Horkheimer & Adorno on The Odyssey (Part One)

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Introduction to Close Reads

1:46This is Close Reads. A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeyer. It's another day, another reading. Let's return to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectical Enlightenment. On the Partial Examined Life, we have just released an episode on Habermas that talks specifically about this Excursus I, Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment.

2:16So, we had, on this show, talked about the first half of the first essay, The Concept of Enlightenment.

Enlightenment and Myth

2:24Do you remember much about that?

2:28I think with regard to this specifically, Habermas recounts this section of the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, where Odysseus is representative of someone who, in a sense, is trying to escape his mythic origins, right? To become a subjectivity. And in doing so, their thesis is that in doing so, he just re-entrenches himself in the mythological position, and that's what the Enlightenment does.

3:05So, the Enlightenment is trying to escape the position in which, I think the mythological position is the position in which power is ascendant and tradition is ascendant, right? We're governed by these external forces rather than by individual decision. I forget how, particularly in the case of Odysseus, they think that he's getting drawn back into that. Right, he's making various sacrifices in order to get home.

3:38I know, I remember that much. So, from our, I actually did listen to the latter, the first part of our third hour of recording on The Concept of Enlightenment.

Critique of Modernity

3:48And, well, overall, it was a critique of modernity as thinking that it has escaped mythic thinking, but it actually just still uses mythic thinking. So, it's really a failure. But, specifically, in this third hour, we were talking about how they were blaming Nazism on the Enlightenment, which you had issues with, because usually that's taken to be a regressive retreat from Enlightenment values. It is a romantic movement, but yet this reduction of everybody, reduction of everything, all value to instrumental value, reduction of everybody to mere units.

4:28And so, you could get into the Marxist, everything is reduced to a commodity and ultimately to money exchange. And so, you could see just the general devaluing of human life that we are, right, even just the idea right now that you could, when you're making calculations about public policy, you could come up with a dollar amount. How much is a human life worth, right? That whole economic way of thinking that we, that modernity, it's not an accidental feature of.

Odysseus and Enlightenment

5:01That's, that's part of, so they were critiquing that and, yeah, so this is a strangely structured book in that the concept of Enlightenment was sort of setting out the basic thing. But we were, we were a little annoyed that it seemed, you know, we didn't decide not to read the rest of it because it seemed like it was just going to go on this historical tour, meditating on the ancients. We weren't really sure what the point was, well, part of that is now going to be this, excursus one is on Odysseus, excursus two, Juliet, or Enlightenment and Morality.

5:36I, I don't know if that's Romeo and Juliet, but probably not because it's spelled differently. And then, then the culture industry that we actually talked about on Partial Exam and Life. Yeah, and just to say a little bit more about this section in particular, which I had just given a very rough gloss of, but now I have my notes open from Habermas. The idea is that Odysseus pays a kind of price for each episode in which he's, he's learning to master danger and he's developing a subjectivity and his ego and he quote, the ego gains its identity and to, and takes leave of the bliss of the archaic union with internal and external nature, internal nature being the instincts and the sirens song represents that.

6:24But with each episode of that, which each ego development and development of subjectivity, there's this sacrifice of right internal nature because we repress the instincts, but also we give in more and more to this instrumental reason, reason for the sake of domination of nature. And in the end, of course, that the ideological critique is that going to be that everything, the reason itself gets reduced to mere power and to instrumental reason for Adorno, which is not something that Habermas liked.

7:00So I actually, in looking ahead, it looks like Juliette is a character in Marquis de Sade. So something we have not read, but the name doesn't seem to come up for the first 10 pages. It's mostly about Kant. So, so maybe we'll be, maybe we'll want to look at that after this, but let's get going on this one.

The Sirens and Civilization

7:23All right. Just as the story of the sirens illustrates the intertwinement of myth and rational labor, of course it does. That's what it was designed to do. The Odyssey as a whole bears witness to the dialectic of enlightenment. In its oldest stratum, especially the epic shows clear links to myth. The adventures are drawn from popular tradition. But as the Homeric spirit takes over and organizes the myths, it comes into contradiction with them.

7:58The familiar equation, equation of epic and myth, which in any case has been undermined by recent classical philology, proves wholly misleading when subjected to philosophical critique. The two concepts diverge. They mark two phases of an historical process, which are still visible at the joints where editors have stitched the epic together. The Homeric discourse creates a universality of language if it does not already presuppose it.

8:29It disintegrates the hierarchical order of society through the exoteric form of its depiction, even and especially when it glorifies that order. The celebration of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus is already a nostalgic stylization of what can no longer be celebrated. And the hero of the adventures turns out to be the prototype of the bourgeois individual, whose concept originates in the unwavering self-assertion of which the protagonist, driven to wander the earth, is the primeval model.

