“In the eyes of the average man, the principle of the majority is often not only a substitute for but an improvement upon objective reason: since men are after all the best judges of their own interests, the resolutions of a majority, it is thought, are certainly as valuable to a community as the intuitions of a so-called superior reason. However, the contradiction between intuition and the democratic principle, conceived in such crude terms, is only imaginary. For what does it mean to say that ‘a man knows his own interests best’- how does he gain this knowledge, what evidences that his knowledge is correct? In the proposition, ‘A man knows … best,’ there is an implicit reference to an agency that is not totally arbitrary and that is incidental to some sort of reason underlying not only means but ends as well. If that agency should turn out to be again merely the majority, the whole argument would constitute a tautology.”
—
Max Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason
Just a thought, but… if poetry that is written with the attachment to the overall wholeness of human existence, pertaining to the further insight of humanity (via ‘superior’, supposedly healthy reason), can be considered, in these times, to be inadequate in a sort of bourgeois, socio-economic setting to one existing in a channelled & narrow structure of society, who is not encouraged to think for his/herself (particularly the youth), is an indication of the dehumanization of the modern human by the application of instrumental reason to decipher reality. Particularly, revolutionary poetry has thus become reduced & formalized & categorised into some kind of objective custom to serve the interests of an audience (put loosely) rather than being used as a vehicle to serve the subjectivity of individual experience. Hmm… which is why I no longer bother tagging my work with #poetry.
