Pynchon & Philosophy: Freed by Martin Eve, the writer of it.....

[David Morris]

OK. So I was a little bored and decided to Google “Adorno,” and the IEP
(Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) turned up this gem:

Adorno argued, along with other intellectuals of that period, that *capitalist
society was a mass, consumer society*, within which individuals were
categorized, subsumed, and governed by highly restrictive social, economic
and, political structures that had little interest in specific individuals.

So . . .    Duhhh!

Surely it didn’t take a philosopher to fathom that?  It doesn’t even
require a GED to know how real that observation is.  How could someone even
write that  synopsis of a great intellectual’s work with that description?
But that wasn’t written on the IEP page.  It was the Google into link to
that page.  So I’ll dig there next…

There we learn:

His fundamental concern was human suffering—especially modern societies’
effects upon the human condition. He was influenced most notably by Hegel,
Marx, and Nietzsche.

And:

He was associated with […] the Frankfurt School, which […] [was a] cultural
intellectual hub for promoting socialism
<https://iep.utm.edu/polphil/#SH3c> and
overthrowing capitalism <https://iep.utm.edu/polphil/#SSH3c.ii>.

OK, let’s stop right there!  I guess political and philosophical schools
are swapping spit these days?  But aren’t the goals of promoting Marxism
and overthrowing Capitalism a little out of style these days? . . .   But
then we’re told that the Frankfurt School invented

critical theory, which takes the stand that oppression is created through
politics, economics, culture, and materialism, but is maintained most
significantly through consciousness. Therefore the focus of action must
come from consciousness.

So Adorno’s school of Philosophy was concerned with “action,” but it seems
it wanted to generate particular kinds of action (Marxism)  and discourage
other kinds of action (Capitalism), all by encouraging some ideal forms of
consciousness.   That all sounds a little suspect to me, like
brainwashing?  Conditioning?

Have I got it all wrong so far?  And then the description of Critical
Theory goes into this:

Adorno made many contributions to critical theory, notably his view that
reason had become entangled with domination and suffering. Adorno coined
the tern ‘identity thinking’ to describe the process of categorical thought
in modern society, by which everything becomes an example of an abstract,
and thus nothing individual in its actual specific uniqueness is allowed to
exist. He lamented that the human race had gone from understanding the
world through myth to understanding it through scientific reasoning, but
that this latter ‘enlightenment’ was the same as understanding the world
through myth. Both modes create a viewpoint that the subjective must
conform to an outside world to which it has no control. Within this
argument, Adorno saw morality as being stuck within this powerless
subjective: in a world that values only recognizable facts, morality
becomes nihilistic, a mere prejudice of individual subjectivity.

And there I’m totally lost.

Oh Well.  We will see how it plays out here…

On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 7:14 PM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I’ve never read any Adorno. I’m pretty philosophy illiterate.  So there’s
> that, too.
>