Script & sources at: www.thenandnow.co/2023/06/24/adorno-and-horkheimer-dialectic-of-enlightenment-part-i/ ► Sign up for the newsletter to get concise digestible summaries: www.thenandnow.co/the-newsletter/ ► Why Support Then & Now? www.patreon.com/user/about?u=3517018

You do a great job of saving me from the hassle of reading dense theoretical books without the undesired side-effect of not having a clue what's in them or knowing why they are actually worth reading.

2:50 - Domination 4:05 - Englightement 10:10- Mythology 16:20 - Marquis de Sade 18:20 - Totalitarianism

Got the "1st" on a "Then&Now" video, that's true dedication from a fan!

Nothing to say, just engaging for the algorithm. You really deserve a boost in viewership.

As an African student at a European graduate school, here is where I come for balanced and critical perspectives. Thanks.

blown away by this. amazing, how you manage to translate complex content like this into understandable language, without simplifying it too much and at the same time turning it into something thrilling, with great artistic choices of subtle visualisation and instrumentalisation. keep it up.

I wanted to just say again how inspiring I find this video now on a second viewing. I like many others am frustrated and occasionally, I'll admit, disgusted by Adorno's abstruseness, although I understand it's part of the project (well I hope to heaven it is anyway). But the ideas as you've articulated them are so important for us right now today, that to deliver a gentle escort into them is really a public service, and we thank you.

This channel deserves more viewers. I love the way your visual works with narration. 😘✌💜

Yeaaaah mate, gimme some of that spicy enlightenment dialectic, love your work!

You're getting really, really good at making these. Technically, this one is spot on; the music is great, your VO is excellent, and the visuals are quite compelling. I'm learning a lot here, thank you!

You are so so so good and under appreciated. Thank you for your insightful, well-produced and videos / perspectives.

The tragic of this dialectic of the enlightenment (as depicted) is that it through confining critical thought to instrumental reason it condems it to dissolve itself.

This is legit one of the best videos on KZfaq. I keep coming back to it constantly.

Thank you for making elusive concepts and theories accessible and compelling.

Excellent content as always, I liked how the track had a crescendo when you introduced totalitarianism

Well done on setting up the atmosphere for this one.

I want to comment on the commenters. Thank you all for existing. I don't feel alone.

This video was awesome. The timing , the clips, music, the whole content, everything was just perfect.

How are you still having so little views and so little subs??!! This channel is gold for philosophy learning and should be more publicised! You are a great teacher

What an incredible video. Thank you, thank you very much. Your channel is a gift to the internet!

Always excited for your new videos, this one is excellent as always. Thank you for the hard work you put into these!

Beautiful visuals. I felt transported while learning engaging ideas that will continue to sit with me. Thank you for making this!

This was an experience. Loved everything about it. This is how it should be done!

Excellent video and thank you for making this! Currently reading this book in my Continental Epistemology class and it is by far the most difficult book I have ever read (for those interested I think this is mainly due to the fragmented nature of the book). This video really helped solidify some of the ideas presented by H and A.

Thanks so much for this one, perfect timing!

Enjoying the background videos and music on this one. Good stuff

This is perfect, came at just the right time for me too. Great work.

Just here for the engagement. Another banger vid carefully structured and edited

This is still one of my Favourite videos from your channel. I think there are a few channels that try to entirely copy your aesthetic and the type of topics you discuss. But they don't even come close to your level of quality content wise.

This is an amazing introduction to the dialectics of enlightenment. Thank you :)

We all can be very thankful for the cultural industry that gives us the opportunity to watch a couple of minutes and having the feeling of already grasping the whole sense of a book. You did really a hell good of a job in giving a unbelievably dense yet enjoyable summary. On this basis we could ask ourself whether it's a sign of failure when these thoughts become just the same kind of cultural product and KZfaq entertainment as everything else. Or is this its own confirmation. ... And what else should we do trying to engage in this "critical thinking" if not producing right this kind of videos.

Loved this! The effort you put in your video's man!

Truely amazing as alway. I can't wait for your next video.

An image request! : which is the oil painting study you use immediately before the Rembrandt? It sort of looks like an oil study of Michelangelo’s last judgement, but it seems different. The title of this beautiful work would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for this stunning video.

Can't wait for the next parts!

Incredible video. Wonderfully dense, yet approachable. Subbing for sure!

