Cultural critic

Cultural criticism is the criticism of ( a ) culture, which is understood as disparate to human needs. You can include cultural pessimism and see culture as a form of adjustment, distortion (deformation ), alienation, degeneration, decadence, incompleteness or other-directedness of human ways of being and living conditions. She has the lifestyle of the people and the meaning of their life designs to the object.

Cultural criticism has many forms of expression. These include appeals against phenomena of modernity, complaints about the general decline of morals and society, about alienation and rationalization, about the disastrous reign of money, the art or the media. The term refers to a discipline -less " wild " thinking that promises attention extensions that comes with modernity and which hosts against modernity loss stories. Cultural criticism processed rather unsystematic and osmotically ( from everyday knowledge to philosophical knowledge ) the variety of knowledge.

The historical roots of Western cultural criticism are especially in the Greek myth of a pre-civilized " golden age " ( Hesiod: Works and Days ). And a whole range of other mythological traditions brings the apocalyptic end of a primordial golden age with the emergence of civilization ( agriculture, centralized administration, ruling priest caste) in connection that is described in many mythological traditions as created originally by the gods. During the Renaissance, the criticism begins in the European belief in progress with Michel de Montaigne. After his conviction that cultural relativism culture destroy the long term nature.

Enlightened cultural critics such as Jean -Jacques Rousseau have the mythical stories of antiquity taken, placed in a secularized form and propagated as an alternative model to the Enlightenment myth of progress. This also in many religions prominent diffuse feeling of " nostalgia for paradise " this is a core sense of cultural-critical discourse. The apocalyptic undertones of many cultural and critical writings are similar to those of ancient biblical prophets and do not relate least for these mythological references their popularity among a wide audience.

• 2.1 Initial situation

Use types

Critique of civilization can be used as a synonym for cultural criticism frequently. There can be three types of use make up, comprising different time periods and concepts: a long, a close and a specific German term use.

Next term

The broad term encompassing all comments, objections and accusations against " incorrect " value systems, "bad" states and "wrong" behavior since ancient times.

Passenger term

Cultural criticism in the strict sense, paradoxically, despite the unintended topicality subscription thinking " to longest point of view ". It arises only in the wake of the European Enlightenment. The crucial difference to the wide variation lies in a novel sense of time with an open future. During the Cynics, a "back to nature " want to keep, for example, Rousseau and Schiller the civilization process irreversible.

Specific German term

Cultural criticism in a specifically German sense operates with a narrow, normative concept of culture as a contrastive point of reference directs the consciousness of crisis. Your mentor is Nietzsche.

It begins with the downgrading of the Enlightenment in preparation phase of Classicism and the philosophy of German idealism; it gets stuck with the cliché of history, foreign rationalism and utilitarianism of the Enlightenment in the minds of educated and receives at the end of the 19th century, new energies. Now the Enlightenment is in the vicinity of - pushed Western civilization, which is regarded as combination of individual achievements and many failures of modernity - increasingly rejected.

It serves as a projection screen for what seems to threaten the cultural hegemony of the " civilized world ". For this sense of threat arises out a peculiarity of the German cultural criticism, namely the evaluative gradation or even antithetical juxtaposition of highly valued culture and civilization rejected.

Education and culture serve as a collective patterns of interpretation that guides perception, experience and behavioral processes motivated. The terms develop a symbolic- socializing function, because in their name itself combines the " civilized world ". And so they carried under the conditions of German history ( the erosion of the educated middle class, the unsettling realities of the economy and society, the crisis-ridden republic and a threatening workers movement ) a readiness for authoritarian solutions and solutions.

Phenomenon of the modern

There are no cultural criticism: works with large diagnostic qualities are works with a redundant anti-modern resentment. In the latter case, cultural criticism has an alarmist, hypergeneralisierenden character; it is subjective and judgmental, bypasses an analytical recess; it is casuistic, not systematic. You judge ethos ethical- normative.

Thinkers and cultural critics, which act as cues for the cultural critique repertoire are about Jean -Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Schiller, Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud ( " The discomfort in the culture " ), Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, Ortega y Gasset and Adorno.

Central pathology findings of modernity as alienation, reification and rationalization, which are generally the Marxist and sociological critique of society attributed to originate from cultural-critical loss stories. With Nietzsche cultural criticism also own normative center began next to the emancipatory promises of the Enlightenment and the liberal world attack, followed by various disciplines and styles of thought based. (eg, critical theory, Western Marxism, Conservative Revolution, etc.) Another example of the destruction of programmatic policies permit is Ernst Jünger's The Worker. Rule and form.

Starting position

Cultural criticism is an international phenomenon, with national centers in Germany and England. It also includes different policy options and academic performance: partisanship for the rights or the left, diagnoses and decay scenarios. This thinking arises in the discussion of the Enlightenment, especially with their anthropology and philosophy of history. It questions the theory of progress of the Enlightenment, the belief in the rational -led linear perfecting the world. It takes seriously its emancipatory promises, and it presents loss stories. The motivating starting position of the culture of critical thinking is based on an insurmountable gap between high-pitched expectations and sobering experience.