9:00Finally, the epic, which in terms of the philosophy of history is the counterpart of the novel, exhibits features reminiscent of that genre. And the venerable cosmos of the Homeric world, a world charged with meaning, reveals itself as an achievement of classifying reason, which destroys myth by virtue of the same rational order which is used to reflect it.

Epic and Novel

9:24Wow, I've never heard anyone say that the epic is a counterpart of the novel. Usually it's contrasted with the novel, because in a novel, people get inner lives, and in the Homeric epic, they don't. There's not really that much dimensionality to characters in a Homeric epic, or in myths more generally. Well, what is this, uh, the discourse creates a universality of language, if it does not already presuppose it.

9:56It disintegrates the hierarchical order of society through the exoteric form of its depiction, glorifying that order. Yeah, I'm not sure what this means. I mean, there's something bad about the universality of language sounds like that turning everything into a common currency and the fact that it was, you know, some, I guess the contrast would be local versions of the story. Once you get, this is the first mass media, right? In the culture industry, you're going to critique mass media that inevitably something gets dumbed down.

10:30The good old days of the oral tradition, this writing these days, this writing things down has ruined everything. Everyone's got their heads buried in scrolls. Back in the day, we just remembered everything. Well, and you could say, maybe there was a time when each local poet came up with their own stuff, their own versions of things, and just, oh, no, no, you're not telling it right. You're left out this part, you know, so the ossification of these folktales into something that is, even though it was still oral tradition, but is standardized and has to be memorized word for word.

11:11That does seem like it is a degradation, even though it's an advance in another respect. Yeah, so that's what he means by universality of language, you know, he says the editors have stitched the epic together, right, from different oral traditions, and it's all been homogenized into one account, and maybe Homer is just the person or people who did this, right? They took an existing oral tradition and standardized it, essentially.

11:43So the disintegration of the hierarchical order of society through the exoteric form of depiction, what is the exoteric form of depiction? Is that what the oral tradition was doing? I mean, it's certainly, I can figure it out from context. I mean, from the sound, from the genealogy of the word. So exoteric meaning, yes, meaning, you know. Esoteric. Public, external, understood by the general population, rather than initiated few.

12:13So this sort of assimilates the poem, not, you know, away from the general populace and towards a learned few, maybe. Maybe that's the argument here. It disintegrates the hierarchical order. I'm still a little confused by that, because you would think it would be creating a hierarchy. So I wonder if we should, instead of proceeding to the next paragraph, go back to where he talks about the sirens, so we actually get the introduction of Homer. So I see that is 10 pages prior, and it's not the whole section.

12:48We would just read a couple pages here and then jump back to where we are. So page 25 or PDF 46. Sure, go for it. I love it.

Homer and Enlightenment

12:57Okay. Remember, before the internet, what was it called? Meta text or something when people were playing around on Macs with linking, and there was a word for this. Choose your own adventure style, moving through a text. Anyway, it was all the rage, and then, of course, there was the internet. All right, go ahead. Well, just so right prior to this in the previous paragraph, I see human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self. With the spread of bourgeois commodity, economy, the dark horizon of myth is illuminated by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new barbarism are germinating.

13:37Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell. So that's a great, concise capturing the spirit of the three hours that we spent on this text. Okay, so right after that, then, here we, the intertwinement of myth, power, and labor is preserved in one of the tales of Homer. Book 12 of the Odyssey tells how Odysseus sailed past the sirens. Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past, but the hero exposed to it has come of age in suffering.

14:08In the multitude of mortal dangers which he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the person, have been hardened. The realms of time have been separated for him like water, earth, and air. The tide of what has been receded from the rock of the present and the future lies veiled in cloud on the horizon. What Odysseus has left behind him has passed into the world of shades. So close is the self to the primeval myth from whose embrace it has rested itself that its own lived past becomes a mythical prehistory.

14:43It seeks to combat this by a fixed order of time. The tripartite division is intended to liberate the present moment from the power of the past by banishing the latter, right, the power of the past, beyond the absolute boundary of the irrecoverable and placing it as usable knowledge in the service of the present. The urge to rescue the past as something living instead of using it as the material of progress has been satisfied only in art, in which even history as a representation of past life is included.

15:15As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge and thus exclude itself from praxis, excludes itself, yeah, it is tolerated by social praxis in the same way as pleasure. But the siren's song has not yet been deprived of a power as art. They have knowledge, quote, of all that has ever happened on this fruitful earth, unquote, and especially of what has befallen Odysseus himself, quote, for all we know that the Argives and the Trojans suffered on the broad plain of Troy by the will of the gods, unquote,

15:46by directly invoking the recent past and with the irresistible promise of pleasure which their song contains, the sirens threatened the patriarchal order, which gives each person back their life only in exchange for their full measure of time. This paragraph goes on for the entire rest of the page 26. So let's insert a paragraph break here. Okay. What's he saying here? The stuff about the past, I mean, is he referring to the structure of the Odyssey in which, right,

16:17we start out with him in the present, trapped on Cersei's island, and then he gets away from it, and then he goes somewhere else and he tells his whole story, basically. So much of it is a flashback, right, which is just bad writing. I'm just kidding. So much of it is a flashback, and then we bring it back to the present, and he gets home and slaughters everyone, and everyone lives happily ever after. So is that the tripart division he's talking about here, intended to liberate the present moment from the power of the past?

