Dialectic of Enlightenment Intro Part 1

hi and welcome to this lecture on the Franklin school an introduction to critical theory focusing specifically on the dialectic of enlightenment this is part 1 of the lecture and part 2 will be also available my name is Jeffrey Nicholas I'm a professor in philosophy at Providence College in this first part of the lecture I want to give you some introduction to the ideas behind the dialectic enlightenment and the Frankfurt School Board generally and so we will be in talking about what enlightenment is and go through some of the changes or ideas that help impact that idea itself leading up to its inheritance by Horkheimer and Adorno who write the dialectic enlightenment and then in the second part we'll go into a little more detail on the dialectic of enlightenment so to begin I want to just think about some of the key ideas of the dialectic of enlightenment or do ii which i'll say as we go forward to understand why we're starting where we're at and why we're headed towards where we're going so the premise of the dialect of enlightenment is that enlightenment has itself undermined itself that there was something about the Enlightenment that worked against itself and further that enlightenment was not just one moment in history so you may be familiar with the Enlightenment period period in European history that stems from 1650 to 1800 but what we're hammering Adorno wanna argue is that enlightenment itself still stems back in human history much farther than that and they want to conclude that today and they're talking about 1944 we live in an unenlightened world and of course that makes a lot of sense when you see a world war ii and hitler and all the violence that has been done there and then one of their other key ideas is that everything conforms to the production of commodities through industrialization and that's going to help explain why enlightenment has undermined itself and what it means to live in an unenlightened world and here what they really really want to think about is that when we think about social relations these social relations friendships work relationships churches clubs they in many ways mimic the kinds of relationships that we get in industrialization in and in the process of making commodities so we want to look at that as well but to begin we want to think about what the concept of enlightenment is and here we go back to our good friend Immanuel Kant who wrote the famous response to the questioned vastus aequorin what is enlightenment and his answer is enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another this immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but in the lack of resolve encouraged to use that understanding without guidance from another so pure a Aude dare to know and hear calm is really in some ways echoing back all the way to Socrates to dare to know oneself right what Khan is talking about here is the idea that we often in life do not act on our own accord but look to guidance from others and Khan has in mind in particular of the guidance that we might go to from church or from state and so he's concerned about say the overindulgent influence of a pastor on one of his parishioners or the way that the state itself might force people to think in one way and not use their own understanding to find their way in life and this immaturity is self-imposed not simply when its cause lies in the lack of understanding that's not what's really going on here he not talking about people who can't who don't have the ability to think he's talking about people who have that ability and simply refuse to use it and so they listen too much to the pastor and they listen too much to the state or they listen too much to whatever authority figure that they're looking at and this lack comes not from again not from something within the person but from a lack of resolve a lack of courage so he's not really talking about the kinds of things that we might imagine when the state says you can't think this way and we're gonna burn these books he's talking about the kind of resolve where we just say okay we won't question what's going on and so unenlightened is conforming to another unenlightened is conforming to the status quo and it's imposed not from outside but from our own lack of courage you may be familiar also with Jazz Mills defensive individuality in his book on Liberty and that's such a wonderful magnificent defense of the idea of developing our own powers in a consistent whole and Mill himself says that the problem there are four problems but the one that he identifies most as blocking the development of individuality is not state interference but our own lack of interest in our development of individuality and our own lack of courage to develop our individuality so Mill and can't agree in many ways on what enlightenment is and on the greatest threat to that enlightenment and so Mill could with Kant's a superior a Aude a dare to know so how does this fit in well the question that caught ends his question his essay with is do we live in an enlightened time and for Horkheimer and Adorno they're living in the midst of world war two as they write this dialectic enlightenment and everything seems as though it's dark and that is not enlightened time it's it's the end of the world in some ways we can to ask this question of ourselves today and I'm sure many are with the various political movements that are going around the women's March etc etc and I'll let you answer that question for yourself but when you do go back and think about what contest saying about enlightenment do we just listen to this or that political party or this or that news station are our parents who do we actually listen to is it our pastor who says we can't vote for this or that person and if it's overwhelming that most people do not then the question we might have to ask ourselves is do we in fact live in enlightened time but we cannot jump simply from conch straight to Frankfurt School in 1944 because the Frankfurt School is also influenced by a conception of history that really arises with Hegel and Hegel studied contnue conte and