Post Theme 2

Reflections

On week 2 of our philosophical outings, the past lecture can really be categorized as one of these history lessons that accomplish to give life to a certain episode in time and transfer its events vividly back into our minds. To hear about the context of the given texts altered my perspective on them. Moreover, it was helpful to see how every political and cultural development prior led up to the retaliation of the technical movement and resulted in the collapse of the progressive idea.

Enlightenment - based on reason, rationality, knowledge, science - was apparently not able to enhance the world, but resulted in political regime, the cultural commercialization and the development of mass media.

Benjamin Walter wrote the text in question in 1936, when his vision of the world was shaped by the present and rising power of Nazi Deutschland. Just eight years later, Adorno and Horkheimer were in no need anymore to substantiate the evils of the past, but focused mainly on the current developments in America, where society deemed to stay blind and – despite their good living standards and educational system – did not act upon reason at all. 

According to them, the freedom of media neither gave people truth nor did it result in ideas put into action. Art was just another way of directing, and even manipulating people.

Benjamin, meanwhile, thought art had massive social revolutionary potential, because now the difference of class (the Bourgeoisie, the Proletariat) was diminished and everyone could experience art. Portraying 'ordinary people' substituted a newfound dignity in the working class.
If Benjamin would live in our presence, he would also credit nowadays-social media the power to change the worldview. Media scholars might agree with him, saying that "Online socialization may encourage very different behaviors and cultivate individuals with very different values than past forms of socialization" (Swigger, 2012: 590).

The technical reproduction also changed the way we perceive the aura of an art object. The interaction with the art object changed from being based on spiritual experience, on being mainly based on vision. There again, the privilege of experiencing is gone, because you and me can look at our art print of Monet at the wall. This resulted, for instance, in a change of perception when visiting a museum, because likely your awe of the object is diminished. The beauty of art, though, is now liberated and free for everyone.

Moreover, the past seminar could also clear things up for me concerning the term Nominalism. Nominalists argue against concepts, because they are made up; in their mind, everything is individual and is its own self. Putting this on a scale from "individual" to "abstract", objects are all individual things, not at all classifiable. Their thinking can be visualised by the following example also implying the risks that are tied to conceptualisation.
Films are usually classified into genres due to their supposedly comparable content. However, just because a movie plot revolves around a couple and contains humorous elements, it cannot be defined as a romantic comedy. By putting these the stories into one distinct group, people start to assess the film by its created label with certain associations (powerful, weak, interesting, boring), which result into prejudgment and restriction.

In our group discussion, we were particularly stuck with the question if naturalism argues in the same direction as enlightenment. The answer is that both of these mind-sets are to some extent agreeing with each other, because they both promote empirical thinking (enlightenment by grounding ideas with experiments; nominalism by focussing on counting, describing, weighing things of).


Swigger, N., 2012. The Online Citizen: Is Social Media Changing Citizens’ Beliefs About Democratic Values?. Political Behavior, Vol. 35, Nr. 3, p. 589-603.