"We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience." - Guy Debord

The Kendall Jenner Pepsi Ad brought me here.

How prescient he was about the commodification of protest and genuine human experience.

I think he has a salient point that can be generally acceptable for anyone despite their opinions about popular music: the medium of popular music is inherently designed to be entertaining and, very importantly, consumable. Like candy. Or bubble gum especially. Pop. But who has the right to deprive people of something they genuinely enjoy, as long as it is not manipulative or egregiously over-stepping its range of expression. Awareness of any pop creator's medium is essential to their success.

A detail: the bit with "past temperment" is not well translated. "...weil die ganze Sphere der Unterhaltungsmusik (...) so mit dem Warencharakter, dem Amusement, mit dem Schielen nach Konsum verbunden ist ..." could be "...because the entire sphere of popular music, (...) is to such a degree connected with the commodity character, the amusement, with the aim for consumption...". I know, I am 11 years late with this comment....

Wow who would've thought it I finally saw the guy that wrote all of the Beatles lyrics and music

When it comes specifically to music and protest/political function of it, i agree with him more than i would like to admit. I personally always found that songs engaged in protests and advocating social changes performed by picture perfect celebrities banalise and trivialise the actual problem and was never able to look past the its entertainment function. In academic terms, i see the main problem to be the vast dispersion of music audiences (music's decentralised power) and the fact that not everyone identifies with and is influenced by it in the same way, whether it be personal interpretation or geographical dispersion. Music can function as a channel for up keeping collective memory and as a strategy of collective empowerment but I don't see it directly and visibly causing social changes.

"Day Tripper" is my favorite Adorno song!

using background music to a protest sets the protest as a background to our own narcisism and superficiality, comfort makes us weak. Music can be only used as protest if you protest music itself.

I think guys like Adorno and Walter Benjamin had the world of music change on them and they just didn't get it. Sure, music may be a commodity, but that doesn't mean that it isn't also meaningful as a forum for protest.

@nomoteticus The problem is that even protest music contains within the seeds of domination and uniformisation (the 4/4 beat, the focus on the chorus, etc), so even when they're singing about rebellion, the music subversively invites them to conform.

A few instantiations of Schopenhauer's timeless, wisely unhistorical profundity: "Intellectual conversation, whether grave or humorous, is only fit for intellectual society; it is downright abhorrent to ordinary people, to please whom it is absolutely necessary to be common and dull." - Counsels and Maxims

If Adorno spent his life’s research being critical of consumption culture and popular art and music then why are there people saying he wrote songs for The Beatles?

Brilliant insight, and a sad recapitulation not only on why the hippie movement failed, but why it was to a certain extent an essentially commercial movement from the start (in contrast to what the popular history asserts. Indeed, why wouldn't the popular histories assert such a theory? If anything, it benefits and historically "props up" that which is popular.) Frank Zappa put it another way regarding his "talk" at the London School of Economics in (I believe) 1968 (this is from a 10/30/69 Down Beat article written by Larry Kart): "I was invited to speak at the London School of Economics. So I went over there and asked, 'What do you want me to say?' So here's a bunch of youthful British leftists who take the same youthful leftist view that is popular the world over. It's like belonging to a car club. The whole leftist mentality - 'We want to burn the . . . world down and start all over and go back to nature.' Basing their principles on Marxist doctrine this and Mao Tse Tung that and all these clichs that they've read in their classes. And they think that's the basis for conducting a revolution that's going to liberate the common man. Meanwhile, they don't even know any common men. With their mod clothes, either that or their Che Guevara khakis. It's a ... game. "I do not think they will acquire the power to do what they want to do, because I'm positive that most of them don't really believe what they're saying. I told them that what they were into was just the equivalent of this year's flower power. A couple of years before those same schmucks were wandering around with incense and bells in the park . . . because they heard that that was what was happening in San Francisco. The first thing they asked me was what was going on at Berkeley. I was thinking to myself, 'What, you guys want to copy that too?' . . . It's really depressing to sit in front of a large number of people and have them all be that stupid, all at once. And they're in college." ------- Does anyone know if Zappa went on record with his thoughts on Adorno, either as a sociologist, composer, or both? I can see why based on the above-referenced quote Zappa may have agreed with certain portions of Adorno's thinking (e.g., his criticsm of consumerist culture) and disagreed with others (particularly those that might have supplied the same "cliches" he derides in the students' assertions).