16:51So Odysseus, instead of being simply driven by past circumstance, in a way has mastered it. And when he tells that story to the, I forget their names, but on that island, when he tells that story, there's reason to believe it's not entirely accurate, and that's, like, very, very much Odysseus. So he puts the past to his own use for rhetorical purposes rather than simply being driven by it. So the tripartite division, the sentence before that, it's,

17:25the self is close to the primeval myth from whose embrace it has rested itself. So that's two. It seeks to combat this by a fixed order of time. So it's sort of, it sounds like it ego superego, more or less. The fixed order of time is the, and at the very end of what we read, by directly invoking the recent past with the irresistible promise of pleasure, sirens threaten the patriarchal order, which gives each person back their life

17:56in exchange for their full measure of time. So the patriarchal order is the fixed order of time. All of your labor must be converted into money. All of your free time, your whimsy must be put in service of the group. And threatening that is something that wants to draw you back to something more primitive. Primitive, I mean, it sounds like merely romantic, right? Because primitive life was probably not an orgy, a dream.

18:32It is horrible subsistence. Like, you know, the, the farm animals are what gives you, makes you get up at dawn. Or are we even talking pre-agricultural? You, you, uh, Lord of the flies, let's just hunt all day. No, no, I mean, it's, we're, agriculture has been around for a long time at this point, probably starting around 9,000 BC. But, but the mythical, what, what is the mythical past that's being, okay, the, the siren technology.

19:04I think it's, yeah, I, I think the, the most primitive myths with the ones that have already been surpassed are, are Neolithic, you know, air agricultural myths, like, you know, worshipping of the mother goddess, for instance, of, of mother earth, which gets replaced by, you know, this is all speculation, but, but gets replaced by more patriarchal mythology as, as time goes on. So the, the patriarchal mythology is subsequent to a more, um, a mythology that's more rooted

19:36in the agricultural, actually. So that's the more ancient part, but. Yeah. And we're saying Odysseus is bourgeois hero, right? That's, that's ultimately going to be the story here. Yeah. And I think you're reading the tripartite division differently than, than I am. I was reading it as a, the division of the Odyssey itself. Hmm. That would make sense. Right. Yeah. Just in, you know, the beginning when he's with Circe and then the, the, the flashback part, and then coming back to the present, which is what seems to liberate the, you know, I was

20:07speculating it liberates the present moment from the power of the past by putting it in service of the present, which is what Odysseus does by telling that story. He's a teller of stories in order to get what he wants. Ultimately he's a manipulator. That's an instrumental use of reason right there. And, and that's, I mean, Odysseus is the representative. He's the man of many ways. And he's the, he is the representative of someone of, of instrumental reason in, not just in the Odyssey, but in certain ancient Greek plays. And I don't know about the, uh, the older mythology on which the Odyssey is based, but

20:44he's just using that horse as just something to hide in. It was a beautiful piece of sculpture that they made. Yeah. When only unfailing presence of mind rests survival from nature, anyone who follows the sirens phantasmagoria is lost. If the sirens know everything that has happened, they demand the future as its price. And their promise of a happy homecoming is the deception by which the past entraps a humanity

21:14filled with longing. Odysseus has been warned by Circe, the divinity of regression to animal form whom he has withstood. Okay.

Master-Slave Dialectic

21:25And who therefore gives him the strength to withstand other powers of dissolution. I think he might be on Calypso's Island at the beginning. Anyway, I, I might've gotten that account wrong of who he starts with, but anyway, but the lure of the sirens remains overpowering. No one who hears their song can escape. Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical purpose directed masculine character of human beings was created.

21:56And something of this process is repeated in every childhood. The effort to hold together attends the ego at all its stages. And the temptation to be rid of the ego has always gone hand in hand with the blind determination to preserve it. Narcotic intoxication in which the euphoric suspension of the self is expiated by death like sleep is one of the oldest social transactions of media mediating between self preservation and self annihilation. An attempt by the self to survive itself.

