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Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in 1947 - when Nazism, Stalinism, Fat Boy & Little Man, and the advent of popular cu

by pizza 9y ago

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in 1947 - when Nazism, Stalinism, Fat Boy & Little Man, and the advent of popular culture were still in short-term memory) devotes a good amount of analysis to how - in spite of society's tendency to espouse 'progress eliminates regression' - society is not monotonically increasing. > "The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape.”

asveikau 9y ago
As I re-read the article and comments, I have an overwhelming feeling of "so what? what's the alternative?" People and societies are imperfect, film at 11, no sense isolating yourself or mailing bombs about it. In other news we try our best.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
I think it would be hard to find an argument anywhere that social or cultural progress was monotonic. It almost feels like sawtooth progression is a natural law of some kind…
dgut 9y ago
I've read some Adorno and his work appears to me as meaningless chewing around. After all, he was inspired by Marx and Hegel. E.g: > What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. To quote Hume: > If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
- etplayer 9y ago
  I would have expected something less dogmatic from Hume, himself a philosopher. The irony is that the Dialectic of Enlightenment is exactly about this kind of attitude spawned with the enlightenment and its relation to the old Greek mythos. Sometimes I think that empiricism fell out of favour for a reason; the wide dismissal of the Continental branch is astonishing and rather ignorant - but who could blame Hume, for German idealism came about after him.
- bjl 9y ago
  It takes a lot of hubris (all too common in the software engineering community) to suggest that Marx and Hegel, two of the most influential philosophers of all time, produced nothing of meaning.
  - etplayer 9y ago
    I wouldn't say it's hubris as much as it's ignorance, dogmatic positivism, and scientism that tends to show itself here and there; I'd say it's more common among those who have made it their life course to be in science or engineering - and I don't mean this disparagingly, as I study EE myself. It's not only ignorance of Marx and Hegel either, Slavoj Zizek regards Marx not as a philosopher but as a sociologist and economist, however GP's words stretch further than Hegel but into Schelling, Kant and all the way back to Aristotle - to say nothing of the "metaphysical" Indian philosophy too. The idea that only Marx and Hegel are guilty of the resistance against dogmatic empiricism in the light of considering being, time, morality and epistemology is a mistake they have made themselves.
    - voidhorse 9y ago
      Couldn't agree more. One only needs to poll some of the opinions of vehement analytics to discover that very intelligent people too, are victims of dogmatism. I think most progress past this once they study a bit deeper, age, and generally engage with disparate perspectives--Rorty's willingness to engage with multiple discourses of philosophical tradition is something I think we all ought to try and emulate. There is a bit of an incommensurability problem too. I find that most resistance to understanding thinkers/alternative discourses stems from a lack of foundational vocabulary/knowledge of the tradition they work within, and, seeing as it takes a good deal of work to acquire this knowledge, most instead default to interpreting the work under the terms and limitations of an interpretive framework (e.g. positivism, structuralism, etc.) they already understand rather than approach the new one. There's a certain degree of bracketing--almost in the phenomenological sense--that must occur if we really want to give a text an honest chance to affect us--Nietzsche had a few illuminating aphorisms on this point, I think most of them appear in The Gay Science and Human, All Too Human for those interested. It's a lack of a sort of meta-theoretical awareness required for resolving incommensurate theories and gauging and weighing them against each other. It's easy enough to select a theory, join in covenant with it, and retain your stance. It's much harder to bring said theory into critical questioning and reevaluation on encountering other approaches (after all the opportunities are boundless--one could levy this very critique against this post).
- pizza 9y ago
  Pertaining Adorno, Marx, etc...: does it not contain abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? The worker chooses argmax_[specialization]: E[Utility(Life | specialization, society)] The executive decides argmax_[production decision]: E[Utility(Enterprise | production decision, society)] The "sphere's turn" means that capital's arms race creates precise solutions that don't necessarily remain backwards compatibility with the previously-solved problems humans would still have to face. If in an idealized model the capitalist bias is towards a hierarchical graph/network of production (the rich don't work for the poor at a loss), then the expendability of the constantly-repopulating labor pool increases, due to technological updates in productivity but also mainly disparate rates of growth of wealth between the worker and the owner. Even if one laborer family has a bigger nest-egg for their child than their neighbor. The expendability of the labor pool drives the fortune of private enterprise's owners and the ordinary person's decreasing autonomy reflects the inflation of the cost of social autonomy itself. What is consumed is then the responsibility of the people who own the deed to the organizations where the development of the consumable occurs. All the decisions that end up in a bias towards increased consumption are decisions that weighed by numbers, dollars, item counts and quantitative optimization. (Though I suppose, quite tongue-in-cheek, it could be argued that it is not axiomatically sound to assume a person need to participate in capitalist society, given that there is a long history of our species before the past 300 , or, (gratuitously,) 10000, years.)

