PHIL479

Against this trend, Zinn contends that Ustinov and other artists have a right to voice their opinion and he emphasizes Ustinov's comments on expertise as regards war to reinforce this position: "[Ustinov] said that there are experts in little things but there are no experts in big things. There are experts in this fact and that fact but there are not moral experts."

Even when  I quote a good deal and take over terminologies I am clearly aware that my use of them often has little to do with the author's original meaning...I take over other theories. Why not? One should accept others according to their strengths and then see how one can go from there

salons we clearly see his interest in a communicative ideal later would become the core normative standard for his moral-political theory. This ideal is characterized by: the idea of inclusive critical discussion, unencumbered by social and economic pressures, where interlocutors treat each other as equals in a cooperative attempt to reach an understanding on matters of common concern.

Marcuse agreeably calculates that an average working person works 10 hours per day (this includes traveling to and from work and preparing for work), and requires 10 hours for the sleep and nourishment of his body. When doing this, he only has 4 remaining hours to do other things. Man thus "exists only part time" (47). He goes on to say that even this part time existence is mostly used for activities which are relaxing. The activities must be relaxing because of the the double effect of being tired from work coupled with the realization that one must rest in order to be prepared for work the following day. He argues that this system, which we call society, is not so much concerned with our own happiness, as it is with the insuring our role as a productive working cog in it. Marcuse stresses the idea of a conflict between the work demanded by society, and the happiness of the individual. In the second paragraph of the introduction, Marcuse states that "Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as a full time occupation"

"Civilization does not once and for all terminate a 'state of nature.' What civilization masters and represses--the claim of the pleasure principle--continues to exist in civilization itself. The unconscious retains the objectives of the defeated pleasure principle." (Eros & Civ, 15-16)

And so rather than becoming ineffectual like Adorno's individual, the pleasure principle, in its diversion through alternate outlets, ends up being the driving force for all human accomplishment

If justice can never be fully rendered because all normative and epistemological claims contain violence, then the imperative is the pursuit of this un-renderable justice, and with it, the least amount of violence

express what [he has] in mind purely without regard for ends and communication.

18th entry of Minima Moralia

Hegel’s emphatic but paradoxical way of stating this is to say that if the free market individualist acts “in [his] own self-interest, [he] simply does not know what [he] is doing, and if [he] affirms that all men act in their own self-interest, [he] merely asserts that all men are not really aware of what acting really amounts to.”

Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond.  With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”

holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.

Last year, Russia successfully sponsored an even sharper version of its cyber disarmament proposal at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China and four Central Asian countries as well as Russia. The accord defined "information war," in part, as an effort by a state to undermine another's "political, economic, and social systems." Using the term "mass psychologic [sic] brainwashing," the agreement said that the dissemination of information "harmful to the spiritual, moral and cultural spheres of other states" should be considered a "security threat."

Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind.  Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them. (21) The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one.  Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures.  Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schemata assigned to it. (21-22)

since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality which mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin defines aura as a work of art's "uniqueness" (223).  He further explains that aura, or "the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art, has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value" (224).  At this point, the value of authenticity in a work of art is apparent, since Benjamin argues that when authenticity is lost, the function of art changes from ritual to political (224).  According to Benjamin, the authenticity and authority of a work of art is jeopardized as it becomes mechanically reproduced and achieves a greater exhibition value, rather than a ritual value (226).

I believe the connection between Heidegger and Benjamin can be seen here, as both stress that works of art are authentic and ritual creations.

As I understand the use of the word 'Aura' here, it is the unique experience of a thing relative to its location in space and time.

In reproduction, there is a sort of separation that happens between the initial object and the reproduced one. What is not very clear to me is the example that Benjamin uses on page 222-223, where he writes about the notion of aura and nature.

"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.  It is more humiliating to discover how larger a number of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions..." (Freud, 22)

The only reason that we hold onto this make-believe fantasy is because it offers us a sense of happiness.

I want to seize upon this "oceanic feeling" that Freud rejects as a cause of religious sentiment and investigate its significance further. In fact, it seems to me that the inspiration for all poetry might very well have its source in this feeling

Wallace Stevens blurs the distinction between emotions, the inner world, and the environment, the outer world

That was not ours although we understood,

1. Freud departs from the consideration of the beautiful within a distinctly modern position, associating aesthetics with the field that studies the "feeling" of the beautiful. This is quite different from say the Greek conception of the beautiful. 2. This modern handling of the beautiful is also seen in Freud's separation of the beautiful from knowledge or truth, again by his emphasis on its lack of usefulness and status as a feeling. 3. Freud places the beautiful within a long list of defenses, sublimations, and repressions that redirect our true libidinal impulses. He counts beauty as a derivation of sexual gratification, as a milder form of substitute intoxication that helps make the pain of life and its refusal to grant maximum pleasure, acceptable.

Thus there is in Freud an interesting, if inverted, parallel to the Greek (especially Platonic) conception of Beauty here on the one hand, and a clear manifestation of its modern development through the rise of the science of aesthetics and positivism. Freud seems uncertain about what else psychoanalytic theory can say about beauty. However, if he were to borrow from this Greek tradition, rather than from its modern development, he might be tempted to suggest that beauty is not so much a distraction from the truth of psychoanalytic theory, but the light that shines in the very confrontation of the conscious with the unconscious, and the intoxicating emergence of a truth (not a substitute feeling) that we find there