22:28The fear of losing the self and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction is twinned with the promise of joy, which has threatened civilization at every moment. The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power. I mean, this take on the Dionysian is pretty interesting that it is an attempt by the self to survive

23:03itself. I don't recall anything like that in Nietzsche, for instance. Yeah. So the sirens promise a happy homecoming, but that's just a lure towards regression to the past, right? And to the mythological position. Well, are they going to kill you? So it's a nostalgia. Yes. Yes. Yes. But thought of symbolically. Yeah. On a literal level, you'd be dead. But right, so you, you know, the killing, it becomes a metaphor for the loss of a more distinct

23:39ego or subjectivity here that Odysseus is forging. So he is the strength to withstand the powers of dissolution. Of course, his men have to tie him to the mast. It's one of the few useful things they actually do. Constantly getting into trouble. So, okay. The lure of the sirens is overwhelming. The masculine, so this is interesting, but I purpose-directed masculine character of human beings. All right. So that's the, he's taking instrumental reason to be masculine in character and seemingly

24:13like a, well, he's not saying instrumental reason. He's just saying purpose-directed. I think that's implied. But this is something that he's making psychologically universal. I mean, this is, this is what Habermas is upset about, Horkheimer Dorno about, is that they reduce all reason. They say the enlightenment reduces all reason to instrumental reason. That there is no, because what's the alternative? Like a Hegelian reason that gets you to the absolute or something. But once you, a real modernity is going to be, try to shed itself of any such mystical

24:50thinking. There is no absolute to get to. Instead, it is obedience and work. You, you are pulled into giving up your life for the sake of these finite group projects over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as a, as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power. So the simulacra, the, uh, you know, all these other things that the critical theorists like

25:22to say, we are being amused to death, et cetera. Yeah, I don't understand this idea of the narcotic as self-preservation.

25:35I think of the narcotic as an, actually an attempt to return, to return to the mythological, really, really to return to something like an, an early attachment state or a more like a merged state with the mother, you know, some would call it death drive and a, and a way to kill off the self. Right. But, but I think those two are intimately related to go back to the kind of ethical substance

26:06or to, to a position in which the, the rational individuated ego is not so prominent, but here he's saying that it's actually in the service.

26:19Well, is he, is he saying that this is ultimately in the, in the service of producing the, the rational ego? No, no. I think that the, the alternative, I mean, I'm thinking about the amount of anxiousness that I carry around such that I then have to turn my mind off with bad TV, with video games, with something people use coffee, people use beer, uh, whatever it is, smoking a joint to

26:53sort of get you through those are not actually escapist. They are a way of controlling the anxiety to be able to move forward, not necessarily to, you know, for some particular instrumental, uh, I need to do this so that I can do better at my job. It's certainly not that kind of, but it is a self preservation. It is basically a, a pro life, uh, sort of move, even though it seems like, wow, you've just killed two hours of your day.

27:24Yeah. We have a fear of losing the self, but then it's also a promise of joy. It's anti-civilizational, which is focused on obedience and work. So we take these little vacations from that in order, but in service of, I guess, continuing on that path, we need our little coffee breaks, so to speak, if we can, can be continued to be good laborers. Yeah. That is the, that is part of the capitalist critique that leisure is different from actually,

27:59you know, let me take a sabbatical and write a book. That would be a different, you know, actually doing, doing the new work, channeling yourself as opposed to being tied into soul destroying regular work that you then need the leisure time, which is just sort of the flip side. That's also killing your soul that the more bad TV you watch, it doesn't actually give you joy. It kills your soul even more. People should try writing a book and see if it gives them joy.

28:32It's a romanticization of, all right, you want to go ahead? Odysseus's idea, equally inimical to his death and to his happiness, shows awareness of this, right? That the fulfillment shines everlasting in this mere illusion as beauty deprived of power. He knows only two possibilities of escape. One, he prescribes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable and

29:04is unable to listen only if he's unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side. The urge toward distraction must be grimly sublimated in redoubled exertions. Thus, the workers are made practical. The other possibility Odysseus chooses for himself, the landowner, who has others to work for him. He listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast. And the stronger the allurement grows, the more tightly he has himself bound.

29:37Just as later the bourgeois denied themselves happiness, the closer it drew to them with the increase in their own power. What he hears has no consequences for him. He can signal to his men to untie him only by movements of his head, but it is too late. His comrades, who themselves cannot hear, know only of the danger of the song, not of his beauty, and leave him tied to the mast to save both him and themselves. And they just kept going for another 20 miles because they didn't realize that the song had faded and they just kept...

30:10They reproduce the role of the oppressor as part of their own, while he cannot step outside his social role. The bonds by which he has irrevocably fettered himself to praxis at the same time keep the sirens at a distance from praxis. Their lure is neutralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art. The fettered man listens to a concert, as immobilized as audiences later, and his enthusiastic call for liberation goes unheard as applause.

30:41In this way, the enjoyment of art and manual work diverge as the primeval world is left behind. The epic already contains the correct theory. Between the cultural heritage and enforced work, there is a precise correlation, and both are founded on the inescapable compulsion toward the social control of nature. All right. It's going to take me a little while to understand what's going on here. Yeah, because I thought there was a distinction between high art and popular art, right? That was the whole point of the culture industry.