Kant's philosophy is rooted in trying to determine what an individual can and cannot know about reality. Nothing to do with constructing enormous tottering edifices embracing the whole of humanity in a paralysing death grip of historical determinism. That's why he's a real philosopher and not just a money spinning charlatan making the bourgeois feel good about themselves and justifying crimes against humanity on the grounds of rational historical inevitability. Big difference.

Adorno can't dance unless it's a waltz.

Didn't this guy write The Beatles and Led Zeppelin tracks?

He's still right no matter what holes you poke in it

In his conflation of Object and Subject which makes all concepts of universal equality and validity. In order to separate a real horse from a dream about a horse there has to be subject/object split. Conflating the two negates that separation.

Spot on. Like always, professor.

Hmmm...the more I think about this, I start wondering if Yoko Ono's unbearable music was a reply to Adorno's critique. Only problem is, I don't think she sang about the Vietnam war...

Theodor Adorno est l'un des esprits les plus importants du XXème siècle.

1. The fact that Kant wrote his Third Critique 17 years before the publication of the Phenomenology doesn't mean they were contemporaries. But even if Hegel was as proximal to Kant as Fichte, it still doesn't make sense to say they were "opposed." Schopenhauer tried to pronounce on the noumenon in a way Kant would never have accepted; does that mean that Kantianism is opposed to Schopenhauer? 2. Schopenhauer teaching at the same university doesn't mean he was "more than familiar" with Hegel.

What's more, I think that "imposing rationality on the lives and histories of others" might be the most fitting epitaph for the author of Critique of Practical Reason and Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Intent.

Macklemore brought me here

By the way, it's one thing to say that Hegel made offensive and downright silly claims about the role of the Germanic races in history, though he can be forgiven at least as much as any other European thinker before Darwin. It's another thing to say that his "whole system" rests on this claim. The Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right are the texts that feature such claims (somewhat) prominently; is "German triumphalism" really an intelligent summary of the Logic or Phenomenology though?

Does anyone know what year this was filmed? Want to quote it in my dissertation

@stillceaser These Infos come from the former brit. MI-agent John Coleman. I red his book about this in German titled "Die Hierarchie der Verschwörer - Das Komitee der 300" (J.K.Fischer Verlag). But this is only a translation. The original book was in English, but I dont know the title. But that Adorno and the "Frankfurter Schule" was official marxistic is well known. In Germany this school is also called "Marxburg". It leaded the transeducation of the german people after WW II.

What difference does it make what particular angle he took? The fact that he didn't say he was certain of these ideas as the necessary unfolding of the World Spirit doesn't mean he didn't think they were true and had normative implications. If anything, it shows how subjectivism and irrationalism are just as susceptible of error as historicism.

"Aristocracies are of three kinds: (1) of birth and rank; (2) of wealth; and (3) of intellect. The last is really the most distinguished of the three, and its claim to occupy the first position comes to be recognized, if it is only allowed time to work." - Counsels and Maxims

Does anyone know When and Where that interview was being made? And who the interviewer was? Thx

The film "Blood Diamond" (2007).

Show me where Hegel said that none of those perceptions can be distinguished.

"That [judges, governors, priests, scholars, philosophers, and sundry other intellectuals] should be permanently relieved of all bodily labour as well as of all vulgar need and discomfort; nay, that in proportion to their much greater achievements they should necessarily own and enjoy more than the common man, is natural and reasonable." - On Human Nature

...was actually in keeping with the concerns of post-Kantian skepticism. It was at least as much an attempt to fill in serious lacunae in Kant's 'concern for what is possible for individuals to experience themselves' as was Kant's own work. And importantly, it was a necessary step, just because the attempt to say what the necessary structures for all possible experience are, without giving an account of the objective, begs the question: can a tenable account of schema be given sans the latter?

In classical music you have the practice of counting. And sometimes I wonder if this music has money character therefore.

