Note from a German philosopher

Nathan wrote 'This thing called "life" is a gross and unjust system, full of cheats and unfairness. I refuse to participate in such a system!' meaning, I trust, that such thinking is inutile.

I have a long response that I assume most won't want to read, but it speaks to some degree on this. It is about Adorno and The Enlightenment. I will post it next for any who may be interested.

'In our talk I mentioned Theodor Wiesengrund Adornos Italian mother! book Dialektik der Aufklärung=Dialectic of Enlightenment which contains a highly controversial interpretation of the 12th book of Homer's Odyssey. One thing to keep in mind when reading Dialectic of Enlightenment is the time period in which it was written, namely, during the height of WW II. Horkheimer and Adorno had fled Nazi Germany and settled first in New York and then in California. Since both were not only Marxists but also of Jewish descent, it behooved them to emigrate. Dialectic of Enlightenment is thus suffused with an atmosphere of gloom and pessimism which reflects the circumstances of its composition. As you defnitely know most of the members of the Frankfurt School whose most prominent founder was Adorno were practitioners of a form of Marxism. The fundamental value of the Frankfurt School, i.e., that which they wish to promote by means of their theorizing (to whatever extent it is possible to promote a change in the real world by means of intellectual efforts), is freedom as autonomy, an idea as you know that is highly connected with the Prussian Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) (quite a contradition: Prussia&freedom!). Kant advocates the idea that we should become autonomous individuals who freely investigate the world in and around us without appeal to external authorities (whether they be human or divine) and who live freely by subjecting ourselves to laws of our own creation, and that we are beings whose immeasurable value and dignity lie in our innate capacity for freedom of thought and action. You know that Kant phrased the important: Sapere Aude! Dare to know! "Have courage to use your own understanding!" — that is the motto of enlightenment. Our task is to become enlightened individuals who are truly autonomous, who choose and set ends for themselves and develop the appropriate means to those ends. Furthermore, we are to do this in a way which respects the freedom of others, and so we are to act in ways that others can rationally consent to, thereby maximizing the amount of freedom in the world. As Kant sometimes puts it, we are always to treat others as ends and never merely as means. A world of free individuals who respect and promote not only their own freedom but that of others as well would be a radically different world. Kant recognizes that it is an ideal that we should approach without necessarily being able to attain it in full. You know that Karl Marx was primarily concerned with alienation which is always contrasted with autonomy. It is also self-inflicted, since free beings fail to recognize one of their creations as one of their creations and thus fail to see that they can change the situation in which they find themselves. According to Marx, we are to overcome our false consciousness and see alienation has something to do with our own will. The book's opening observation expresses the idea that something has gone horribly wrong with the project of enlightenment. How did this happen? How did we allow ourselves, despite our long dedication to the proposition that freedom is the fundamental value, to degenerate into a state of barbarity, totalitarianism, and warfare? What went wrong? Adorno/Horkheimer differentiate between two conceptions of reason.
The dominant form of reason in an alienated world is what they call instrumental reason. This is the capacity for selecting the appropriate means to our ends, whatever they happen to be. That is, we use reason as an instrument to guide us in attaining our ends. Instrumental reason simply conforms to the ends that we have acquired, telling us how to pursue them in the most effective fashion.
There is, however, still another type of reason, namely objective reason. This type of reason concerns itself with the ends themselves. It asks whether our ends our rational, whether they express our deepest needs and desires, whether they express our longing for freedom. Objective reason tells us what our ends should be, and thus it tells us how the world should be, because we are to transform the world in accordance with our rational ends, and thus from how it is into how it should be.
Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that our ends are usually imposed on us from without (Kant called it heteronomy.) We acquiesce in what others tell us to think and to do, thereby giving up our independence and failing to achieve autonomy. We employ reason to control it nature, to bend it to our ends. We often succeed in these efforts, but, of course, not always. Much of nature remains beyond the sphere of our best efforts to dominate it. What are we to do in this circumstance? It is here that the topic of myth enters the story, and it is here that we can begin to look at Horkheimer and Adorno's reading of the Odyssey. Myth, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is an expression of our desire to dominate nature. The "basic principle of myth" is anthropomorphism: the inanimate forces of nature are falsely interpreted as superhuman beings much like ourselves. These beings — the gods, spirits, and demons of ancient mythologies — are open to our influence, however. We can bargain with them, sacrifice to them, pray to them — all in the effort to enlist them, if only briefly, in helping us to realize our ends. Nature is seen as hostile to us, when it actually has no regard for us whatsoever. These mythologies are clearly not forms of enlightenment; rather, they are forms of alienation. We create these mythologies and are then controlled by them. Nor do they really help us to control nature: they only give us the illusion of control. They are hostile powers of our own creation which we fail to recognize as our own creations. Seeing them as hostile, however, makes us suffer. Enlightenment, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, has always opposed myth, and the age of Enlightenment, because of its hostility to organized religion, attempted to exchange science for superstition. Religion retreats under the pressure of science and the patient investigation of the forces of nature; imaginary control is replaced by real control. Enlightenment genuinely makes the world a better place. Horkheimer and Adorno never deny that it does. Yet they find themselves in 1944 in an allegedly enlightened world in which disaster is triumphant. How is this reversal of the initial successes of the age of Enlightenment to be understood? Once again, the answer is abstract. Any social system, capitalist or otherwise, tends, they argue, to reproduce the conditions necessary for its existence. This is fairly obvious, for if a form of social organization cannot reproduce itself across time, it will die out. So any social system will tend to produce subjects who identify with the values which the system embodies. Thus there is a strong tendency towards conformity in any set of social arrangements. We can reflect on the values which we accept, and sometimes as a result we exchange them for others. But this is relatively rare. Normally, we accept the ends and goals sanctioned by society, and thus simply calculate the means required to attain these ends. Therefore, we tend to reason instrumentally rather than objectively. The Enlightenment successfully battled the mythological world in which it found itself, but, say Horkheimer and Adorno, it reverted to myth. A new mythological world arose: that is, a new form of alienation took the place of the old one. This follows from the pre-eminence of instrumental reason. The Enlightenment created new social arrangements, but in time they became as ossified as the old ones because of the conformist tendencies of instrumental reason. These new arrangements take on an alienated form in that, like the old ones, they are our creations but are not recognized as such, not seen as capable of being changed. Given that Horkheimer and Adorno are Marxists, these new arrangements are taken to be those of the capitalist mode of production. The enlightened world becomes a new form of myth because we are just as alienated in it as in the pre-enlightened world, though in a different way this time. Myth changes into enlightenment which reverts to myth. Remember now the story of the Odyssey. Horkheimer and Adorno claim that Odysseus is a prototype of the bourgeois individual, especially in his most trait of cunning. Like the bourgeoisie of the capitalist world, Odysseus employs instrumental reason to advance his self-interest. This enables him to survive the mythological terrors of the ancient world. He sacrifices all else that he might desire and value, even his crew, all of whom die on the way back to Ithaca. And so he escapes the mythological world of his voyage. Yet what does he return to? An enlightened world of freedom and autonomy? No, he returns to his kingdom, resuming his place as ruler of his people. His odyssey is thus a voyage in which Odysseus oppressed resumes his place as Odysseus the oppressor. So instrumental reason can successfully combat myth, but only at the cost of re-establishing a new myth. One form of alienation is exchanged for another. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Enlightenment admonishes us to be rational, for rationality can set us free; but if we become complacent and use our reason uncritically, then we are in peril. We are tempted by instrumental reason and usually succumb willingly, and thus we collaborate in our own domination.'

