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

[Mark Kohut]

I'll offer this: Such an abstract summary as here embodies Adorno's
criticisms in word-embodied action...
also, what the last couple of lines seem to mean is Adorno believed that
moral values are also IN the real world....perhaps since
today is the anniversary of a great document, The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, that in a narrowed, just-the-facts-Ma'am world
those universal human rights would not even be accepted as true, real....

On Fri, Dec 10, 2021 at 12:17 AM David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>