Btw, I still love your videos! Keep up the good work! Looking forward to part 2

Since we're here, shall we get one about the Theory of Communicative Action perhaps? Big fan btw, love your work! XD

I LOVE THIS CHANNEL

Thank you for this informative video - I thoroughly enjoy all of the videos you put out. Thank you for your passion and hard work.

Such beautiful narration. Beautiful voice! 😍

Bro that theory of enlightenment by kant is fuking all encompassing no wonder he is the father of philosophy he controls everyone’s thoughts today

Kept listening for three to four times Great as always Looking forward for more videos

Magnificent, as usual.

the music, you are giving me goosebumps

This is honestly amazing. Thank you so much.

This is amazing work. Thanks.

I like how Then and Now have continued on with the work left wanting by the school of life, which went downhill after the philosophy series ended and they started making subjective videos about emotions.

this helped me so much in understanding - thanks!

So we’ll-edited! Looking forward for more

HI guys, what is the video clip used at 8:44? looks familiar but cannot remember for the life of me.

I think it's important to refer to Wittgenstein's critique of Frazer's Golden Bough. Frazer (just like Adorno and Horkheimer here) reads myth and magic as flawed use of reason to form an utilitarian understanding of the world, and Wittgenstein completely rejects this reading. Instead he views humans as an inescapably "ritualizing species", whereby they engage in rituals in response to emotional demands. For example, take the ritual act of piercing an image of your enemy with your spear before war -- a practice we can imagine to be prevalent among some primitive men. Also consider the act of kissing an image of your lover, which we still do. Is there any significant difference between these two? Why assume that the primitive men were doing that because they expected that to bring good luck in war? He also writes: "Simple though it may sound: The difference between magic and science can be expressed in the way that there is progress in science, but not in magic. Magic possesses no direction of development internal to itself."

Homer quote at 10:55: can you provide the attribution? Iliad or Odyssey? and who is speaking?

Hope this doesn't get demonitized. Btw I need to rewatch your deleuze video for the third time, because I don't think I get it.

Very helpful, thanks so much for making this.

Great work! 6:43 compromises or comprises?

A masterpiece of a video

thanks for the help. I read this book completely, and have to read it again...but then I would prefer to find some helps in that re-reading/Studying, then thanks a lot

Great content as always!

Random question but what is the font used at 2:10 for the title card? Thanks.

Excellent vids as always

Amazing work !

This is incredible. Wow.

Outstanding. Thank you.

An ad every 4 minutes doesn't make this a particularly enlightening video... I get one or two at the beginning, but with ads constantly interrupting my experience... yeah.

I dont like how reasoning and observation seem to be like two interlocked things in the theory of Adorno and horkheimer. I think that its this knitting together of observation and reason what makes modernity ( enlightment ). While observation ( science ) in its purest form has no meaning. And reasoning is just an other mode of being just like breathing, feeling, remembering, sleeping. Observing, cause it can shift focus and therefor our sense of time, together that it can be inwardly, outwardly and even interpersonal, it must be more than just a tool of instrumental reason. It is what socrates and kierkengaard refer to as the sacred of the individual.

Currently reading this book, this is an excellent primer to go back to! It’s full of some awesome quotes, my favourite so far has to be these two: “Human beings purchase power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted.” “The distance of subject from object, the presupposition of abstraction, is founded on the distance from things which the ruler attains by means of the ruled.” Contradictory, yet complementary. Love those crazy frankfurters.

I never hear Adorno and Horkheimer mentioned separately, I hope they were best friends

I wonder if the 'input' from others, lost in self preservation as we are, can be anything other than an attack.

Great video!

In Quetzal we (must) trust.

Great work...

Brilliant. I should also try to make videos in this style.

Where is the second part of this video? Can anyone please share?

