, rather than an unchanging constant to be
set against the movement of history.” There are no universals, but now there are
no teleologies either. In fact, two decades after they wrote the book, they already
had different views of the correct interpretation of their historical circumstances.
“In not a few places,” they write in 1969, “the reality of our times is formulated in
a way no longer appropriate to contemporary experience.”38 Critical analysis, in
this sense, has to be punctual and historical and can be valid only in its immediate,
concrete historical context." Harcourt, BE 2020 "Critique and Praxis" p67
In Harcourt's discussion of Jaeggi, he says, "The thrust of her project, instead, is negative critique: not so much to
identify good forms of life, but rather to judge the weaknesses and irrationalities of
particular forms of life. Jaeggi’s project is not intended to dictate one good way of
living, or even to narrow it down to a handful of ways, but rather to identify a mode
of critique that can show when modes of life are not living up to the problems that
they are intended to address." p150. Is this mode not deconstruction?
Harcourt quotes Jaeggi, “If we follow my investigation, there is no positive
answer to the question of what makes a form of life a good or adequate form of
life. However, there is a negative, indirect answer: failing forms of life suffer from
a collective practical reflexive deficit, from a blockage to learning. In other words,
they are not able to solve the problems they face or to perceive the crisis experiences
to which they are exposed in appropriate ways as experiences and to
transform themselves accordingly.”85
nice ästhetics!
Terrible lecture.
Lol
Hahahahahahaha
Kind of convenient this whole Adorno line, since philosophy cannot attempt or has to renounce the quest for totality, it's useless to posit anything, so the negative will suffice, and the line between praxis and theory is false, so what I Adorno or any other fat-bottomed mandarin does in form of criticism of what exists and is thought is bliss and best. If ever a Brahmin came up with a better shastra