by pizza 9y ago

asveikau 9y ago

As I re-read the article and comments, I have an overwhelming feeling of "so what? what's the alternative?" People and societies are imperfect, film at 11, no sense isolating yourself or mailing bombs about it. In other news we try our best.

matthewmacleod 9y ago

I think it would be hard to find an argument anywhere that social or cultural progress was monotonic. It almost feels like sawtooth progression is a natural law of some kind…

dgut 9y ago

I've read some Adorno and his work appears to me as meaningless chewing around. After all, he was inspired by Marx and Hegel. E.g: > What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. To quote Hume: > If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

etplayer 9y ago
I would have expected something less dogmatic from Hume, himself a philosopher. The irony is that the Dialectic of Enlightenment is exactly about this kind of attitude spawned with the enlightenment and its relation to the old Greek mythos. Sometimes I think that empiricism fell out of favour for a reason; the wide dismissal of the Continental branch is astonishing and rather ignorant - but who could blame Hume, for German idealism came about after him.
bjl 9y ago
It takes a lot of hubris (all too common in the software engineering community) to suggest that Marx and Hegel, two of the most influential philosophers of all time, produced nothing of meaning.
- etplayer 9y ago
  I wouldn't say it's hubris as much as it's ignorance, dogmatic positivism, and scientism that tends to show itself here and there; I'd say it's more common among those who have made it their life course to be in science or engineering - and I don't mean this disparagingly, as I study EE myself. It's not only ignorance of Marx and Hegel either, Slavoj Zizek regards Marx not as a philosopher but as a sociologist and economist, however GP's words stretch further than Hegel but into Schelling, Kant and all the way back to Aristotle - to say nothing of the "metaphysical" Indian philosophy too. The idea that only Marx and Hegel are guilty of the resistance against dogmatic empiricism in the light of considering being, time, morality and epistemology is a mistake they have made themselves.
  - voidhorse 9y ago
    Couldn't agree more. One only needs to poll some of the opinions of vehement analytics to discover that very intelligent people too, are victims of dogmatism. I think most progress past this once they study a bit deeper, age, and generally engage with disparate perspectives--Rorty's willingness to engage with multiple discourses of philosophical tradition is something I think we all ought to try and emulate. There is a bit of an incommensurability problem too. I find that most resistance to understanding thinkers/alternative discourses stems from a lack of foundational vocabulary/knowledge of the tradition they work within, and, seeing as it takes a good deal of work to acquire this knowledge, most instead default to interpreting the work under the terms and limitations of an interpretive framework (e.g. positivism, structuralism, etc.) they already understand rather than approach the new one. There's a certain degree of bracketing--almost in the phenomenological sense--that must occur if we really want to give a text an honest chance to affect us--Nietzsche had a few illuminating aphorisms on this point, I think most of them appear in The Gay Science and Human, All Too Human for those interested. It's a lack of a sort of meta-theoretical awareness required for resolving incommensurate theories and gauging and weighing them against each other. It's easy enough to select a theory, join in covenant with it, and retain your stance. It's much harder to bring said theory into critical questioning and reevaluation on encountering other approaches (after all the opportunities are boundless--one could levy this very critique against this post).
pizza 9y ago
Pertaining Adorno, Marx, etc...: does it not contain abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? The worker chooses argmax_[specialization]: E[Utility(Life | specialization, society)] The executive decides argmax_[production decision]: E[Utility(Enterprise | production decision, society)] The "sphere's turn" means that capital's arms race creates precise solutions that don't necessarily remain backwards compatibility with the previously-solved problems humans would still have to face. If in an idealized model the capitalist bias is towards a hierarchical graph/network of production (the rich don't work for the poor at a loss), then the expendability of the constantly-repopulating labor pool increases, due to technological updates in productivity but also mainly disparate rates of growth of wealth between the worker and the owner. Even if one laborer family has a bigger nest-egg for their child than their neighbor. The expendability of the labor pool drives the fortune of private enterprise's owners and the ordinary person's decreasing autonomy reflects the inflation of the cost of social autonomy itself. What is consumed is then the responsibility of the people who own the deed to the organizations where the development of the consumable occurs. All the decisions that end up in a bias towards increased consumption are decisions that weighed by numbers, dollars, item counts and quantitative optimization. (Though I suppose, quite tongue-in-cheek, it could be argued that it is not axiomatically sound to assume a person need to participate in capitalist society, given that there is a long history of our species before the past 300 , or, (gratuitously,) 10000, years.)