From this discrepancy, the general problem of cultural configuration of critical thinking, namely the alienation of himself as of the society and the difficult mediation between the individual and society emerges. Cultural criticism is an osmotic thinking with criticism and interpretation of the world claim that lives by the zeitgeist, even though it is against their own time. It is steeped in philosophy, but rarely disciplined times philosophical.

Scoring and forms of knowledge

As a paradigm, is generated with the knowledge that cultural criticism contains an evaluative difference between eingeschönter past, an ideal as normative point ( the state of nature, the Greeks, the Middle Ages, the " whole person," the genius of the " superman ", the successful identity) and the bad relationships and behaviors in the present. The evaluative difference sharpens criticism and evokes antithetical juxtapositions.

The total construction gives individual aspects of a "symbolic concision " for the decay diagnosis. In contrast to contemporary criticism cultural criticism has a historical consciousness " of long duration ", but is determined neither to the left nor to the right. Cultural criticism arises from the judgmental reconstruction of different civilizational states; they questioned the progress of your own age who own present refuses to look at the victims of individuals or groups looking for a way out in the future ( Triadic thinking).

Problems inherent in the cultural criticism

A central problem of cultural criticism is the definition of what is meant by a human good life. Cultural criticism always implies a certain understanding of life and of man. In the criticism of life designs philosophical and sociological positions are introduced inevitably associated with the meaning of life, ethics, and the solzialpolitischen conditions with which certain cultures are linked deal.

Conservative cultural criticism

Conservative and traditionalist culture critics like Julius Evola relate to their culture and progress criticism explicitly to the World Age doctrine of traditional worldviews. Enlightenment ideals ( liberty, equality, emancipation - emancipation of women in particular ) are interpreted as a sign of degeneration. As a counter-model of radical conservative cultural critics such as Evola one rooted in mythology / religion and kingship traditional social order is seen.

Conservative thinking emphasizes that culture is part of being human and is wary of the contemporary phenomena that want to cut " old habits " to be able to demonstrate without new perspectives. It tends to see the essence of the traditional.

Culture is true for conservatives as the reservoir of the best life, as the acquis of its own history. Conservative cultural criticism turns against cultural " anarchy " and " barbarism " as well as against the stranger as a threat to your own.

With his critical attitude towards the social civilization Friedrich Nietzsche kept people fundamentally incapable of forming a free and creative society and understood his cultural criticism as incitement, as an objective need for a stinger with which a spiritual elite should drive and curb the human herd. The Gesellschaftsverständis of Nietzsche is not based on an understanding of the state according to Plato, but to the fact that the corresponding form of society could only be derived from the formation of a certain culture. Cultural development arises thereafter from the changes in prevailing culture class (eg, scientists, artists, politicians ) that had to be replaced over and over again inevitably decadent by their power according to their peak by more vigorous culture protagonists. Culture is therefore the work of supermen, they have advanced as an elite of their time, and always has a kind of leadership necessary to advance the human nobility.

Left cultural critique

Left cultural critique sees problems of culture as untimely problems of life and adherence of man by social constraints. Your destination is in the withdrawal of formal practices and in overcoming understood as coming about relationships. In contrast to conservative cultural criticism, whose main source is in traditional worldviews, grab left cultural critics primarily on the ideological fundus of the Enlightenment back, but see themselves as the "true yogi " the ideas of the Enlightenment (mainly freedom, equality and progress ). Together, both forms of cultural criticism bonds in apocalyptic discourses. So while conservative cultural critics are more prone to a nostalgic attitude, left cultural critics tend to eschatological embossed attitude that might be described best as a " humanist eschatology ".

From Left to cultural criticism is directed mainly against the aesthetics of securing power, which penetrates into the living practice of bourgeois culture and this subjects the economic necessities of capital utilization itself. Theodor W. Adorno spoke of a culture industry that is able to " reify " that they by means of the " blindness context " of their cultural experiences would put people's consciousness so in the long boarding with meaningless products for the affirmation of the status quo. Its "aesthetics" wanted to address here against sensitive sensation and show their wounds in art; his " Negative Dialectics " wanted the thinking to a fundamental doubt against any totality, against the totalitarian thought formations of bourgeois culture and spirit of the established transport (Adorno: "The whole is the untrue "). This was the basis of critical theory, which, inter alia, in the student movement in active cultural criticism transposed (eg, anti-authoritarianism, art as a "political action ", Higher Criticism ). From this practice, however, Adorno detached and remained as a theorist of aesthetics at the same time theoretical esthete. His aesthetic critique of culture proved to be ultimately as classical culture sensation with epistemological base. As such, they turned against any entertainment culture, eg against Jazz and dismissed the problems of the emerging of meaning and event culture by resorting to the "true" art.