#punctuation_unaltered

[theoryverses-blog]

Horkheimer on Labor

I do not believe that human beings naturally enjoy working, no matter whether their work has a purpose or not. Originally, the position of man is like that of a dog you want to train. He would like to return to an earlier state of being. He works in order not to have to work. The reification of labor is a stage in the process that enables us to return to childhood, but at a higher level.

[theoryverses-blog]

British Romanticism and the East

It was logically inevitably that a civilization believing itself unique would find itself drowned in the sum total of civilizations, just as personal boundaries would be swamped by over-flowing mobs and dislocations of the rational. All this together was called Romanticism, and it produced, through its many re– creations of the past, the present that propels us forward.

[theoryverses-blog]

The Concept of Enlightenment

under the

pressure of

labor, through

the centuries,

pleasure

has learned self-hatred,

and therefore

in the state of

totalitarian emancipation

remains

mean and disabled

by self-contempt.

[theoryverses-blog]

Hegel Aesthetik

What man requires

for his external life,

house and home,

tent, chair, bed,

sword and spear,

the ship with which

he crosses the ocean,

the chariot which carries

him into battle, boiling

and roasting, slaughtering,

eating and drinking,––

nothing of all this

must have become

merely a dead means

to an end for him; he must

still feel alive in all these

with his whole sense and self

in order that what is in itself

merely external be given 

a humanly inspired

individual character

by such close connection

with the human individual.  

[theoryverses-blog]

Armstrong explicating Gerard Manley Hopkins

Energy leaps over

the gap between us and things,

absorbed, taken up by, dwelling upon,

their being. It does not

dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate things

in order to recreate them and itself

in a successive process of transformation,

for the unity

of the world

is outside the self

and not made by it.

Objects as objects

are fixed and vital in themselves,

Hopkins would have maintained.

This dualism is essential

to his thinking.