31:12But it sounds like this is a description of high art, unless you're already saying that as soon as there's a group applause, as soon as the opera is open to the hoi polloi, to everybody's going to Shakespeare, that even that is debased. It's certainly not the opiate of the masses, because we're talking about the managers, the owners here, but it is their way of having the illusion of feeding their spiritual needs while still tied to the mass,

31:52tied to the, not the grindstone, the hamster wheel that is the capitalist economy. Well, we have the two possibilities of escape. One is to plug your ears, which he seems to associate with the working class. They have no time for such foolishness. Yeah. The workers are made practical, right? They just get the plugging the ears, I guess, yeah, means getting tied down to labor.

32:22However, but he's in the position of the landowner, he can be tied to the mast, but not here. So each is, in their own way, refusing the lure of the mythological past, right? But why is that such a good thing? I mean, I'm just, I'm reading civilization and its discontents onto this, so that there are these, the sirens are the call of the wild that threatens civilization, sexuality itself.

32:55Yeah, a closer relationship to nature, both internal and external, and a situation in which subjectivity is more immersed in the world and less individuated, I guess. But anyway, so Odysseus is being tied to the mask. He's in the position of the bourgeoisie, who, I guess, by way of the Protestant work ethic, or what is it, how do they deny themselves happiness? Yeah.

33:25Even as their power increases. Yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah, shouldn't you, as an exploiting landowner, just actually delegate all the work? So you could actually live like a noble, but that is the... And then hire a bunch of sirens and keep them on, just as part of your legion of servants. Well, and you can gamify the work of your workers, you know, that they get, the sirens will amuse them while they work.

33:56Whistle while you work? Mm-hmm. I want somebody to write a scathing critical essay on the Snow White song, Whistle while you work. Oh, God. I'm sure it's been written a few hundred times. Because it came out at that time, the 30s or whatever. Right. No, of course. Yeah. So his comrades can't hear. So they don't know it's beauty. But somehow the bourgeoisie are still aware of the beauty, the allure of this.

34:27But the beauty is made impotent. It is circumscribed. It is merely something to witness and not something to partake in.

34:37So the fettered man listens as immobilized as audiences later. Yeah, this is it. So the connection to high art here is what I'm trying to now understand. And his enthusiastic call for liberation goes unheard as applause. So when a modern audience is giving applause, it's like Odysseus asking for liberation. That's the comparison here.

35:05We are captive in our seats. We are captive audiences, like being tied to the mask. Okay. The enjoyment of art and manual work diverge. So the working class is distracted with work and the bourgeoisie is distracted with art. Sure. And you can see a progression then. You might say, oh, you know, that's not fair. We should let the working classes be distracted with art too. And then we get toward the culture industry where it just becomes part of the opiate of the masses.

35:39Yeah, they don't need high art. They've got Dua Lipa. Don't get me wrong. I like, I like her.

35:49Measures like those taken on Odysseus's ship in face of the sirens are a prescient allegory of the dialectic of the enlightenment. Just as the capacity to be represented is the measure of power. The mightiest person being the one who can be represented in the most functions. So it is also the vehicle of both progress and regression. The capacity to be represented.

36:18All right. I'm not sure what that means. Under the given conditions, exclusion from work means mutilation. Not only for the unemployed, but also for the people on the opposite social pole. Those at the top experience the existence with which they no longer need to concern themselves as a mere substrate and are wholly ossified as the self which issues commands. Getting a very Hegelian thing going on here. Primitive man experience the natural thing only as the fugitive object of desire.

36:50But the Lord who has interposed the bondsman between it and himself, quoting Hegel now, takes to himself only the dependent aspect of the thing and has the pure enjoyment of it. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the bondsman who works on it, unquote. And there's no actual mention of Hegel here. It's just you know we're talking about Hegel. Yeah. Well, there's a footnote. Somebody added a footnote. That we don't have to look at to know that's Hegel. Odysseus is represented in the sphere of work.

37:23Just as he cannot give way to the lure of self-abandonment, as owner, he also forfeits participation in work and finally even control over it. While his companions, despite their closeness to things, cannot enjoy their work because it is performed under compulsion, in despair, and with their senses forcibly stopped. So alienated labor now is what we get for wax in the ears. The servant is subjugated in body and soul.

37:53The master regresses. No system of domination has so far been able to escape this price, and the circularity of history in its progress is explained in part by this debilitation, which is the concomitant of power. Humanity, whose skills and knowledge become differentiated within the division of labor, is thereby forced back to a more primitive anthropological stages. Since, with the technical facilitation of existence, the continuation of domination demands the fixation of instincts by greater repression.

38:29Fantasy withers. The calamity is not that individuals have fallen behind society or its material production, where the development of the machine has become that of the machinery of control, so that technical and social tendencies always intertwined converge in the total encompassing of human beings. Those who have lagged behind represent not only untruth. Adaptation to the power of progress furthers the progress of power, constantly renewing the degenerations, which prove successful progress, not failed progress, to be its own antithesis.