I wonder what they would've made of Michael Jackson's 'Moonwalk'? The illusion is apparently all created in how you kick your foot back (onto your toes) to give the appareance of pushing off that foot, when in fact all the push is coming from the other foot - I guess because we rationalise this is how people walk, we can't help but think that the ground must be moving relative to the moonwalker to send them backwards? Three main concepts have helped me understand the general criticism they have; 'backwards bullsh*t', 'Matrix organisations' and 'qualities vs functions': - - 'Backswards Bullsh*t'; A design tool called 'reverse engineering' is used to evaluate products - the idea is that by analysising the product, it is then possible to uncover the reasons for it's creation. It is a bit like a detective story - working back to a motive based on the clues the product gives a way (like a swastika imprinted onto what would otherwise be assumed to be a water pump from a fire engine, but is in fact a fuel pump for a V-2). In the common sense design process the realisation of a product starts with the 'customer need' - a customer wants something, a solution is engineered and created, then the customer buys that product. 'Backwards Bullsh*t' is the reverse of this process - effectively telling the customer what they should have. It is like applying 'reverse engineering' before a product even exists yet. A clear example of this in action is the flammable cladding used on the Grenfell Tower - which resulted in a fire that killed many people... the 'profit motive' dictated that the residents should live in a death trap, which is clear not what they would've wanted. - 'Matrix organisations' are perhaps a way or redressing the balance here? Such organisations have been around now for decades, and they essentially serve to ensure product quality. In a tradtional 'top down' company structure, you have the CEO at the top, followed by various department heads, and then all their employees - this structure is in very much danger of creating a 'Backwards Bullsh*t' approach I described above. In Matrix organistions however, a product line manager is assigned to ensuring product quality. And rather than each employee just having a department boss (like a HR or Finance boss). They also have a boss in the form of the product line manager - so effectively each employee has TWO bosses with competing interests (one working in the interests of preserving the 'backwards bullsh*t' structures of the company, while the other is effectively a representative of the customer needs of those who will eventually buy the product... How this works in the banking world I am not sure though?). Such matrix stuctures have been described as 'anarchist' due to how they challenge hierarchies. 'Qualities vs Functions'; the 'Top Down' structures (the 'backwards bullsh*t') can be described as representative of 'fucntions' (roles, commands, why?s). While the other component of a matrix structure (perhaps conceptualised as 'horizontal' due to it's resistence to heirarchies) is mainly concerned with 'quality' (people, material needs, how?s). It makes you wonder if though politicians should really be serving as the 'horizontal' influence rather than the 'Top Down' role they appear to predominantly play - if they are afterall representing the interests of 'the people'? maybe there is also an argument for greater public involvement in companies - to represent their own interests rather than a 'pruduct line manager' representing their interests for them (who isn't even elected?). Or if maybe workers should take over the companies themselves if they are the ones predominantly buying the products they make (ahem, alienation)? The existentialist Gabriel Marcel apparently has a good take with his 'functions vs the ontological mystery'. Where he analyses in two parts - functions and qualities - an then combines them together. I guess he is somewhere between a modernist and a postmodernist - critical of the modern world, but also realising that the modern world plays an important role in the technologies we use to support our technologically advanced way of life (I think? - I would have to look into Gabriel Marcel in more depth). Sorry for the long comment.

If you ask me, these guys offer a perspective which, better than any other, delivers context to the events of the 20th century that allows us to make sense of it all. I don't think you can understand modernity, WW2, liberalism, neoliberalism and most currently the nationalist backlash against globalization and multiculturalism, without the perspective of critical theory.

This was excellent

So what would the world look like if we individually lived beyond reason and fact?

source on the painting at 16:00?

14:34 anyone know what the music is here ?

i cannot thank enough for this video! i wish i could buy the person behind it a beer :)

I just accidentally poured Jalapena pepper juice on my testicles.

Needed this video after attempting to read the book lol

what i find most tragic is that today we are erasing the human experience, we are becoming more and more animalistic in a total denial of culture. We can fall back in the old traps that freed the enlightened man.

6:51 : not «compromises» (speaker), but «comprises» which means «includes», something entirely different.

Thanks!

Do Epicurus next

I bet the 2K views are from 200 people, I know I did re-watched this video like 5 times already

The dark side of reason is Original Sin. The evidence of man's depravity and lack of good will permeates history.

Please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that Horkheimer and Adorno failed to grasp a critical point. They grasped the following somewhat.: 1. The Enlightenment's main thrust was not just how civilized man could be free from superstition and the Church, but the freeing of the individual from all forms of conformist tyranny. 2. Totalitarian tyranny results from finding a seemingly workable solution to a specific problem in a specific time and context and then taking it to be the absolute answer for all time. This is why Hegel in his most brilliant phase, refused to admit of any well defined final system for Utopia, but only an ever continuing dynamic of self correction. Just as humans needed to be free of the tyranny of religion, we need to be free of the tyranny of scientific positivism/materialism. What I think they missed was that we must return to spirituality, myth and aesthetics, but as individuals, not dictated to by any church, institution, government or cult. This must be done in a balanced way, not totally rejecting scientific reason. Freedom of Thought and Speech must be preserved for this.

