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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Via imomus, I recently came across Peter Sloterdijk, and his Critique of Cynical Reason:"Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain... The phrase "enlightened false consciousness" goes to the heart of the matter: by a process of education--an education in disillusionment—consciousness attains a higher order of falsity, where insight into the cynical workings of the world is gained, but the means to resist it are not. Instead, "the compulsion to survive and desire to assert itself have demoralized enlightened consciousness. It is afflicted with the compulsion to put up with preestablished relations that it finds dubious, to accommodate itself to them, and finally even to carry out their business."
It's an interesting concept though, as is usually the case with such theories, it is considerably better at dissecting social ills than at proposing remedies. Sloterdijk's remedy is based to a large extent is Heidegger's idea of the authentic self, applied in this case to the proletariat, while the bourgeoisie are subject to contradictions and struggles between self conception and the ruling ideology of capitalist society are unavoidable. Thi strikes me as the converse of Anthony Giddens's ideas of post-traditional identity, which has to be negotiated and chosen rather than being imposed in the way traditions, authentic or otherwise, dictated. Equally, as with the original idea of false consciousness, it's doubtful that much of the proletariat would turn down the opportunity to experience those contradictions.Labels: Culture, Philosophy
posted by Richard 1:01 pm