39:06The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression. Yeah, the end of that lost me there. But mostly... Yeah, me too. Got that. Right. So we get, yes, this master-slave account, where in the Hegelian version, right, the master loses by not being able to get the recognition he wants from the bondsman. And the bondsman gains something in being connected to the object of work and being able to find himself in it, in a way, as a reflection of himself.

39:45Right? So the Lord takes himself only the dependent aspect of the thing and has pure enjoyment of it. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the bondsman who works on it. Right? In the Marxian version of this, we get, what happens to the bondsman in Hegel? I mean, in Marx, it's clear, right? It becomes, the labor is alienated because it's commanded by the capitalist. Well, the bondsman becomes the stoic. The labor is no longer doing its own accord, yeah.

40:17It becomes the stoic consciousness. So you'd think that it would, we originally told the story as if it gained full recognition of itself, you know, both by being recognized by the Lord and maybe even more so getting a sense of its own, his own power by being able to work on, work the external thing and create something. And so the creation, you know, I've made some bread out of this wheat now reflects my being.

40:51So the, having an external thing, but that certainly was not enough. That is not a full engagement with equals, which we eventually need. So it leaves one. Eventually it's reciprocity, right? They need mutual recognition. So we were trying, we had tried to figure out then, since we read the stoicism section on this podcast of why you would end up from the bondsman having a very incomplete, you have a notion of your own independence, but it is radically abstracted from your environment.

41:25So that you didn't no longer, you only care about your own reason and your own ethical choices. And you don't care about if the bread, if all the crops die, well, that's just something outside me. That's something I have no control of. I don't identify with that. It doesn't seem like that point of view should follow directly from, I have worked on the bread. I have worked on the wheat and made it into the bread. And therefore I have a sense of self that actually does seem like I'm actually dependent for self on, on external things.

41:57Not that I'm exerting my independence. Yeah. Self-consciousness is ultimately the goal, but we get, we get debased forms of self-consciousness all along the way or, or insufficiently developed forms. So reciprocity is still incomplete in some sense. I don't fully understand that. I mean, we've, we've talked about it a little bit. So, so yeah. So what's happening for Adorno here, the owner forfeits participation in work. Yeah.

42:27And then finally even control over it. I'm not sure what that means. Well, just that the machinery works according to its own laws, right? The capitalist is forced to produce more to keep up with competition or cease being a capitalist. Insofar as the capitalist is being capitalist, he is bound by laws of capital. He says the master regresses. So maybe that has something to do also with the loss of control.

42:59So we get more division of labor with the technical facilitation of existence. The continuance of domination demands the fixation of instincts by greater repression. So we get right. There's this parallel between getting more and more domination over external nature and more and more domination through repression over internal nature. But why is that so? You would think, right, that the domination of nature creates all these opportunities for pleasure, which it does, right?

43:29Including the culture industry and Doritos. But isn't that, isn't that the, you know, I don't think I can go back to pre-Dorito society. The Marxist story is that the, the machine keeps spinning on its own. Once you've created these systems, then they, they make all of us, they're slaves. So you have to fit into your slot, whether it's being manager or being worker. And in either case, you are suppressing your natural instincts and subject to various tools of control, internal and external.

44:04Yeah. I don't understand is then the next part is where the development of the machine has become that of the machinery of control. So that technical and social tendencies always intertwine conversion that total encompassing of human beings that much. I understand that's sums up what we've been talking about so far. Those who have lagged behind represent not only untruth. All right. Who are those who have lagged behind? Those who have not gotten into the, uh, into their, have not taken up the call to capitalist groupthink.

44:36Is it Luddites like him, the special people? Yeah. The, the intellectuals. They represent not only untruth. Adaptation to the power of progress furthers the progress of power. So successful progress is its own antithesis, right? The, the, the idea here is that the enlightenment is, is its own undoing in the sense that it, it's trying to transcend the mythological, but it just reinstates it in an even more dominant and subversive way.

45:10Right? Because it's not simply about, we're thinking we're escaping the power of tradition, what Haeckel calls positivity, but we just reinstate that in, I guess, in the superego and in the systems of domination and capitalism. I think that must be what he means here as its own antithesis. Okay. So this, that's the conclusion of the treatment of Odysseus here.

Nietzsche and Enlightenment

45:38Uh, you know, it, it has a bunch more pages that look to be, I see he's talking about the Fuhrer again. So I think we've, we've kind of gotten the overall message from our previous discussions about this. So we should get a couple more, another paragraph or two into, uh, excursus one so that we can actually claim that this is about excursus one, but you could see if they wrote excursus one later, right? If this whole book was written over some time, I think they're bringing up the Odyssey, the sirens in that one part of their main essay.