Apple... as in the "Apple"?

We should socially own and democratically manage the wealth we produce and that which lies in natural resources so that we can have the power to distribute it on the basis of need and live in harmony with the Earth. We should, but we don't. The wealth we produce does not belong to us. We give it up to capitalists. The wealth, what we perceive as being useful to us becomes a commodity called capital. Wage-labour reproduces the social relation Marx called Capital. The dialectic of Capital is anchored within a psycho-social dynamic of sado-masochism, justified in our minds as being the only realistic way to achieve the best of all possible worlds. Thus, the subject/object relation is reversed in everyday life. Wage-slavery becomes freedom, the freedom of one to dominate the other in the pursuit of happiness under the class domination of the few over the many. The most important issue, the issue of survival, is being treated as if Godot will come to save us. Nothing can be done by the immense majority of humanity while the means of producing wealth are not under common ownership and democratic control. Only the few who do own and control them have the power to stop greenhouse gas emissions and guess what folks--they aren't going to do it. The Market is us. We create it. It is not a god which will save us. Only we can save ourselves from the coming waves of ecocide. What is the definition of the term 'will to power' as used by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche? What are some examples of it? Profile photo for Jennifer Armstrong Jennifer Armstrong studied Nietzsche since 199637m Very good question! in his four posthumously published volumes, Nietzsche sets up several outlines as to how some larger chunks of society express themselves in terms of art, politics and social attitudes. He also gives them an outline to modernize their ideas along lines that are no longer theological. That is, he lays out a blueprint for the “modern soul” to express their natures in a manner that is no longer morally squeamish. The main idea here is to see human relations in the terms he coined, “will to power”, rather than in terms of some kind of mysterious agenda that would require us to morally perfect ourselves (in other words instead of implicit and explicit theological ideologies). His conflict with the relatively prevailing theological perspective of his time was in the idea that we are not supposed to improve ourselves, because everything that exists has a measure of power that is unchanging, and that we remain, in this sense, true to ourselves despite many cycles of growth and destruction. We are what we are, moving toward a direction that is driven by an underlying agenda that we all have, toward development (increasing our power, not increasing our morality or our “knowledge”). But this growth spurt that we all have a drive to embrace is no more and no less than the quantum of power already within us. (In other words, we merely actualize what is already “there” in its seed form, through seeking our own expansion and design to master what is weaker.) Now the currently controversial or despised term “weakness” is, in this case, very much a relative term, based in the notion of an underlying sense that we are constantly on the move and trying to master ourselves, and new situations, in order to improve. But there is also an understanding here that human hierarchies implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) are built on the notion that those who gain mastery will in turn dominate those who do not do so. A point to bear in mind here is that Nietzsche does express a certain revulsion toward a very direct form of “will to power”. He despises militarism and actual physical dominance, but nonetheless he wants to see those who are actually psychologically astute (because of self-mastery) come into a position of obtaining actual social power. It is to this end that he writes in ways that engage with many social perspectives (and sometimes promulgate them), because he wants to find a way through the forest of modern styles of thinking, to the point that “the higher man” will earn his role and place in a more natural style of society. In all I think Nietzsche finds (as I do) that the “higher man” - one who has more complexity and drive to create “higher culture” is the meat in the sandwich between the earnestly pious masses (who are not so innocent at all in their piety, as they seek scapegoats) and those who employ power crudely and mechanistically (like the bourgeois and the nationalists). In the four volumes, which involve a multidimensional and multifaceted look at how “modern” society is shaping up to be, Nietzsche’s main concern is the suffering of the “higher man” and how it might be vindicated. Aphorism 79 from MINIMA MORALIA Intellectus sacrificium intellectus. [Latin: Intellectuals sacrifice to intellectuals]. To presume that thinking would profit from the decline of the emotions through increasing objectivity, or that it would remain indifferent to such, is itself an expression of the process of dumbing down. The social division of labor recoils on human beings, however much the former may facilitate the accomplishments required of the latter. The faculties, which develop through reciprocal effect, shrivel once when they are torn from each other. Nietzsche’s aphorism, “The degree and kind of sexuality of human beings reaches into the furthest peak of their Spirit [Geistes]” strikes at more than just a psychological state of affairs. Because even the most distant objectifications of thought are nourished by the drives, to destroy the latter is to destroy the former’s own condition. Isn’t memory inseparable from the love, which wants to preserve, what nevertheless passes away? Doesn’t every impulse of the imagination arise from the wish, which transcends the existent in all fidelity, by displacing its elements? Indeed isn’t the simplest perception modeled on the fear of what is perceived, or the desire for such? It is true that the objective meaning of cognitions has, with the objectification of the world, separated itself ever further from the basis of the drives; it is true that cognition fails, where its objectified achievement remains under the baleful spell of the wishes. However if the drives are not at the same time sublated in the thought, which escapes such a baleful spell, then there can be no cognition anymore, and the thought which kills the wish, its father, will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity. Memory is tabooed as uncalculable, unreliable, irrational. The intellectual asthma which results from this, which culminates in the breakdown of the historical dimension of consciousness, immediately debases the synthetic apperception which, according to Kant, is not to be separated from the “reproduction in the imagination,” from commemoration. Imagination, today attributed to the realm of the unconscious and defamed in cognition as a childish, injudicious rudiment, creates alone that indispensable relation between objects, out of which all judgment originates: if it is driven out, then the judgment, the actual act of cognition, is exorcised as well. The castration of perception, however, by a controlling authority, which refuses it any desiring anticipation, thereby compels it into the schema of the powerless repetition of what is already familiar. That nothing more is actually allowed to be seen, amounts to the sacrifice of the intellect. Just as, under the unrestrained primacy of the production process, the wherefore of reason disappears, until it degenerates into the fetishism of itself and of externalized power, so too does it reduce itself down to an instrument and comes to resemble its functionaries, whose thought-apparatus only serves the purpose, of hindering thought. Once the final emotional trace is effaced, what solely remains of thinking is absolute tautology. The utterly pure reason of those who have completely divested themself of the capacity “to imagine an object even without its presence,” converges with pure unconsciousness, with idiocy in the most literal sense, for measured by the overweening realistic ideal of a category-free actuality, every cognition is false, and true only if the question of true or false is inapplicable. That this is a question of wide-ranging tendencies, is evident at every step of the scientific enterprise, which is on the point of subjugating the rest of the world, like so many defenseless ruins.

