German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century 1st Edition by Julian Young ISBN 9781138220010 1138220019

PART I: Frankfurt

1. Weber: Rationalization, disenchantment and charisma

Bureaucratization

Loss of freedom

Life in the iron cage

Loss of meaning

Disenchantment and loss of meaning

Charisma and change

Weber as transmitter of the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment

2. Horkheimer and Adorno: The irrationality of reason

The Marxist heritage

What is critical theory?

Traditional theory

Critical theory

Loss of meaning

The rise and fall of objective reason

The way we are now

Two objections to the alleged meaninglessness of modernity

Loss of freedom

The culture industry

How dated is Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry?

The irrationality of enlightenment

Is negation enough?

The distorting effect of Marxism

Max Weber’s self-deception

3. Habermas: In defence of enlightenment

Habermas’ response to his predecessors

Good rationalization

Discourse ethics

Problems with discourse ethics

Good rationalization and the lifeworld

Bad rationalization: system

Uncoupling

Colonization

Consequences of colonization

The task

Loss of meaning

Loss of freedom

4. Marcuse: Eros and utopia

Diagnosis

Advanced industrial society’s methods of self-preservation

Soul control: the media

Further methods of soul control

One-dimensionality

Eros and Civilization: why Freud?

What Freud says

Freud’s mistakes

Aggression, the death instinct, and the Nirvana principle

Fantasy as the vision of a new world

The content of fantasy

Is Marcuse utopian in a pejorative sense?

Closing the gap between here and there

Kant, Schiller, and the aesthetic basis of a repression-free society

The recovery of ‘polymorphous sexuality’

Non-repressive sublimation

The role of reason in utopia

Non-repressive civilization and nature

The conquest of death

The lineaments of utopia

Hedonism, and the meaning of life

PART II: Freiburg

5. Husserl: Phenomenology and the crisis of humanity

What is phenomenology?

The phenomenological method

The results of phenomenology

The lifeworld

Why is phenomenology important?

The ‘crisis of humanity’ and the ‘crisis of science’

Combating irrationalism

The ‘telos’ of Western history

The wrong turning taken by Western science

Why is scientism mistaken?

How does phenomenology ‘solve’ the ‘crisis of humanity’?

Can the ontology of the lifeworld really ground a universal morality?

Is Husserl’s diagnosis of the ‘crisis of humanity’ correct?

6. Early Heidegger: Existential phenomenology

Being and Time: the project

Method

Being-in

World

Being-with-others

Affectedness and thrownness

Digression on poetry

Projection, understanding, and interpretation

Assertion

Truth

Care

Inauthenticity and the One

Idle talk, ambiguity, and curiosity

Falling

Anxiety

Death

Conscience and guilt

Resoluteness

Temporality as the ontological meaning of care

Temporality and historicality

Heritage

7. Gadamer: Truth versus method

What is philosophical hermeneutics?

Gadamer’s motivation

The aestheticization of art

Play as the clue to the ontology of the artwork

Novels and paintings

Romantic hermeneutics

Gadamer’s critique of Romantic hermeneutics

The hermeneutical circle

Understanding is never final

The rehabilitation of prejudice and the authority of tradition

Text and tradition

Fusion of horizons

Fusion and ethical tradition

Criticisms

Self-refutation?

The historical sense

Does Gadamer confuse interpretation with reconstruction?

Does Gadamer confuse ‘thrownness’ with ‘tradition’?

Is Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy too conservative, incapable of criticizing oppressive ideologies?

8. Arendt: The human condition

The human condition

Labour

Work

Difficulties in the work–labour distinction

Difficulties in Arendt’s account of work

World

World as a precondition of individuality

Action

The political

The fragility of human affairs

The motive for action

Authentic politics

Arendt’s critique of modernity

World alienation

Modern science and world alienation

Scepticism, Cartesian doubt, and world alienation

Capitalism and world alienation

Technology and world alienation

The rise of ‘society’

The way we are now

What is wrong with the way we are?

Loss of freedom

Loss of meaning

Gesellschaft versus Gemeinschaft

Canovan’s interpretation

Tradition

Authority

Our loss of tradition

What is to be done?

Arendt’s response to the ‘crisis in education’

The irreparability of the ‘thread of tradition’

Ethical tradition versus Hegelian tradition

9. Later Heidegger: Re-enchantment

Truth and the turning

Metaphysics

The historicizing of being

Homelessness

The violence of modern technology

Loss of the gods

Anxiety and death

The turning

The return of the gods

Becoming capable of ‘the good death’

Gentle technology

The fourfold

Poetry and enlightenment

The ethics of dwelling

Heidegger and Weber

Afterword

Bibliography

Index