46:09It was like, that's really cool. Let's have a spinoff. Let's write a whole second essay together. That's based on that. So we're now up to prequel, prequel, even back, back to page 36. I'll go ahead. Understanding of the element of bourgeois enlightenment in Homer has been advanced by the German, a late romantic interpretation of antiquity based on the early writings of Nietzsche. Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment. He formulated the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power.

46:42Enlightenment must be, quote, drummed into the people so that the priests all turn into priests with a bad conscience and likewise with the state. That is the task of enlightenment to show up the pompous behavior, princess and statesman as a deliberate lie. I don't know what that is a quote from exactly. Yeah. Notch las verke. Yeah. I don't know. It's not one of the major works. Yeah. I think it's just a collection.

47:13Even from his note, you know, scraps. Yep. Gleanings. Yeah. The stuff that he, you know, the many pieces of paper he just balled up and threw in the wastebasket. Took all that stuff, uncrumpled it. We need more Nietzsche. Because he doesn't, right? As far as I remember, Nietzsche is not explicitly commenting on the enlightenment a lot, even though we can read him as a response to that. So he's not using that word a lot as far as I remember.

47:46But so they had to dig into the wastebasket to get a quotation where he actually uses the word. He certainly. Okay. So what does this mean here? If we're, if we're, if we're equating the enlightenment with liberalism and we know that Nietzsche had a lot of snide things to say about liberalism. And it is basically the slave morality. Then yes, show the pompous behavior of princes and statesmen as a deliberate lie. The priests all turn drummed. Enlightenment is drummed into the people so that the priests all turn into priests with a bad conscience and likewise the state.

48:21So that the task of the enlightenment is to make us feel guilty about status, more traditional, yeah, hierarchies of power. Yep. Okay. All right. So this is not a quote now.

49:04As this twofold character of enlightenment emerged more clearly as a basic motif of history, its concept, that of advancing thought, was traced back to the beginning of recorded history. However, whereas Nietzsche's attitude to enlightenment and thus to Homer remained ambivalent, whereas he perceived in enlightenment, both the universal movement of sovereign mind, whose supreme exponent he believed himself to be, and a nihilistic, life-denying power, only the second moment was taken over by his pre-fascist followers and perverted into ideology.

49:39This ideology became a blind eulogy of blind life, which imposes a praxis by which everything living is suppressed. This is seen in the cultural fascist's attitude to Homer. In the Homeric depiction of feudal conditions, they detect a democratic element, brand the work a product of seafarers and traders, and condemn the Ionian epic for its overly rational discourse and its communication of the commonplace. All those polished wooden tables that Homer talks about.

50:10Did you have any idea that this was, even just saying that Nietzsche's attitude toward the enlightenment and thus to Homer remained ambivalent, as if Homer is representing, I thought for Nietzsche, the Homeric heroes are the representation of the pre-enlightenment, the master morality. I mean, it's the way, the lack of inner lives that the Homeric characters have, their thoughtless just use of power and their self-esteem, all this was, this is what the enlightenment has made such people small and made them hate themselves, made them have a guilty conscience.

50:51Yeah, the blonde beasts, the blonde beasts, also. I mean, I always think of the Trojans as redheads for some reason, but I don't. Yeah, no, that's the, I think of it in the same way as you. I would associate everything before, right, late, later, well, I would, everything before the classical period in Greece with Socrates and Euripides and something that Nietzsche would like more, right?

51:23That's more attuned to the Dionysian before the ascetic and the Apollonian take over in Greek culture. So you would think the Homeric is far back enough to, to count for something, you know, for Nietzsche, something that's certainly very distant from the enlightenment. But as for his like pre-fascist followers, yeah, I don't know. I don't know about the history of that. I would love to see, you know, I'd love to see some quotations there about who glommed onto that. But so there's something too democratic for them in Homer's depiction of feudal conditions.

51:59That's pretty hilarious. How can feudalism be too democratic? I guess they weren't whipping their serfs enough or something. All right. Well, I'm looking up the Odyssey on Amazon here, and I see that there are user reviews from NeoNazi69. And it says, yep, yep, too much rational discourse and communication of the commonplace. Commonplace. Okay. So that checks out. It does. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, let's, let's keep going. Let's finish the paragraph and then we'll be done for today.

52:31Yeah. Go finish the rest. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, the evil eye of these sympathizers with all seemingly immediate power who reject mediation and quote unquote liberalism of any degree discerns an element of truth. Oh, some of them are very good people.

52:50The proto-fascists have a point. All right. Connections with reason, liberality, and middle class qualities do indeed extend incomparably further back than is assumed by historians who date the concept of the burger from the end of medieval feudalism. It's very convenient if you want to read something into the odyssey to extend liberalism and the enlightenment all the way back to the Homeric. In identifying the burger where earlier bourgeois humanism had imagined some pristine dawn of culture, which was taken to legitimize that humanism, the neo-romantic reaction equates world history with enlightenment.

