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How the Frankfurt School diagnosed the ills of civilisation + Perfect language

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How the Frankfurt School diagnosed the ills of Western civilisation
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-frankfurt...vilisation

EXCERPT: [...] This view of history underpinned the work of the boldest and bravest philosophers of the past century: the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Their arguments lacked for nothing in theoretical aspiration, and have scarcely begun to be assimilated, even today.

A key point of disputation for this generation of thinkers arose from the notion that society, in its progress from barbarism to civilisation according to the narrative of the European Enlightenment, had been increasingly founded on the principle of reason. Where mythology once held sway, the rationalistic sciences now reigned supreme. Among the Frankfurt School’s most provocative contentions was that Western civilisation had unwittingly executed a reversal of this narrative. The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism. Why? The Frankfurt School theorists argued that universal rationality had been raised to the status of an idol. At the heart of this was what they called ‘instrumental reason’, the mechanism by which everything in human affairs was ground up.

When reason enabled human beings to interpret the natural world around them in ways that ceased to frighten them, it was a liberating faculty of the mind. However, in the Frankfurt account, its fatal flaw was that it depended on domination, on subjecting the external world to the processes of abstract thought. Eventually, by a gradual process of trial and error, everything in the phenomenal world would be explained by scientific investigation, which would lay bare the previously hidden rules and principles by which it operated, and which could be demonstrated anew any number of times. The rationalising faculty had thereby become, according to the Frankfurt philosophers, a tyrannical process, through which all human experience of the world would be subjected to infinitely repeatable rational explanation; a process in which reason had turned from being liberating to being the instrumental means of categorising and classifying an infinitely various reality.

Culture itself was subject to a kind of factory production in the cinema and recording industries. The Frankfurt theorists maintained a deep distrust of what passed as ‘popular culture’, which neither enlightened nor truly entertained the mass of society, but only kept people in a state of permanently unsatiated demand for the dross with which they were going to be fed anyway. And driving the whole coruscating analysis was a visceral commitment to the Marxist theme of the presentness of the past. History was not just something that happened yesterday, but a dynamic force that remained active in the world of today, which was its material product and its consequence. By contrast, the attitude of instrumental reason produced only a version of the past that ascended towards the triumph of the enlightened and democratic societies of the present day.

Since these ideas were first elaborated, they have been widely rejected or misunderstood. Postmodernism, which refuses all historical grand narratives, has done its best to overlook what are some of the grandest narratives that Western philosophy ever produced. Despite this, these polemical theories remain indispensable in the present globalised age, when the dilemmas and malaises that were once specific to Western societies have expanded to encompass almost the whole globe. As a new era of irrationalism dawns on humankind, with corruption and mendacity becoming a more or less openly avowed modus operandi of all shades of government, the Frankfurt analysis urges itself upon us once more.

More than any other intellectual venture of the 20th century, the scholarly foundation established in 1923 in Frankfurt as the Institute for Social Research attained true institutional status. While other influential movements in philosophy and cultural theory coalesced around a nucleus of prominent writers and thinkers, they tended to be transitory intellectual fashions, as in the case of the passing New York engagement with continental theory. By contrast, the Frankfurt School, as it became known after the Second World War, has endured for a full three generations because its ideas, so vastly ambitious in their reach, keep taking on new significance in changing circumstances....

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-frankfurt...vilisation



Who needs a perfect language? It's already perfectly imperfect
https://aeon.co/ideas/who-needs-a-perfec...-imperfect

EXCERPT: [...] To be sure, the danger of foggy thinking was (and is) quite real. But Carnap’s complete mishandling of Heidegger’s philosophy helps us to see what goes wrong in any attempt to create a perfect language. When ‘perfect’ means clear and unambiguous, then constructing a perfect language means clipping its expressive range so severely that nothing new and interesting can be said. What Carnap saw as language’s power to bewitch is also its creative power to present startling new ways of looking at the world. Anyone seeking to reorient our thinking by challenging our ordinary ways of thinking and talking about experience will have to use language in new ways, ways that might seem nonsensical to the language police. Think of William Shakespeare, James Joyce and Maya Angelou. The flexibility of language, its Protean twisty-turnyness, its quicksilvery spilloveritude (take that, Carnap!), allows us to reshape our experiences and see the world afresh. Language’s imperfection is its greatest perfection. Seen in this perspective, we were done a favour when Nimrod’s tower went down amid a babble of languages. True, we are stuck with confusions and misunderstandings and knowledge that is forever partial. But the splendid variety of languages, along with each language’s creative possibilities, lift our incessant babblings to a heavenly height that almost reaches the rafters of human experience....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/who-needs-a-perfec...-imperfect
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