Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 03:06:03 -0600 From: jlnich1-AT-service1.uky.edu (jln) Subject: Re: Kant, Hegel, Hitler >More than that, to suggest that thinking in totalities is the same thing >as committing mass murders is just plain silly. By this reasoning, >Jameson, Said, Kenneth Burke, de Beauvoir, to name only a few, are all >mere synonyms for Hitler. Anyone who believes this has fallen prey to >the "fascistic" thinking of the _Dialectic of the Enlightenment_, a book >that posits a causal totality, and then has multiplied Adorno and >Horkheimer's reasoning by about 10. I don't beleive that H & A "posit a causal totality." They argue that there is a totalizing process out there which has caused/created/allowed for fascism. But nothing suggests that their theory is totalizing in the same sense- that is, leaving no room for other possibilities. Indeed, what their point is is that we should have other possibilities. Thus, they argue in "THe Culture Industry" thaT everyone simply acts like, looks like everyone else. This is what a totalizing theory does. Thus, enlightenment reason totalizes all reason by saying that ny reason there is must be this rationalistic, utilitarian scientific reason. H & A say this is only one kind of reason- the bad kind. It depends on what you mean by the same as committing mass murders. No, there is not the same kind of physical violence done. But there is violence, physical and mental and social. The whole point of feminists studies and ethongraphy is that modern, western scientific reasoning does violence to other forms of life. In a allegorical but also very real sense, it is mass murder, only of a different kind. Or how else should we uderstand the inverted Clauseqitzina phrase that politics is war continued by other means? JLN jlnich1-AT-pop.uky.edu Department of Philosophy University of Kentucky Lexington, KY. 40509 ------------------
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