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Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes - Volume 5

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
612 Seiten
Englisch
Books on Demanderschienen am12.01.20231. Auflage
"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 5" comprises the five books "Adorno in 60 Minutes", "Habermas in 60 Minutes", "Foucault in 60 Minutes", "Rawls in 60 Minutes", and "Popper in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? For Adorno it is the dialectical development of civilization from the Stone Age up to capitalism along with the alienation of Man from Nature that goes with it. Habermas, by contrast, sees in this historical process of development the chance to gradually improve society through the emancipatory power of language in communicative action. Foucault remains sceptical here and reveals to us the rigid structures in which we, as modern individuals, are trapped. Rawls develops a complex and compelling procedure for the creation of an ideally just state of affairs. Popper, finally, establishes a quite new theory of science whereby every scientific truth has only a provisional character so that it must eventually be relieved and replaced by better truths. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Dr Walther Ziegler is academically trained in the fields of philosophy, history and political science. As a foreign correspondent, reporter and newsroom coordinator for the German TV station ProSieben he has produced films on every continent. His news reports have won several prizes and awards. He has also authored numerous books in the field of philosophy. His many years of experience as a journalist mean that he is able to present the complex ideas of the great philosophers in a way that is both engaging and very clear. Since 2007 he has also been active as a teacher and trainer of young TV journalists in Munich, holding the post of Academic Director at the Media Academy, a University of Applied Sciences that offers film and TV courses at its base directly on the site of the major European film production company Bavaria Film. After the huge success of the book series "Great thinkers in 60 Minutes", he works as a freelance writer and philosopher.mehr
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Produkt

Klappentext"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 5" comprises the five books "Adorno in 60 Minutes", "Habermas in 60 Minutes", "Foucault in 60 Minutes", "Rawls in 60 Minutes", and "Popper in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? For Adorno it is the dialectical development of civilization from the Stone Age up to capitalism along with the alienation of Man from Nature that goes with it. Habermas, by contrast, sees in this historical process of development the chance to gradually improve society through the emancipatory power of language in communicative action. Foucault remains sceptical here and reveals to us the rigid structures in which we, as modern individuals, are trapped. Rawls develops a complex and compelling procedure for the creation of an ideally just state of affairs. Popper, finally, establishes a quite new theory of science whereby every scientific truth has only a provisional character so that it must eventually be relieved and replaced by better truths. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Dr Walther Ziegler is academically trained in the fields of philosophy, history and political science. As a foreign correspondent, reporter and newsroom coordinator for the German TV station ProSieben he has produced films on every continent. His news reports have won several prizes and awards. He has also authored numerous books in the field of philosophy. His many years of experience as a journalist mean that he is able to present the complex ideas of the great philosophers in a way that is both engaging and very clear. Since 2007 he has also been active as a teacher and trainer of young TV journalists in Munich, holding the post of Academic Director at the Media Academy, a University of Applied Sciences that offers film and TV courses at its base directly on the site of the major European film production company Bavaria Film. After the huge success of the book series "Great thinkers in 60 Minutes", he works as a freelance writer and philosopher.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783756872053
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum12.01.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten612 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Artikel-Nr.10717047
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

Adorno s Great Discovery
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) counts still today as one of the most charismatic and intellectually imposing thinkers in the whole history of philosophy. Already during his lifetime he exerted great influence on the student movements that so deeply marked the post-war German Federal Republic and indeed on the intellectual climate of this young republic in general. No other German intellectual of the period between 1959 and 1969 lectured so frequently on public radio and TV channels as did Adorno.

As did Sartre in France, Adorno became, in Germany, a charismatic point of orientation for student protestors and indeed for the New Left as a whole. He also resembled Sartre in other respects: both men were small and stocky, wore horn-rimmed glasses to correct their overstrained sight, and were known to have conducted many affairs with attractive women. His lectures, that many students from other parts of Europe and even from America travelled thousands of miles to attend, were always packed - though very few of those who attended them could honestly claim to have understood all that they heard there. The immensely complex lines of reasoning spun out at the lectern by the little bald man in horn-rimmed glasses, and such strenuously abstract books of his as the late masterpiece Negative Dialectics, are still looked on today in Germany as intellectual hurdles that only the greatest intellectual athletes can hope to clear.

His work contains, among other things, a rigorous critique of the capitalist system, so that he is often considered to have prepared the ground for the great wave of social protest that shook many countries in 1968. There is certainly some truth to this, even if he was dismayed by many aspects of this great revolt that broke out, also at his own German university, in the year before his death and refused, to the disappointment of some of his admirers, to play the role of a leader of this movement.

Adorno s central idea is a paradoxical and provocative one. Modern capitalist society has gone entirely and fundamentally astray. Individuals in this society enjoy, indeed, unprecedented advantages in terms of mobility, technology, medical care and other forms of prosperity; but at the same time we have lost, collectively, all that makes life really worth living, namely: a sense for Nature (including, perhaps most importantly, for the natural beings that we ourselves are) and, in the end, even the ability to love:

This, modern Man s loss of the ability to love is, Adorno believes, a direct consequence of the commodity and consumer society. Human beings become calculating and calculable because in a society based solely on exchange value everything and everyone has a fixed and determined price. Every commodity, and first and foremost the commodity that is an individual s labour-power, is and has to be carried to market and sold. This leads, in the end, to human actions and relations appearing to those involved in them as external, exchangeable things that they themselves, as humans, have no real part in. In a society where nothing is ever done unless it is paid for, the once-natural concern for the fate of others gradually vanishes. Everyone fights for their own advantage alone. Me Incorporated becomes a symbol of our modern world.

