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Old 05-08-2008, 08:54 PM
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Dialectic of Enlightenment

Yeah, this pretty much simplifies it even enough for the rationalists to get the point fairly objectively.

Quote:
Dialectic of Enlightenment, is the core text of Marxist Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment.
In essence, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the Enlightenment turned "magical" culture, which looked for associations, analogies, and relationships, into a scientific culture, which sought to reduce everything to the irreducible, to base units of measurement, to the smallest particles, and as often as possible to numbers. This resulted in an inability to address problems of relationships, and often of anything to do with the irrational (e.g., sexuality, emotion, etc.), as well as larger cultural concerns that could not be reduced to the individual. The ideological structure had the tendency, common to most political ideologies, of arguing for its own accuracy. This kind of enlightenment thinking, they argue, always implicitly claims that anything that is not reducible or quantifiable is simply not worth paying attention to. It is immaterial in the metaphorical sense: it might as well not exist. Thus, concepts as divergent as subjectivity (which cannot be measured or objectified) and collective action (which is always understood as merely the action of many individuals) cannot be understood because precisely what needs to be understood is relational and/or subjective. This "magical" versus "scientific" thinking is easily recognizable in the two solitudes of contemporary Humanities and Sciences research in universities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment
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