The phrase, "I refuse to participate in such a system!" was meant to mean that the only way to change the system is from the inside because (as you rightly point out via Adorno and Horkheimer), the system is our own creation, to which we have become enslaved.

And this is where Adorno's Negative Dialectics comes in: it recognizes that the system we erect around natural phenomena is and always will be inadequate to describe / circumscribe those pheonomena. There will always be a remainder, a gap, between the concept and the thing we are attempting to conceptualize -- the "nonidentity". The tyrrany of the Enlightement's dialectic is that the push to render the world into concepts is both fundamental to the human epistemological desire and yet never quite enough: it is a desire that is both necessary yet will always remain unfulfilled.

Adorno's "Negative Dialectics" was the process by which we recognize that nonidentity and keep that recognition always at the forefront of our minds.

But the simple recognition of the nonidentity, which is parallel to the post-modernist's program of demystification, is not sufficient. If we simply stop there, we are let with nothing: demystification is great at rendering visible and then tearing down the exercise of power inequity. But it leaves nothing in its wake around which to build a just society.

Thus, the dialectic demands a remystification, as it were, but one which keeps the recognition of the nonidentity at its forefront: this is where Adorno moved to near the end of his life.

{Have to go teach class now; more later, I hope.}

First: to be clear, this was not written by me, but to me, by someone I met in Poreć, Croatia, on Monday while on a fool's errand. This guy made the nonsense worthwhile.

Second: he assumed more knowledge than I have. I need to read it again when I have time.

Third: from what I do understand i think you, Nathaniel, have it down quite well.

"Mitmachen wollte ich nie" was actually attributable to Lowenthal. While Adorno and Horkheimer holed up in Pacific Palisades, writing Dialectic of Enlightenment and hanging out with Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, Marcuse, Kirchheimer and Neumann working for the OSS during WWII. Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort

Leo?

Yep, Leo.

I hope it seemed like I knew what I was talking about. (Google, so many Lowenthals...well, I will find out...)

I'll print this above and read it and see what I can do with it if anything.

(Is there a "movie"? Kirk Douglas and Tony Quinn in "Ulysses"?...)

Well I did read the "thesis" and I'd say that Odysseus had no concern for anyone's "freedom" but his own hmm. His fellows were of course his "subjects" as king of Ithaca and that they all died because of his whims and will was well "too bad" but that's the way the gods go huh.

He returns home to a polity that his wife Queen Penelope can't run; indeed she's bankrupting it because she can't assert control so O does it with a bow and arrow. Then he is "free" to be king again and he never promised anyone it seems to me "the millennium" on his retaking the throne, only a "return" to his former rule which was neither "bad" nor "good" but "normal"?

Personally I LIKE Marx; I even have a (red!) t shirt with Chico, Groucho, Harpo and "Karlo" which has the slogan "Sure I'm a Marxist!" It's my fave. Maybe if the Soviet Union had been run by "Marxists" rather than paranoid maniacs we'd be more in the clover today? I think I would...

Hear here!