Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno

You will also recall that, although Adorno urged philosophers to eschew totalities and focus on middle-level concepts (such as the commodity form or class), Adorno nevertheless retained confidence in dialectical reason. “Philosophy,” Adorno suggested, “must learn to renounce the question of totality.” The systematic and total theories of earlier German Idealism were things of the past. The actual could not be rendered fully rational. In that essay, Adorno took as his point of departure a radical break in philosophy: contemporary philosophy, Adorno argued, could no longer aspire to understand the world in its totality. You will recall that we began Critique 13/13 with the early Adorno of “The Actuality of Philosophy” from 1931. In Critique 7/13, we return to Adorno, but this time to the late Adorno of the Negative Dialectics (1966), in conversation with Martin Saar, Professor of Social Philosophy at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. Adorno at the Institute for Social Research ( Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS) Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main December 18, 2019 Harcourt read and discuss Negative Dialecticsby Theodor W. We seem to have reached the era of mathematics and exact calculation, but this leaves us with no sense of control or meaningfulness, and in the face of crisis and systemic contradictions in the now global society we tend to regress and rely on older, more primitive forms of sense-making and coping: magic, mythology and metaphysics - even ritual behaviour.Professors Martin Saar and Bernard E. What Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to capture and reflect is the very process of rationality backlashing into irrationality. It is a critical view of the process of civilization, economy and enlightenment as such, a critical view of the seemingly self-evident notion of pure reason, science and technology. I find that the central philosophical critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment runs deeper than just a critique of contemporary (and perhaps now out-dated) media technique and cultural habits. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1944) and bringing it to bear on the digital era in general and in particular on the phenomenon of modern social media. My reflections in this paper concern revitalizing the critical potential of certain core concepts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.

Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor W. Adorno