Socrates died because he subjected the most sacred and most familiar ideas of his community and his country to the critique of the daimonion, or dialectic thought, as Plato called it.

The Daimonion

Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.

Today there is almost general agreement that society has lost nothing by the decline of philosophical thinking, for a much more powerful instrument of knowledge has taken its place, namely, modern scientific thought.

Philosophical Thinking

Positivists rely on the successes of science as a justification of their own method.

Positivist and Science

In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation.

Popular Darwinism

The crisis of reason is manifested in the crisis of the individual, as whose agency it has develop.

The Crisis of Reason

Individuality is impaired when each man decides to shift for himself.

Individuality

The deification of industrial activity knows no limits.

The Deification of Industrial Activity

The individual no longer has a personal history. Though everything changes, nothing moves.

Change vs. Move

The formalization of reason leads to a paradoxical cultural situation.<ul><li>On the one hand, the destructive antagonism of self and nature, an antagonism epitomizing the history of our civilization, reaches its peak in this era.</li><li>On the other hand, philosophical thinking, whose task it is to essay a reconsiliation, has come to deny or to forget the very existence of the antagonism.</li></ul>

The Formalization of Reason

Reason can realize its reasonableness only through reflecting on the disease of the world as produce and reproduced by man.

Reason can Realize its Reasonableness

The definition of freedom is the theory of history, and vice versa.

Freedom

The process of subjectification has affected all philosophical categories.

Subjectification and Philosophy

On the one hand, tolerance means freedom from the rule of dogmatic authority.On the other, it furthers on attitude of neutrality toward all spiritual content, which is thus surrended to relativism.

Two Sides of Tolerance

Justice, equality, happiness, tolerance, all the concepts that were in preceding centuries supposed to be inherent in or sanctioned by reason, have lost their intellectual roots.

What are the Consequences of the Formalization of Reason?

Pragmatism reflects a society that has no time to remember and mediate.

Pragmatism

All realities influence our practice, and that influence is their meaning for us.

All Realities Influence Our Practice

Plato wanted to make philosophers the masters; the technocronts want to make engineers the board of directors of society. Posi

Positivism is Philosophical Technocracy

Far from excluding competition, industrialistic culture has always organized research on a competitive basis.

The Industrialistic Culture

To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve, what sensations we are to expect from it and what reactions we must prepare.

Fascism treated language as a power instrument, as a means of storing knowledge for se in production and destruction in both war and peace.Philosophy helps man to allay his fears by helping language to fulfil it genuine mimetic function, its mission of mirroring the natural tendencies.

Fascism

a philosophical critique of logical positivism, scientific absolutism, and the rapid rise in subjective reason over objective reason.

In Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer discusses how the Nazis were able to project their agenda as "reasonable", but also identifies the Pragmatism of John Dewey as problematic, due to his emphasis on the instrumental dimension of reasoning. It is broken into five sections: Means and Ends, Conflicting Panaceas, The Revolt of Nature, The Rise and Decline of the Individual and On the Concept of Philosophy and deals with the concept of reason within the history of western philosophy. Horkheimer defines true reason as rationality, which can only be fostered in an environment of free, critical thinking. He details the difference between objective, subjective and instrumental reason, and states that we have moved from the former through the centre and into the latter (though subjective and instrumental reason are closely connected). Objective reason deals with universal truths that dictate that an action is either right or wrong. It is a concrete concept, and a force in the world that requires specific modes of behaviour.

JOHN DICKINSON

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