Z.B.: A yet darker foreboding gnawed at philosophers´ hearts: that people might simply dislike being free and resent the prospect of emancipation, given the hardships which the exercise of freedom might incur.
Important reading: “Odysseus und die Schweine: das Unbehagen an der Kultur”, by Lion Feuchtwanger.
Herbert Sebastian Agar: “The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear”
Z.B. on Marcuse: Other popular addresses for similar complaints have been the “embourgeoisement” of the underdog (the substitution of “having” for “being”, and “being” for “acting”, as the uppermost values) and mass culture (a collective brain-damage caused by a “culture industry” planting a thirst for entertainment and amusement in the place which – as Matthew Arnold would say – shall be occupied by the passion for sweetness and light and the passion for making them prevail).
Adorno & Horkheimer: Enlightenment is a project of “sinister potential”
Z.B.: Being modern came to mean, as it means today, being unable to stop and even less able to stand still.
Ulrich Beck: “How one lives becomes a biographical solution to systemic contradictions”
Z.B.: The modernizing impulse, in any of its renditions, means the compulsive critique of reality. Privatization of the impulse means compulsive self-critique born of perpetual self-disaffection: being an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one´s own misery, seeking the causes of one´s own defeats nowhere except in one´s own indolence and sloth, and looking for no remedies other than trying harder and harder still… The table so to speak has been turned: the task of critical theory has been reversed. That task used to be the defense of private autonomy from the advancing troops of the public sphere, smarting under the oppressive rule of the omnipotent impersonal state and its many bureaucratic tentacles of their smaller-scale replicas. The task is now to defend the vanishing public realm, or rather to refurnish and repopulate the public space fast emptying owning to the desertion on both sides: the exit of the interest citizen, and the escape of real power into the territory which, for all that the extant democratic institutions are able to accomplish, can only be described as an outer space.
Adorno: Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated… Exile is to the thinker what home is to the naïve; it is in exile that the thinking person´s detachment, his habitual way of life, acquires survival value.
Adorno & Horkheimer (Dialectics of the Enlightenment): “The history of the old religions and schools like that of the modern parties and revolutions teaches us that the price for survival is practical involvement, the transformation of ideas into domination”.
Kojève: The truth of philosophy might be indeed unaffected by history, but it does not follow that it can steer clear of history… As long as the gap between the truth of philosophy and the reality of the world remains unfulfilled – the state takes the form of tyranny
Z.B.: …Not only does the individualization appear to be a one-way-street, but it seems to destroy as it proceeds all the tools which could conceivably be used in implementing its erstwhile objectives.
Z.B. on Daniel Cohen and Microsoft: The passengers of the “Light Capitalism” aircraft, on the other hand, discover to their horror that the pilot´s cabin is empty and that there is no way to extract from the mysterious black box labeled “automatic pilot” any information about where the plane is flying, where it is going to land, who is to choose the airport, and whether there are any rules which would allow the passengers to contribute to the safety of the arrival.
Tony Blair: Politics has been diminished to a gossip column
Z.B.: As I argued in “Life in Fragments”, postmodern society engages its members primarily in their capacity as consumers rather than producers. That difference is seminal.
Z.B. on Health: Health, like all other normative concepts of the society of producers, draws and guards the boundary between “norm” and “abnormality”. “Health” is the proper and desirable state of the human body and spirit – a state which (at least in principle) can be more or less exactly described and once described also precisely measured. It refers to a bodily and psychical condition which allows the satisfaction of the demands of the socially designed and assigned role – and those demands tend to be constant and steady. “To be healthy” means in most cases to the employable: to be able to perform properly on the factory floor, to carry the load with which the work may routinely burden the employee´s physical and psychical endurance.
Camus: “Everyone tries to make his life a work of art”
Z.B.: The meeting of strangers is an event without past. More often than not, it is also an event without a future (it is expected to be, hoped to be, free of a future), a story most certainly “not to be continued”, a one-off chance, to be consummated in full while it lasts and on the spot, without delay and without putting the unfinished business off to another occasion.
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