The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog
On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963).
How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno (armed with Marx and Freud) thinks that our “mass culture” is imposed from the top down to lull us into being submissive workers.
End song: “All Too Familiar,” from around 1992 with all instruments by Mark Linsenmayer, released on The MayTricks..
On Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), plus Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1963).
How does the entertainment industry affect us? Adorno (armed with Marx and Freud) thinks that our “mass culture” is imposed from the top down to brainwash us into being submissive workers.
End song: “All Too Familiar,” from around 1992 with all instruments by Mark Linsenmayer, released on The MayTricks.
On Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956). What is love, really? This psychoanalyst of the Frankfurt school thinks that real love is not something one “falls” into, but is an art, an activity, and doing it well requires a disciplined openness and psychological health.
End songs: “Kimmy” (1995) and “Kimmy 2002” by Mark Lint.
V-Day Special! On Fromm’s The Art of Loving (1956). What is love, really? This psychoanalyst of the Frankfurt school thinks that real love is not something one “falls” into, but is an art, an activity, and doing it well requires a disciplined openness and psychological health. Love is the answer to the deep human need to rid ourself of isolation, but a mere sexual union won’t provide real intimacy. To connect the center of your being with the center of another’s being, you need to really know yourself and know the other, and this knowing requires an overall openness that amounts to a love of humanity, a feeling of oneness with nature, and an overall orientation toward the good, which is what he considers a mature take on “love of God.”
End songs: “Kimmy” (1995) and “Kimmy 2002” by Mark Lint.
Of all the first-generation Frankfurt School writers, Herbert Marcuse offered the kind of Critical Theory most concerned with revolution. It should come as no surprise, then, that Marcuse generated condemnation from across the political spectrum.