53:32The fashionable ideology, whose most urgent concern is to liquidate enlightenment, thus pays it involuntary, involuntary homage, homage, homage. It is forced to acknowledge enlightened thinking even in the remotest past. For the bad conscience of present-day devotees, devotees of the archaic, it is especially the earliest traces of enlightenment, which threaten to unleash the process they seek to hold back, but which they themselves obliviously promote.

54:05So it's very convenient, yeah, to treat the fascists as if they are proponents of the enlightenment rather than regressive, simply regressive anti-enlightenment figures. And that's, you know, I think Adorno has to do that sort of thing. He can't be lumped, right? There's an anti-liberal, as far as I can see, strain in all of this, but he doesn't want to be lumped in with those other neo-romantic anti-liberals.

54:35So in saying Nietzsche is ambivalent about Homer, I think this is ambivalent about ancient Greece as a model, as an inspiration altogether. And specifically, he's ambivalent about Socrates as, on the one hand, being somebody that is, you know, really admirable and original, and on the other hand, being overly rational. So the fact that the Platonic dialogues are still suffused with Homer, rather, they use Homer as like their primary, their favorite movie, their favorite story, the font of their literature.

55:11They're constantly quoting Homer and, you know, a series of other poets and things related to Homer. I think that is the, you know, that, and even in Homer itself, in the Odyssey, you could say, well, there's both the Dionysian, the behavior of somebody like Achilles running around crazy. And the Apollonian, I mean, just the uniformity and the Apollonian, I mean, just the uniformity and poetry of the words that does not. But I think he contrasts Homer maybe with Archilochus, right, as being some purely Dionysian, more ancient, hoary, let's commune with the gods.

55:55Certainly, if you're saying that Homer is conveying the commonplace, I'm not sure what exactly he has in mind. But he's, you know, he's, it's not just all about, let's drop acid, it's, it's about, let me sketch out a scene and use these things like the wine, dark sea, and use a uniform meter that, you know, can actually make it so that we can have a story that's long enough. Like, you don't want a piece of, I don't know if Yeats is the best example, but like, your deepest romantic poetry to be that long, right?

56:31Yeah, well, he does linger over the commonplace in the sense of little, little details that are often repeated because they're stock phrases, you know, someone gets out the little three-legged table of polished wood and serves the meat on that and they eat and blah, blah, blah. So you do get all these little details of everyday life in Homer. The Iliad, of course, is very different than the Odyssey in the sense of, you know, in the Iliad, the Iliad, that's a, that's the third book that the lost synthesis of the Iliad, the Odyssey.

57:05In the, in the Iliad, you have a bunch of- In the idiocy. Heroes, yeah, heroes run amok killing each other. The Odyssey is very different because it's a biopic of this particular hero who is a very odd sort of hero and I do think legitimately represents a, right, and he's a good representative of this transition from oral history to the culture of the written word, which I think can credibly be assimilated to, you know, qualities of the Enlightenment, right?

57:41So this is kind of an early, you know, this is a, Homer comes at a, at a stage of a Greek Enlightenment, early Greek Enlightenment, and you can read Odysseus as the representative of that and the Odyssey as a tale about the ambivalent relationship to that, right, the emergence of a new sort of self-consciousness and of ego and subjectivity. I think that's not inaccurate, but I think the idea, you know, I think it might be overstated here and also, you know, I take issue with this idea that the neo-romantic anti-Enlightenment reaction is in a way of a peace with the Enlightenment.

58:26Yep. That it's just another Enlightenment force as opposed to something simply regressive. Yeah, well, I think this is what is, was being said by that phrase that I didn't understand before a page earlier, you know, where, where there's this total mechanism of oppression, those who have lagged behind represent not only untruth. So they represent untruth in that they are not with the program, but they're not only untruth because the program itself is mythological and lagging behind is mythological, right?

58:59It's, it's in a state that, as you're saying, the lagging behind is one of the things that is one of the variations. Yeah, I'm trying to think who, who we read, maybe it was Adorno the first time where we're saying in the capitalist, the, the, the capitalist economy is inescapable because, uh, a stance of rebellion is just gets commodified. And that is just a stance within the right capitalism will integrate any sort of rebellious tendencies into itself.

59:30Hmm. Well, I would like to do at least one more of these. Yeah. Yeah. I'm enjoying this a lot. Yeah. Okay. So thanks everybody for listening, for watching patrion.com slash close reads philosophy is where you're going to get, uh, the part two and perhaps part three of this hope to, to see you there. Um, and, and if you're not listening to this through that, that is entirely an ad free feed and episodes like this that are public, wherever you're listening to it are also public there. So there's no reason not to just take the five minutes to go to, you know, sign up for a Patreon account.

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