Not everything entirely fails of its own accord. Popular music is a weapon used to simplify and degrade oblivious parties who are unaware of the doomed structural momentums heaving towards these planned rehearsals for extinction. "There is no There there"

He has a very good point. Millionaire popstars singing about social injustice shouldn't work. But it can. Do lyrics really matter? I do pay a lot of attention to lyrics but they often are hard to decipher. If I like the melodies, the genre, the production, the singer's voice, as long as the lyrics are quite alright, it can work really well. Then there are those musicians that release a deep track once in a while, but mostly they are singing abou banalities. The music industry is about money and fame. You can even manipulate your listeners by writing a deep song. It's almost impossible to figure out if the author's intention is honest or not. Can it be honest? Not really. It's your job, you have to sell to make money. You will always choose your words carefully.

*It might be too much to say that Sartre is "staunchly" anti-Hegelian, but his later work, like Critique of Dialectical Reason, at least gestures at the irreverence toward Hegel which characterized his early years. And Lacan was something of a Hegelian, but it's also true that he stood more on the blurry line between structuralists and post-structuralists.

To say "these are the transcendental structures that determine all possible experience," and to make them knowable in a way that their objects cannot be, is to stop the necessary dialectic of the criticism of rationalism; for how can we pass verdict on these structures without understanding the whole which is prior to it, and the 'noumenal' qualities of which may make them radically different than how speculation represents them?

Each gave birth to narrow authoritarian concepts of power and history where an educated minority declared themselves to be harbingers of the next stage of dialectical evolution and were prepared to sacrifice whole acres of humanity on its altar.

The point, my friend, is that because someone's views on aesthetics don't jibe with your own, that doesn't mean you can throw out their contributions in toto. Which is exactly what you want to do.

Adorno wrote all of the Beatles tunes

Once heard Dylan's The Times They Are A Changin' in a supermarket. I had a little chuckle to myself. That's the same Bob Dylan who said the purpose of life was to become stinking rich so you could do as you wished.

Which is, of course, why Adorno made an entire career trying to assert that various composers (like Stravinsky) who did not write in accordance with his narrow diktats were somehow psychologically disturbed. If you had actually read Kant properly (which you clearly have not) you fully understand the folly of linking him to Hegel.

Yes, I'm sure he was a very compassionate person. One need only review Schopenhauer's attitudes on the majority of humanity, save his precious "genius," to see what his compassion amounted to. But I think it's telling that you refer to his as an "all-embracing outlook." It reveals that his will to system is as strong- and as distorting of actual Existenz- as his historicist coevals.

Something is happening, and you don't know what it is ...

"And since women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species, and are not destined for anything else, they live, as a rule, more for the species than for the individual, and in their hears take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual." - Studies in Pessimism

And who's "flinging up hierarchies of progress"? This statement itself doesn't make sense to me. Can you explain how I've posited progress hierarchically?

Umm, wait. You're saying that Hegel's "nonsense" influenced the majority of 20th-century philosophers. Yet when I mention 20th-century philosophers who were actually influential, you bring up the fact of their inscrutability as proof of their irrelevance to the subject at hand, viz. the actual influence of Hegel. This is a category mistake.

It's unimportant to me whether or not Hegel was merely a mouthpiece for Prussianism; much of the recent (and not-so-recent) scholarship from better experts than either of us has called this canard into question. What's important is whether Hegel's method is entirely flawed; whether historicism can dovetail with dialectic to reveal anything more than Transcendental Idealism will allow...

All art becomes commodity in a capitalist society. No art can escape commodification, not even difficult contempory music such as Schoenberg. The purpose of popular music is to bring people together and create a community around simple shared pleasures and beliefs, which is a purpose that is in direct opposition to capitalistic commodification, which is cynically designed to isolate the individual and create artificial alienated needs and desires that can only be satisfied by materialistic consumption.

Hmm. So in other words, you just don't like Adorno because he was into Expressionism and thought other contemporary aesthetic movements didn't effectively capture alienation in late bourgeois society. So what? What does that have to do with his Negative Dialectics? Or his critique of fundamental ontology? Does a thinker have to be perfect, or stay perfectly within the bounds of what they know, to retain a place in academe?

