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knowledge, in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization
thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to become a mere means in the service of an existing order, it involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has espoused into something negative and destructive.
Such metamorphoses of critique into affirmation do not leave theoretical content untouched; its truth evaporates.
The process to which a literary text is subjected, if not in the automatic foresight of its producer then through the battery of readers, publishers, adapters, and ghost writers inside and outside the editorial office, outdoes any censor in its thoroughness.
one use of the obscene - to be a canary for this sort of tampering
To render their function entirely superfluous appears, despite all the benevolent reforms, to be the ambition of the educational system.
that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy acceptance
does he mean fertile ground or unreceptive ground? context suggests former.
petitio principii—that
so forfeiting the dialectic? how do you avoid progressivism here?
In the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the spell of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia, in all this uncomprehended senselessness the weakness of contemporary theoretical understanding is evident.
that's a v specifically nazi german defining characteristic.
The loyal son of modern civilization’s fear of departing from the facts, which even in their perception are turned into clichés by the prevailing usages in
science, business, and politics, is exactly the same as the fear of social deviation.
False clarity is only another name for myth.
The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate
advantage over the rest of the population.
The flood of precise information
What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes.
That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen* and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain,* within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering,
does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments.
Bacon, “the father of experimental philosophy,”1 brought these motifs together. He despised the exponents of tradition, who substituted belief for knowledge and were as unwilling to doubt as they were reckless in supplying answers.
the beginning of the statistical turn
The “happy match” between human understanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature.
#nature
Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others,* capital.
tech as the method by which science is turned into capital
What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.
The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.
and the latest logic denounces the words of language, which bear the stamp of impressions, as counterfeit coin that would be better replaced by neutral counters.
bizlang
idola theatri
The moist, the undivided, the air and fire which they take to be the primal stuff of nature are early rationalizations precipitated from the mythical vision.
In the authority of universal concepts the Enlightenment detected a fear of the demons through whose effigies human beings had tried to influence nature in magic rituals.
From now on matter was finally to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties.
Once the movement is able to develop unhampered by external oppression, there is no holding it back. Its own ideas of human rights then fare no better than the older universals.
Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth.
tho seee wittgenstein's criticisms of frazer.
Despite the pluralism of the different fields of research, Bacon’s postulate of una scientia universalis7 is as hostile to anything which cannot be connected as Leibniz’s mathesis universalis is to discontinuity.
those things that 'cannot be connected' simply either do not exist or are wrong.
The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and arrangement, history to fact, things to matter.
see jared diamond + also see wb on histkoricism
Formal logic was the high school of unification. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable.
number became enlightenment’s canon.
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities.
All gods and qualities must be destroyed.
Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins—but therefore
also to narrate, record, explain.
data or numbers or information are not in themselves explanatory
Each ritual contains a representation of how things happen and of the specific process which is to be influenced by magic.
contracts to a monad, a mere reference point—and
Only those who subject themselves utterly pass muster with the gods. The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power
as the principle of all relationships. In face of the unity of such reason the distinction between God and man is reduced to an irrelevance, as reason has steadfastly indicated since the earliest critique of Homer. In their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man’s likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command.
Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted.
this is presumably the dialectic and relates to his point about enlightenment producing myth
I mean he did also say that enlightenment destroyed myth
also this is romanticism
Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them.
This identity constitutes the unity of nature.
interesting from a romance pov. monism and immanence are substrates of dominance? nature is fragmented in the Novalis sense.
mask. It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities.
Science puts an end to this. In it there is no specific representation: something which is a sacrificial animal cannot be a god. Representation gives way to universal fungibility.
the thing is the thing
every definite theoretical view is subjected to the annihilating criticism that it is only a belief,
it is "only a belief" in relation to "the facts of the matter". this is definitely a problem.
In myths, everything that happens must atone for the fact of having happened. It is no different in enlightenment: no sooner has a fact been established than it is rendered insignificant.
what the fuck you niggaz mean.
