4
Reason, which is essential to keep the machinery in motion, necessarily contains its other. When you start to think, you cannot stop short at purely reproductive thinking. This does not mean that things will really work out like that, but you cannot think without thinking that otherness. The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away. [...]
Reason, which is essential to keep the machinery in motion, necessarily contains its other. When you start to think, you cannot stop short at purely reproductive thinking. This does not mean that things will really work out like that, but you cannot think without thinking that otherness. The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away. [...]
15
a shaft of light from the telos falls onto labour. Basically, people are too short-sighted. They misinterpret the light that falls on labour from ultimate goals. Instead, they take labour qua labour as the telos and hence see their personal work success as that purpose. That is the secret. If they did not do that, such a thing as solidarity would be possible. A shaft of light from the telos falls on the means to achieve it. It is just as if instead of worshipping their lover they worship the house in which she dwells. That, incidentally, is the source of all poetry.
a shaft of light from the telos falls onto labour. Basically, people are too short-sighted. They misinterpret the light that falls on labour from ultimate goals. Instead, they take labour qua labour as the telos and hence see their personal work success as that purpose. That is the secret. If they did not do that, such a thing as solidarity would be possible. A shaft of light from the telos falls on the means to achieve it. It is just as if instead of worshipping their lover they worship the house in which she dwells. That, incidentally, is the source of all poetry.
23
Freedom is not the freedom to accumulate, but the fact that I have no need to accumulate.
Freedom is not the freedom to accumulate, but the fact that I have no need to accumulate.
53
ADORNO: The more superfluous a job of work is, the worse it becomes, the more it degenerates into ideology.
HORKHEIMER: And the more it is misapplied. Work today is not superfluous as long as people still go hungry. Work is perverted. Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick. Nowadays there is a false abolition of work.
ADORNO: It amounts to production for its own sake.
HORKHEIMER: I couldn’t care less about sending spacecraft to the moon.
ADORNO: There is nothing sacred about technology.
HORKHEIMER: Marx already has the idea that in a false society, technology develops wrongly.
ADORNO: The more superfluous a job of work is, the worse it becomes, the more it degenerates into ideology.
HORKHEIMER: And the more it is misapplied. Work today is not superfluous as long as people still go hungry. Work is perverted. Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick. Nowadays there is a false abolition of work.
ADORNO: It amounts to production for its own sake.
HORKHEIMER: I couldn’t care less about sending spacecraft to the moon.
ADORNO: There is nothing sacred about technology.
HORKHEIMER: Marx already has the idea that in a false society, technology develops wrongly.