@AlemanJuan Basically the same as what he said about the 1960s Students Movement in general: They're onto something, but they're not in the position to do anything about what they realize is wrong with the world because of their absolute lack of support from society at large.

No the crest of Hegel's Philosophy is the idea that, as a Philosopher working for a German State apparatus, he was the ultimate end of mankind's cultural evolution. Hegel declares himself to be God and everybody believes him. Aside from Schopenhauer who bears the brunt of bourgeois outrage for daring to suggest that Hegel was wearing the Emperor's new clothes, that history was not rational, that there is no reason behind anything aside from a will to exist of which every thing is a victim.

Wow. I'm not talking about causal connections or any phenomenal relation in general; I'm talking about the dialectic of Kantian critique itself. I don't know why you would confute a purely methodological question with a disconnected categorical claim about "defining individual units of perception." But while we're on the subject, how can it be true that there's no 'universal necessity' (not my claim) if it's necessarily true that all that can be defined are individual units of perception?

What does this even mean? Schopenhauer was, indeed, all of the things I said he was, and he was fully in earnest when he made these statements. Now the burden is on you to show me why, if he meant for these statements to be taken seriously by serious thinkers, the latter actually should, since Adorno's "elitism" invalidates his entire corpus.

@stillceaser Dear oh dear, no argument, just statements. It is profoundly ambiguous which is how a right/left Hegelian split was able to occur and how Gobineau was able to apply the dialectical rational conflict to race and Marx to social classes. In Gobineau it is seen as rational retreat from a utopian state of society, whilst Marx merely applied it wholescale to social structures. Schopenhauer was the only one to see through the bullshit of his generation which is why the bourgeois hate him.

@stillceaser Just been reading up about a composer called Robert Still. He fell foul of the Adornoite regime at the BBC when it was run by William Glock and Hans Keller. They declared whole swathes of music to be "unsuited for broadcast" and promoted the Darmstadt school in its place. Major composers like Martinu, Copland, Matyas Seiber, Panufnik, Honneger, Bloch, Milhaud etc were aesthetically cleansed from broadcast mediums and concert platforms. Hegel's legacy speaks for itself.

Kant's language fits the complexity of his thought. He was awkward like that. Hegel just flung around high sounding words and concepts to curry favour with academia. Its hilarious to read that whenever one of his so-called dialectical transitions takes place the verbiage becomes even denser around it. Kant's philosophy is rooted in the interior, it is from the "I", hence the idea of god being only valid as individual experience rather than shared objective fact. It is real philosophy as it....

Second sentence should have read: "Yet when I mentioned 20th-century, anti-Hegelian philosophers who were actually influential..." Point being that it's not Hegel's influence per se that accounts for what you happen to not like in 20th-century philosophy. If your gripe is stylistic, then fine; but the anti-realism in these thinkers, which was the meat of Sokal's critique, is actually the opposite of Hegel's epistemic stance.

Schopenhauer evidently thought that whatever flowering of culture existed among the dark peoples was attributable to their heterochthonous ruling class- which originated in temperate regions. Cosmetic, indeed. It apparently didn't occur to you that a man who thought he could determine another's intelligence by their physiognomy would consider "cosmetic" differences among the races to be of paramount importance.

So little boy. Come back to me when you have actually read these works for yourself rather than (like most students) read mere precis of them in textbook commentaries. Bryan Magee commented that it is now wholly possible to qualify as a philosopher without actually having read seriously a single text. Talking to you, I can see how he came to that conclusion.

I deleted it because I thought there was a different way of expressing that. If you hadn't noticed, there's a post with almost the exact same wording. And the fact remains that I *don't* care. Not that I think it's unimportant; only that it's not my area of concern. I'm also not interested in cardiology, though I wouldn't doubt its importance.

Hmm...it's interesting that you think only Kant's philosophy is "rooted in the interior," when critics of Transcendental Idealism as various as Jacobi, Platner, and Maimon based their (fairly devastating) arguments on Kant's account of 'exteriority', viz. the existence of external objects to account for the "pure passivity" of sensibility in the CPR. What's ironic is that Hegel's system was a response to just such critiques. His concern with the "shared objective fact," however misdirected...

