![]() ![]() ![]() We seem to have reached the era of mathematics and exact calculation, but this leaves us with no sense of control or meaningfulness, and in the face of crisis and systemic contradictions in the now global society we tend to regress and rely on older, more primitive forms of sense-making and coping: magic, mythology and metaphysics - even ritual behaviour. What Horkheimer and Adorno are trying to capture and reflect is the very process of rationality backlashing into irrationality. It is a critical view of the process of civilization, economy and enlightenment as such, a critical view of the seemingly self-evident notion of pure reason, science and technology. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimers modification of Immanuel Kants thesis that Enlightenment means the end of the intellectual immaturity of humans and the. Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is a foremost text of critical theory, grapples with precisely this account of reason. I find that the central philosophical critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment runs deeper than just a critique of contemporary (and perhaps now out-dated) media technique and cultural habits. Theodor Adorno was one of the foremost continental philosophers of the twentieth century. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (first published 1944) and bringing it to bear on the digital era in general and in particular on the phenomenon of modern social media. My reflections in this paper concern revitalizing the critical potential of certain core concepts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. ![]()
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