Dialectic of Enlightenment
Metadata
- Author: Max Horkheimer, Theodor W Adorno, Gunzelin Schmid Noeri, and Edmund Jephcott
- ASIN: B011U1P03Y
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B011U1P03Y
- Kindle link
Highlights
knowledge, in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization — location: 83
thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the service of an existing order, it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has espoused into something negative and destructive. — location: 91
Such metamorphoses of critique into affirmation do not leave theoretical content untouched; its truth evaporates. — location: 95
The process to which a literary text is subjected, if not in the automatic foresight of its producer then through the battery of readers, publishers, adapters, and ghost writers inside and outside the editorial office, outdoes any censor in its thoroughness. — location: 101
one use of the obscene - to be a canary for this sort of tampering
To render their function entirely superfluous appears, despite all the benevolent reforms, to be the ambition of the educational system. — location: 103
that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy acceptance — location: 105
does he mean fertile ground or unreceptive ground? context suggests former.
petitio principii—that — location: 110
— location: 114
so forfeiting the dialectic? how do you avoid progressivism here?
In the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia, in all this uncomprehended senselessness the weakness of contemporary theoretical understanding is evident. — location: 114
— location: 117
that’s a v specifically nazi german defining characteristic.
The loyal son of modern civilization’s fear of departing from the facts, which even in their perception are turned into clichés by the prevailing usages in — location: 121
science, business, and politics, is exactly the same as the fear of social deviation. — location: 122
False clarity is only another name for myth. — location: 127
The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate — location: 129
advantage over the rest of the population. — location: 130
The flood of precise information — location: 136
What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes. — location: 138
That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen* and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain,* within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, — location: 145
does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments. — location: 147
Bacon, “the father of experimental philosophy,”1 brought these motifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers. — location: 181
the beginning of the statistical turn
The “happy match” between human understanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature. — location: 191
Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others,* capital. — location: 195
tech as the method by which science is turned into capital
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. — location: 198
The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism. — location: 207
and the latest logic denounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, as counterfeit coin that would be better replaced by neutral counters. — location: 208
bizlang
idola theatri — location: 214
The moist, the undivided, the air and fire which they take to be the primal stuff of nature are early rationalizations precipitated from the mythical vision. — location: 217
In the authority of universal concepts the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals. — location: 222
From now on matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties. — location: 224
Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external oppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights then fare no better than the older universals. — location: 225
Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth. — location: 229
tho seee wittgenstein’s criticisms of frazer.
Despite the pluralism of the different fields of research, Bacon’s postulate of una scientia universalis7 is as hostile to anything which cannot be connected as Leibniz’s mathesis universalis is to discontinuity. — location: 237
those things that ‘cannot be connected’ simply either do not exist or are wrong.
The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter. — location: 239
see jared diamond + also see wb on histkoricism
Formal logic was the high school of unification. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable. — location: 242
number became enlightenment’s canon. — location: 243
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. — location: 247
All gods and qualities must be destroyed. — location: 249
Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins—but therefore — location: 251
also to narrate, record, explain. — location: 251
data or numbers or information are not in themselves explanatory
Each ritual contains a representation of how things happen and of the specific process which is to be influenced by magic. — location: 252
contracts to a monad, a mere reference point—and — location: 258
Only those who subject themselves utterly pass muster with the gods. The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power — location: 266
as the principle of all relationships. In face of the unity of such reason the distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance, as reason has steadfastly indicated since the earliest critique of Homer. In their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command. — location: 267
Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. — location: 270
this is presumably the dialectic and relates to his point about enlightenment producing myth
I mean he did also say that enlightenment destroyed myth
also this is romanticism
Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. — location: 271
This identity constitutes the unity of nature. — location: 273
interesting from a romance pov. monism and immanence are substrates of dominance? nature is fragmented in the Novalis sense.
mask. It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities. — location: 280
Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility. — location: 287
the thing is the thing
every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief, — location: 304
it is “only a belief” in relation to “the facts of the matter”. this is definitely a problem.
In myths, everything that happens must atone for the fact of having happened. It is no different in enlightenment: no sooner has a fact been established than it is rendered insignificant. — location: 311
what the fuck you niggaz mean.
Enlightenment dissolves away the injustice of the old inequality of unmediated mastery, — location: 322
yes!
The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same. — location: 325
enlightenment throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion. — location: 328
i mean, commmidification of culture maybe. coercion as putting place frameworks of medicine and social frameworks less?
The horde, a term which doubtless* is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive égalité, — location: 330
The fake myth of fascism reveals itself as the genuine myth of prehistory, in that the genuine myth beheld retribution while the false one wreaks it blindly on its victims. — location: 331
Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd” (Trupp), which Hegel16 identified as the outcome of enlightenment. — location: 335
The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. — location: 367
Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. — location: 373
come on srsly
than a form of universal taboo. — location: 374
presumably by denying the thing in itself and defining that thing in terms of its fungibility, as constitution as a resource or capability of belonging to a category.
The step from chaos to civilization, in which natural conditions exert their power no longer directly but through the consciousness of human beings, — location: 387
The very renunciation of external effects by which art is distinguished from magical sympathy binds art only more deeply to the heritage of magic. — location: 421
The work of art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura. — location: 424
art. Where it restricted knowledge, it generally did so to make room for faith, not art. — location: 429
The attempt made by faith under Protestantism to locate the principle of truth, which transcends faith and without which faith cannot exist, directly in the word itself, as in primeval times, and to restore the symbolic power of the word, was paid for by obedience to the word, but not in its sacred form. — location: 432
yes! something i agree with here. see stevenson’ shepherd. the birth of the literate mobilised working class was protestantism?
Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or its foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. — location: 434
The paradox of faith degenerates finally into fraud, the myth of the twentieth century* and faith’s irrationality into rational organization in the hands of the utterly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism. — location: 442
Even the deductive form of science mirrors hierarchy and compulsion. Just as the first categories represented the organized tribe and its power over the individual, the entire logical order, with its chains of inference and dependence, the superordination and coordination of concepts, is founded on the corresponding conditions in social reality, that is, on the division of labor. — location: 460
the entire logical order based on these principles - the principles of hierarchy and power, and ordering and obedience.
The power of all the members of society, to whom as individuals no other way is open, is constantly summated, through the division of labor imposed on them, — location: 467
fair
Concepts in face of enlightenment are like those living on unearned income in face of industrial trusts:* — location: 484
is tbis like saying its ok to have buklshit like this
already equates probability with essence. — location: 485
sgats!