Theme 2: Post seminar

Just like last week I feel that I have a much better understanding of what the theme really is about after going to the lecture and discuss the questions during the seminar.

Nominalism is a way to think about objects. It questions the idea of categorising objects in to pens, bottles and so on. Instead the focus lies on the properties and particularities of the object. For example a pen is an object that you can write with and the only thing that is real is the individual pen. It might be better to look at the properties of an object to understand it and not get lost in abstractness.

While nominalism at first sounds like a very logical and useful way of thinking, Adorno and Horkheimer are critical of it. If we only observe properties and objects that exists we can not question it, which means that we are slaves to it. In Italian fascism people believed that some people are born poor and some rich, that’s just the law of nature. If everything repeats, like nominalism is arguing, the working class will always be poor and the rich will always be rich. In order for us to have human rights we need a concept to strive for a better world and not just observe that there are people that starve, get abused and so on without thinking more about it because that’s just the way it is.

An example from the seminar was that, in film, secretaries were portrayed very traditionally. It’s a woman with a male boss. According to Adorno and Horkheimer this would only enforce the old values and take the edge of the growing frustration which does not lead to any changes. Benjamin is more positive and thinks there is a potential revolution in this. Thanks to industrial mass producing that removes the aura and the uniqueness from art and makes it available for the masses.

During the seminar we also talked about Platonic realism and used plato’s cave as an illustration for what it is. Basically what it says is that there is a, for example, perfect and original chair and all the other chairs that we see are shadows of that one. In nominalism every object is unique and is how we see it, in realism the object is part of its concept. When we observe the world it is important, like I stated earlier, to be able to see a different future and reality in order to make the world a better place. Therefore we can not only see the world and accept it like it is, we need to conceptualise what we see in order to think freely.