In this lively interview with philosopher Vanessa Wills, we discuss her recently published book, Marx's Ethical Vision, which argues that Marx's historical materialism contains a coherent and consistent moral picture of social transformation grounded in a view of human nature and the conditions of human flourishing. Contra the amoralist reading of Marx, Wills critically reconstructs, drawing from the entire range of Marx's corpus, an unflinching concern for normative ends that emerge as the dialectical product of human interaction with the natural world. For Marx, the necessity for morality is grounded in the existence of class domination and antagonism and will only disappear with the final dissolution of class society. Until then, we will still need to take seriously the gap between the existing state of things and the way things out to be, while remaining vigilant against forms of ideology that mystify or naturalise conditions of life that thwart the unleashing of human potentiality, freedom, and individuality.

Find out more about Professor Wills's book here:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marxs-ethical-vision-9780197688144?cc=us&lang=en&

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This episode inaugurates a series of episodes exploring the existentialist approach to modern philosophy by considering the most well-known work of the melancholic, Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is a genre-bending blend of aesthetic criticism, biblical exegesis, and critical ethics. It is perhaps the most profound deliberation on the concept of faith in the history of philosophy. Firmly rooted in post-Kantian ethical universalism, Fear and Trembling attempts a first approximation at defining the relation between faith, deliberative choice, passion, and the limits of rational morality. It is a work that challenges our received notions of faith as immediate certainty or intuition and takes us to the limits of human understanding. Faith, for Kierkegaard, as exemplified in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac is a matter of passionate interiority that defies intelligibility. In faith, we are gripped with an anxiety whose object is the paradox that tempts us to trespass the bounds of our understanding and our conventional ethical worldview. True faith is a rare human achievement that places the singular individual in an absolute relation to the absolute. Can the conviction of a passionate interiority which unifies a life around a singular decision be justified? Can passion or a purely personal virtue be reconciled with the public demands of ordinary social morality? Are there instances in our ethical life where our commitments force us to become an exception?

To complete our series on Dialectic of Enlightenment, we take an extended look at the famous chapter on the culture industry. The function of the culture industry, or the sphere of production concerned with creating entertainment and art is to inure and train consumers to acquiesce to the dominant ideology expressed through its culture products. The tendency of this process, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is to reproduce sameness, conformity, and eliminate the thought of rebellion against the status quo. The culture industry is a totalizing system that continuously creates desires by the management of consumer preference, while foreclosing the means of actually fulfilling these desires. Some have argued that this analysis is no longer applicable to a digital age characterized by a fragmentation of mass media and infinite streams of information. In this episode, we ask to what extent does the internet age continue to stifle authentic creativity and individuality and reproduce formulaic entertainment? Finally, we pose the question of whether rebellion is still possible within a system that anticipates and absorbs the gesture of rebellion.