Summary of Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Odyssey is a prime example of the intertwinement of myth and rational labor. It illustrates the dialectic of enlightenment, as it shows clear links to myth, but it also contradicts those myths. The epic creates a universality of language, but it also disintegrates the hierarchical order of society.
#2 The German late-Romantic interpretation of antiquity, based on the early writings of Nietzsche, recognized the element of bourgeois enlightenment in Homer. However, they saw this element as both positive and negative, and tried to liquidate it.
#3 The most prominent and therefore the most impotent of the esoteric apologists of German heavy industry, Rudolf Borchardt, prematurely breaks off his analysis in the service of repressive ideology. He fails to recognize that the primal powers he extols themselves represent a stage of enlightenment.
#4 The Odyssey is closer in form to the picaresque novel. The hero’s peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self that is infinitely weak compared to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Politics
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Political

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822503342
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Odyssey is a prime example of the intertwinement of myth and rational labor. It illustrates the dialectic of enlightenment, as it shows clear links to myth, but it also contradicts those myths. The epic creates a universality of language, but it also disintegrates the hierarchical order of society.

#2

The German late-Romantic interpretation of antiquity, based on the early writings of Nietzsche, recognized the element of bourgeois enlightenment in Homer. However, they saw this element as both positive and negative, and tried to liquidate it.

#3

The most prominent and therefore the most impotent of the esoteric apologists of German heavy industry, Rudolf Borchardt, prematurely breaks off his analysis in the service of repressive ideology. He fails to recognize that the primal powers he extols themselves represent a stage of enlightenment.

#4

The Odyssey is closer in form to the picaresque novel. The hero’s peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self that is infinitely weak compared to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness.

#5

The faculty by which the self survives adventures is cunning. The Seafarer Odysseus outwits the natural deities, just as the civilized traveler was later to swindle savages, by offering them colored beads for ivory.

#6

The moment of fraud in sacrifice is the prototype of Odyssean cunning. The awareness that the symbolic communication with the deity through sacrifice was not real was probably age-old. Something of this fraud, which elevates the perishable person as hearer of the divine substance, has always been detectable in the ego.

#7

The belief in the representative nature of sacrifice is rooted in the non-original quality of the self, which is recalled through the history of domination. However, this belief becomes untruth when the self is no longer attributed with the magic power of representation.

#8

The transformation of the sacrificial victim into subjectivity is done under the aegis of the same cunning which always had a part in sacrifice. The deception inherent in sacrifice becomes an element of character, and it becomes the mutilation of the cheat.

#9

The detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her. The mythical monsters under whose power Odysseus falls represent petrified contracts and legal claims dating from primeval times.

#10

The word is no longer connected to the thing, and thus begins to designate. This is the beginning of consciousness arising out of intention: the hero becomes aware of dualism, and realizes that an identical word can mean different things.