"Do what thou whilst" -- The Grand Idiot Aleister Crowley "Justice is the interest of the stronger." -- The Lesser Idiot Thrasymachus. "Wherever I go in my mind, I meet Plato coming back." -- Scott Buchanan.

I think they misrepresent what Homer is about. Check out Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's work. Otherwise, I'm all in on their view of enlightenment.

This is one hell of an argument against empiricism then too

This video is wrong; the transcendental subject of Hegel and enlightened reason is a totalitarian unity in that no pure subject as such exists, the subject of history is itself dialectical tension between mereological parts of history and wholes of the historical, not the white, Christian man who wrote the historical narrative that is the Western Cannon. History happens whether it fits into the Kantian ontology or not.

Maybe Adorno and Horkheimer would be happy that philosophers such as Quine essentially used positivism's own principles to falsify its pretentions to universality. The authoritarianism of what is characterized here as the Enlightenment can no longer hold

First time watching a video by this channel, good content but even at 1.25 speed he is still talking to slow lol

Why Adorno and Horkheimer asked is mankind instead of entering into a truly human condition, sinking into a new kind of barbarism. How has the Enlightenment gone wrong and why with all of our scientific progress secularism, (which means the belief that religion should not be involved with the ordinary social and political activities of a country), an emphasis on human rights. Have we just emerged out of decades of catastrophic murder and war. Their answer the reason itself has a dark side, enlightenment man's use of his own reason was meant to be the antidote to myth, to religion, to unjust Authority phenomena that men followed blindly, but for Adorno and Horkheimer myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology, What does this mean? According to James Bradley, for Adorno and Horkheimer, they see enlightenment as subject throughout history to a dialectic, wherein it all too easily gives itself an absolute status over and against its objects, thereby constantly collapsing into new forms of the very conditions of primeval repression, which had earlier set height to overcome. I think we can best understand their claim by looking at it, though, thematically through a number of concepts.