In this episode, I discuss how Adorno views the Enlightenment as sliding inevitably towards totalitarianism. The Enlightenment seeks to reduce reality to numerical rationality. It suffers no exemption to this reductive trend. Eventually it emerges in a totalitarian political system that brings every aspect of human life under its control.

Aporia is a state of speechlessness in which we are unable to articulate a mysterious phenomenon. In this podcast, I explore the precarious existence of time, and how it is an aporia insofar as it is defined by being and non-being. Death is also an aporia, because it is an experience no one can assume for us, but we talk as if it were an impersonal experience that always happens to other people.

In this episode, I illuminate the modern notion of identity politics through a description of Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave. This parable is about how consciousness views itself as a transparent measure of all things, only to be relativized in the encounter with the “other,” that is, another consciousness. I tie in this encounter with the other with identity politics, which is perpetually seeking outliers to the dominant cultural narrative.

In this episode, I discuss again the death of God theology. I root this movement in the rational religion of Kant, which sought to remove the doctrines of historical religions and make them subordinate to an ahistorical and universal moral law. I then describe Nietzsche’s character, Zarathustra, and how he sees the “meaning of the earth” in the transcendence of the human in the Ubermensch. I finally discuss Heidegger’s notion of anxiety and how it reveals the contingency of all meaning and the inner emptiness of the world.

In this podcast, I discuss how postmodernism represents a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Not only is faith abandoned, but human reason’s ability to develop objective knowledge is challenged. Postmodernism entered theology in the death of God theology. This theology seeks to rethink the idea of God to conform to a more secular and worldly culture. Check out the 1966 Time magazine article, “Is God Dead?”, at Time-Is-God-dead.pdf(valleybeitmidrash.org).

In this podcast, I go over Kant’s great work, The Critique of the Power of Judgment. I discuss the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. I discuss what Kant means by free play, in the interaction between the imagination and the understanding. I also discuss how reflecting judgement attempts to find a universal in what is particular.

In this episode, I discuss how Hume deals with the problem of subjectivism in artistic appreciation. If beauty is just a feeling, and not a property of objects, how can anyone be wrong about their judgment of art? Hume provides five characteristics of the true judge of art: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense.

In this episode, I discuss how the theory of beauty, or aesthetics, developed during the Enlightenment. Aesthetic judgement has to do with how we react to works of art and beauty in nature. I discuss how aesthetics in the Enlightenment tied aesthetic judgement to the rational structure in things. What is beautiful in art is what captures the unity in multiplicity, i.e. the universal rational structure that connects things that appear on the surface to be diverse.

In this episode, I discuss the attitude of Enlightenment thinkers towards religion. I discuss how they sought to purge religion of any unreasonable elements involving miracles and supernaturalism. They wanted a religion based solely on the moral law. I mention deism, which presents God as a Supreme Architect who never intervened in the world, which proceeds like clockwork. I also mention how liberty of conscience was radicalized in the Enlightenment, such that it was divorced from Revelation.

In this episode, I discuss how ethics changed in the Enlightenment. The classical basis in ethics, in the Platonic intelligible domain, and the Aristotelian teleology, was lost in the secular naturalism of the Enlightenment. So too was the faith-based focus on the afterlife. I discuss the threat of subjectivism in ethics, in which it is based on individual desires without any objective standard! Check out the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Enlightenment online!