What s more, Adorno is not criticizing here just the fact that in market societies like ours everything is appraised in terms of supply and demand; he is also pointing out that consumer societies make it their job to awaken ever new artificial needs in the consumer, so that commodities become, in these societies, fetishes that enjoy an almost religious veneration.

For many people in today s society, for example, a car is much more than just a means of getting around. They invest their own identity in this lifeless object to such an extent that they derive their whole sense of their value as human beings from the make and quality of car they own. Capitalism turns individuals into dependent beings, penetrating and deforming their whole character. Adorno believed so strongly in this notion of our having been wholly and entirely distorted by the world we have created that he included in his most personal work, the Minima Moralia, a pithy little thesis that turned completely on its head the famous thesis of a philosopher, Hegel, whom he greatly admired but who had taken, in the end, a positive and even apologetic stance toward the modern world around him. The truth is the whole , Hegel had concluded in the 1820s; just over a hundred years later, Adorno s conclusion was:

This general suspicion cast upon modern capitalist society in its entirety earned Adorno the reputation of being the most significant of the various representatives of what is called Critical Theory , a body of thought which did indeed set itself the task of analysing and critiquing capitalist society not just, as Marx and the early Marxists had, in its economic basis but in all its social and cultural ramifications. Since all the thinkers associated with this current in social philosophy had been associated, in the 1920s and 30s, as teachers or researchers with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, Critical Theory is also sometimes referred to as the Frankfurt School .

The Frankfurt School thinkers included, besides Adorno, such writers famous in their own right as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. These philosophers all sharply criticized the ossified structures of post-war capitalist societies. In practicing this critique they still made frequent reference to Marx and continued to describe themselves as philosophical materialists .

But in the face of the degeneration of Soviet Marxism into Stalinism and of the transformation, in the West, of the proletarian more and more into a consumer , the Critical Theorists came to consider world communist revolution as a less and less realistic prospect. They replaced Marx s notions of the inevitability of the worldwide overthrow of the existing order and the imminent realization of a classless society with the notion of the need for a permanent critique of existing society. Hence the name Critical Theory .

It was in exile from his German homeland that Adorno authored, together with Max Horkheimer, his friend since their student days, the book that counts as the primary work of Critical Theory: The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The two men, like the other prominent Critical Theorists Fromm and Marcuse, had had to flee to the USA, due to their Jewish origins, when Hitler seized power in 1933. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the country that gave them refuge, counts still today as one of the most important standard works of sociology and social philosophy.

The book represented a watershed in social philosophy because it was the first to develop a critique of critique . Enlightenment , embodied in the works of such great early-modern thinkers as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume and Locke, had been, itself, a great enterprise of social critique.

These 17th and 18th century Enlighteners critiqued feudalism, the divine right of kings, religion and all superstition and aspired to free human beings once and for all from all the old irrational constraints passed down from the Middle Ages. Who should rule the people if not the people themselves? ran one of their progressive rallying cries. The Enlightenment, in other words, was the great age of critical thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer returned from their American exile, however, bearing with them a great suspicion of this generally accepted truth. The whole critically emancipatory movement that was the early modern Enlightenment signified for Europe, they now argued, not just the welcome opening of a new era but also a sort of calamity. It too, then, needed to be subjected to a rigorous critique. The Enlightenment era, indeed, had seen much progress in political, intellectual and technical fields; but all these improvements had had a troubling flip side to them.

Already the opening sentence of the first chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment sums up the problem:

The Enlightenment, so ran Adorno s argument here, had originally pursued the progressive aim of relieving human beings of the fears that had tormented them through so many dark centuries: fear of Nature, of wild animals and of failed harvests, as well as irrational, superstitious fears such as that of the Last Judgment, the Apocalypse or the Devil. The Enlightenment did indeed aspire to let the light of science and reason shine on and illuminate every area of human life, driving out and replacing that irrational belief whereby our destinies are determined by imponderable higher powers.

Enlightenment marks the end of the thousands of years in which peasants gazed fearfully up at the sky and made sacrifices to the thunder-god to dissuade him from ruining their crops with hail or heavy rain and the beginning of an era in which storm-clouds are scientifically dispersed by the release of chemicals from aeroplanes. In our enlightened age Nature is no longer experienced as all-powerful and threatening. Rather, our modern combine-harvesters, pesticides, fungicides and factory-farming methods have made of it something that we completely dominate and control. And yet today, in the...
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Autor

Dr Walther Ziegler is academically trained in the
fields of philosophy, history and political science.
As a foreign correspondent, reporter and newsroom coordinator for the German TV station ProSieben he has produced films on every continent. His news reports have won several prizes and awards. He has also authored numerous books in the field of philosophy. His many years of experience as a journalist mean that he is able to present the complex ideas of the great philosophers in a way that is both engaging and very clear. Since 2007 he has also been active as a teacher and trainer of young TV journalists in Munich, holding the post of Academic Director at the Media Academy, a University of Applied Sciences that offers film and TV courses at its base directly on the site of the major European film production company Bavaria Film. After the huge success of the book series "Great thinkers in 60 Minutes", he works as a freelance writer and philosopher.