In other words, because someone used an epistemological approach to evil ends, that approach is in itself illegitimate? What are you really saying here? I mean, phenomenology was used by both Levinas and Heidegger; does it follow that if the latter did horrible things, the whole method is illegitimate?

I mentioned Foucault, Althusser, and other "names" because I wanted to hypostatize these 'errant philosophers of the 20th century' as you pronounce them. What I discovered was that you're not faintly familiar with their relationship to Hegel; that your only gripe with Hegel's legacy in them is a stylistic and not an epistemological one; that you have a hazy understanding of the one thinker you singled out among them (Foucault) as saying anything important. I prefer not to play in the ethers.

Selective quotations and cherry picking does not an argument make. I reject Hegelianism because his entire philosophical outlook is merely an exercise in self glorification. As can be shown by simply linking his supposed conclusions together. As I have already demonstrated. Schopenhauer has flaws, but he wasn't arrogant enough to place himself as being the ultimate product of mankind's entire cultural/ historical evolution as Hegel clearly does.

Here's an especially interesting one, when taken in combination with Schopenhauer's less than enlightened views on the differences between the races: "Gobineau in his work Les Races Humaines has called man l'animal mechant par excellence/ People take this very ill, because they feel that it hits them; but he is quite right, for man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it." - On Human Nature

Er... no sometimes aesthetic means are more communicable about ideas than text books. Like the dialogue form for example.

So, is it more plausible that historicism is wrong because it exalts the present- except when it doesn't, as in Nietzsche's or Adorno's case- or that you're looking for a reason to dismiss historicism as such?

@TheCanine2 You should read Henze's autobiography. He can be found strutting around there denouncing everything south of absolute chaos as "Kitsch". For somebody so fixated on consumerism and capitalism it would be interesting to learn whether he was paid to give talks like this, or whether he gave his books away for free? If not then he is just as guilty of commodifying cultural discourse as the people he "critiques". His market share may be of a different demographic, but the end result is?

The thing I find so amusing about Hegelians is that they are convinced that there lies some shared conclusion that embraces mankind in general and that if one is simply not in tune with this shared revelation then one should be confined to a gas chamber or gulag. Given that you have yet to prove there is some kind of reality that exists beyond the content of your own mind, this is rather an amusing step. I reject Hegelianism, you embrace it. End of story.

@Kommentator888 Which infos are you referring to chap? The stuff that egapnala65 is talking about?

Yes, you seem generally to prefer axiology to all the other, equally important sub-fields of philosophy. Maybe because it's much easier to import unearned opinion into this area than all the others. At any rate, the above comment has nothing to do with the point I raised: Sartre's critical approach to dialectical philosophy, and his irreverence towards Hegelianism (he actually *opposed* the inevitable reconciliation of opposites in dialectical tension, a very un-Hegelian position).

What is the "ubermenschen" philosophy of Hegelianism? You are aware that the "ubermensch" was a Nietzschean counterpoint to the ideal human of such Hegelians as David Strauss, right? And that the majority of the major philosophers of the 20th century defined themselves in opposition to Hegel (like the French thinkers after Sartre and Althusser, Karl Popper, Heidegger,and the logical positivists)?

I didn't say they were opposed. I said it is entirely possible to ignore the ludicrous self serving posturings of Hegel and go straight to Schopenhauer's more serious considerations. Hegel does not even qualify to enter the argument as far as I am concerned.

As for Popper, Popper knew as much Hegel as an autodidact with a second-hand bookseller's anthology in hand. Have you never read Walter Kaufmann's takedown of Popper's broadsides against historicism? The man was reading from popular anthologies, like an undergrad.

Surely, given the nature of this video, all questions aside from the aesthetic ones are irrelevant.

Their lives overlap substantially. The "Critique of Judgement" (1790) "Phenomenology" (1807). No doubt Kant would have have been the most important figure in the field when Hegel was a student. Schopenhauer was more than familiar with Hegel and his ideas as anybody who has actually read some history would tell you. They were even tutors at the same university for a while.

When did I say that Marx and Hegel were separate? The "pedantry" charge comes from your unnecessary exposition on Gobineau.