was trying to answer many of Kant's primary questions and this is a picture not of Hegel but of Napoleon marching into llena outside of Hegel's window really is the story that's told and Hegel looks out he says I saw the Emperor the soul of the world go out from the city to survey his reign it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual who concentrating on one point while seated on a horse stretches over the world and dominates it so Hegel at least at the time of this writing had a wonderful idea of what Napoleon represented and you can see there that Napoleon is just this individual that is both an individual but also stretches out over the world and so from in other works of Hegel he says the real being of man lives rather in his deed it is in this deed that individuality is effective the individual is what this deed is and so what Hegel kind of does is put Kant's idea of enlightenment Mills idea of individuality into concrete form kind of right he's I defying real being and individuality with the deeds that people act but it's an example that we can think about just from our armchairs in our rooms wherever we might be it's not Hagel going out and saying that we have to do these sorts of things so there's a sense of what Hagel is trying to talk about here is not the individual him or herself doing the deed but the influence that that has the the history that lies in to that influence and so what's important about Napoleon is not simply that he's an individual who's affecting something upon the world but that he represents a moment in history for Hegel so what Hegel is trying to do in his whole theory is just think again about what final cause is and particularly in terms of the relationship between the self and the self awareness of what it's doing in its activities and so he Saints of history as a consciousness coming aware of itself as free so it's not individual actors necessarily that bring about freedom but its history acting through and it's the ideal of freedom itself acting through individuals what prevents that of course is alienation and we can relate this concept of alienation to the concept of enlightenment so when we think about alienation in Hegel's terms he's taking this concept from religion and in religion of course it talks about the fallen state of humanity we were alienated from God and what Hegel wants to do is turn it into a philosophical concept that talks about human beings alienation from the moral law and in many ways this goes back to Khan's concept of enlightenment because for cought we should obey the moral law because it's the moral law not because the church or the state told us to obey it so what Hegel wants to do is see history as a progress of different forms of alienation until we come to identify ourselves with the moral law so right being opposed to the human being the law being opposed to the human being which is alienation Hegel wants to see the law United within her the individual he also talks about objectification how we externalize the lawless state and in that sense we are no longer seeing ourselves as part of the state and this is part of the famous master-slave dialectic that the master only recognizes himself as master at the slave recognizing as such and the slave can only be recognized as slave if the master recognizes him as a slave and so this objectification comes out in our social relationships how do I we recognize each other in these social relationships and again this stems from the concept of alienation and in the subjectification we are objectifying ourselves in alienating ourselves from each other and in the process we're lacking our own enlightenment so what Hegel represents is the individual coming to see himself as free but the individual here is it's the progress of history right Napoleon is a step in history on the road to the greatest freedom and in Hegel's eyes he's the last step napoleon represents freedom coming to an awareness of itself because the state and the individual finally identify themselves with each other we can obviously ask all kinds of questions about that but my point here is to understand the influence to the Frankfurt School and that begins with Kant's idea of enlightenment and then Hegel treating history as a progress of enlightenment or what he's going to call a progress of freedom to other influences here are Max Weber whose famous book the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism identifies the growth of capitalism with the gross growth of the Protestant idea of asceticism and hard work for our purposes what's important is the notion of rationalization and this is the idea that as society develops it becomes more and more a legalized more and more individualistic and this takes the its greatest form and bureaucracy and so one of the key things that you want to think about as you read the dialectic of enlightenment is where does bureaucracy fit into their analysis what are they saying that addresses that and the final idea comes from Georgi Lukacs who is a Marxist in the twentieth century and he wants to take the key idea of reification and talk about that this is a concept really that we don't find in Marx developed very well and what Luke hashas done what Lukacs does is to develop this concept and so it's the turning of social relation into things through quantification and abstraction and you can see that yourself that bureaucracy quantifies an abstract sense right we are not people we are objects that have to be processed through the system so how do these two things reification and bureaucracy prevent enlightenment that can be the question that we're going to ask as we go through the dialectic enlightenment and particularly in terms of the cultural industry thank you very much for listening to this and I hope you go to the next video on the origin of the Frankfurt School and the dialectic enlightenment thank you

Channel: Jeff Nicholas

Views: 12,081

Rating: 4.8716578 out of 5

Keywords: Herbert Marcuse, Diealectic of Enlightenment, Marxism, Horkheimer, Adorno, Frnkfurt School

Id: qp7BpChBMEs

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2017