Philosophy
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R.C. Smith Over the course of the last few years, I’ve been re-reading a lot of books on the enlightenment (mostly in my spare time), including many notable texts by such prominent enlightenment thinkers as Kant, Hume, Descartes and so on. My interest in the philosophes dates back to when I was a teenager, where…
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Ethics of Experience In think, ultimately, what we read in The Gods in Whom They Trusted is a set of philosophical formulations that take the human tendency to formulate faith-based constructs, fundamental principles of “life direction”, “core or ultimate convictions”, or “visions of life” – very much in the philosophical sense of absolute first principles – as universal. In other…
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Introduction I recently read through and had time to consider Arnold De Graaff’s The Gods in Whom They Trusted: The Disintegrative Effects of Capitalism – A Foundation for Transitioning to a New Social World (2016). This book in particular is one, I think, that can best described as being part of the broader core humanistic…
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[An earlier unedited draft of this article was written with contributions by Arnold De Graaff. It has since become single authored and has been revised, updated and shortened.] “The Enlightenment”, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously wrote, “understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings” (Adorno…
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Charles Baudelaire wrote in the prose poem Le Joueur Généreux (The Generous Gambler), “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. Baudelaire, the father of modern poetry, had a keen eye for the gritty details of human life. Many of his poems focused on exposing the ugly side of…
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Introduction In spite of the fact that one of the primary aims of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1964/2002) is not to do away with the liberating force of the Enlightenment,[1] it nevertheless remains important that we address concerns about the totalizing propensity of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “domination of nature” (Naturbeherrschung) thesis,[2] which threatens to undermine whatever…
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Introduction There has been a noticeable increase in writing on the Frankfurt School in recent years. With a steady stream of formerly unpublished writings, new translations, and secondary literature being made available (especially in English), the Frankfurt School has undergone a bit of a revival. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the backdrop to…
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So much of my younger writing was written like an existential treatise. It sought to analyse patterns and trends in relation to human behaviour throughout history, focusing in particular on the reoccurrence of popular forms of orthodoxy and the epistemology behind them. In simple terms, it sought to critique the tendency toward the “absolute”, in…
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The theme of self-deceptive thought amounts to little more than the human ability to function in the mode of believing a particular lie whilst simultaneously not believing that lie. In Being and Nothingness Sartre tackles this human complexity – the human ability to be self-deceptive, through what he considers to be the phenomenon of ‘bad…