There is little point in you throwing name like Lacan, Deleuze etc at me. These were, like Adorno and Hegel people who hid paucity of thought behind extravagance of language. Sokal has shown these people up for what they are.

Read them all like I have and then come back to me. Simple.

what do you think adorno would have said about a band like ton steine scherben?

Again, you're only concerned with his aesthetics. Is it possible to disagree with some facet of a philosopher's thought and still think that other parts warrant one's attention? Or are you still in thrall to the "total system" archetype that is the less admirable legacy of Hegelianism?

Fair and standard points, but what do you mean by 'over-stepping its range of expression.'. Surely as artists they are not limited by anything aside imagination

Unfortunately it doesn't. He made an entire career out dissing Stravinsky. Yet did he produce something comparable to "Les Noces"? Of course not he was incapable of anything apart from watery Schoenberg. His poisonous legacy destroyed a good many composers who had a lot to say but didn't feel the serialist language was how they wished to say it. Thankfully, now that his influence is on the wane these other figures are being re-assessed.

Yes, I brought "necessity" into the equation, the same way as Kant did, the same way as many philosophers have done. But so what? I didn't intend "necessity" according to dogmatic metaphysics; I intended it in the same way Kant did in his Preface to the Critique. I certainly didn't drag "historical necessity" into the discussion, either. For all your erudition, you seem to have a poor recall of distinct ideas.

@stillceaser So not only do you deny the simple facts of how Hegel's philosophy actually terminates, you now deny that Adorno came to the same opinions as Hitler on Jazz. I think it is you who needs to do some serious study, not me.

I mean, I have no idea how you read Idea for a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Intent and do not reach the conclusion that Kant thought that reason and nature were intimately tied, such that nature itself *intended* the use of human reason to resolve all political conflict and bring about perfect concordance between the state and bourgeois civil society. There's nothing so teleological as Kant's conception of history; is a vice with Hegel to become a virtue with Kant?

Could you put it more detailed? In message, if you will.

Year? Producer? Name of film? Interviewer?

@stillceaser He still clings to the myth that history is a rational process determined by endless conflict.

Not at all. Read Schopenhauer on Academic philosophy. The Hegelian influence can also be said to be linguistic and semantic as well as ideological.

It was, in fact, the very basis of his Analogies of Experience, which sought to demonstrate inter alia and contra Berkeley that the seeming permanence of our experience wasn't attributable to the mind, but rather to the permanence of substance. Your description of the Kantian project, for all your pretended erudition, is that of a tyro.

LOL. So you're just gonna ignore the quotes I presented, why? Because you suspect that some of them might be "googled", though I gave direct quotes? Schopenhauer's social observations were practically written with bile. You think his warm sentiments toward animals and nature are expiatory, but in the same breath you acknowledge the "all-embracing" character of a world-view in which women were unequals, whites are the source of all high culture, etc.

Adorno was a Marxist, sure. But that doesn't mean he was an unqualified Hegelian, or responsible for the idealist excesses of Hegel. In fact, the younger members of the Frankfurt School took a strong position against Hegelian absolutism in part to demarcate themselves from Lukacs and other early Western Marxists. You might be a "musicologist" or whatever, but it pays to know something more about the people you criticize than their views on music.

LOL. Because Gobineau is in no way necessary for an understanding of either Hegel or Marx. Can you explain to me why you think he's so indispensable, except to understand the "thinking" of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg and the like?

And this is the man who gave us the Ubermensch of course. Historicism has no part in Schopenhauer, he viewed it as stasis, therefore Nietzsche's critique is irrelevant. Nothing wrong with studying dialectics, everything wrong with applying to history and trying to extrapolate important truths about humanity from them. Particularly when you are talking about armed warfare as being the principle by which these conflicts are resolved. See the blood in the streets.

Ah, yes. Even though I gave you names for the texts from which these quotes emerge, you repose confidently on this idea that everything I've gotten was from a search engine, because once I didn't have my text ready to hand. But the fact remains that you've merely asserted that I don't understand the subject/object debate; the fact remains that you've merely gestured at superior knowledge of these subjects without ever presenting it.