Post-seminar reflection 2

During this week’s lecture and seminar, Henrik Åhman described the concepts and ideas discussed in my previous blog posts more in-depth, and thereby gave me a deeper understanding as to what they mean and meant for the age of enlightenment and its cultural development. As many others, I previously had a hard time grasping the concepts of nominalism and realism since they seemed rather similar while the texts’ authors described them as opposites. During the lecture, and seminar in particular, this was discussed and further described. The way I now understand realism, as per Plato’s description of Socrates’ Cave, is that it is a way of looking at objects and events with a knowledge of them having pre-assigned connotations based on what we know of them. The example discussed was that a realist saw a chair as a representation of the vision we have of a chair. Therefore, there exists such a thing as a “perfect chair” from which all other chairs stem, and from which all chairs receive their inherent properties. On the other hand, a nominalist would simply see the chair through the empirical senses and therefore not ascribe to it any properties other than it existing then and there. Furthermore, during the seminar, we discussed Benjamin’s notion of substructure and superstructure and how the concepts could be implemented at a societal level (as I’ve discussed in my pre-reflection), but also on a more objectal or practically conceptual level. For instance, we discussed that it is the substructure which is the most interchangeable, whereas the superstructure often takes a lot more time and effort to change - i.e. cultural patterns etc.

The way Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer differ in their view of culture having revolutionary potentials or not was also discussed, where Benjamin saw e.g. cinema as a cultural revolution for the common man since this was an opportunity for them to become depicted and thereby have an impact on society. However, Adorno & Horkheimer (being stationed in Hollywood) meant that this development where freedom of choice had emerged simply after a while lead people to ignore the fact that there were depictions of real people and events on the big screen, and rather saw it as just entertainment. Much like many of us in Sweden disregard our privilege when it comes to democratic voting, and simply chose not to vote. Since we’ve had it for such a long time and it’s become a regular custom, we tend not to append to it the same weight as it had when it was introduced (obviously). After having this discussion, as opposed to the discussion I had in the pre-reflection, I wasn’t as sure I only agreed with Benjamin anymore - since both sides were in the right in their own senses.

Furthermore I got somewhat of an eye-opener when we discussed natural and historical perception. Much like the discussion we had in our first seminar on from where Kant’s faculties of knowledge had arisen, so landed the discussion on natural and historical perception. The way I see it, the only things we can perceive naturally (i.e. natural perception), without any experience from history or previous events, are basically the concepts of time and space. Even though we might see to for instance the wheel as an intuitive invention and a natural object, we had the exact same brain capacity before the wheel was invented as we have today ☺. Thus there is not a single event or object apart from those mentioned above that can be categorized under natural perception, they’re all historically perceived.