hem|mungen

LOL I love it...

"The implication is that the intellectual and the spiritual are closely related.."

a great statement that can be taken many ways. I guess it is

"up to the reader to decide, based on context, which of these is the best fit."

Me I would go for Adorno but even then i will try not to forget that Horkheimer had his second thoughts. I would guess myself that the "spiritual" starts where the "intellectual" starts to fail :-)

Where its true that it is quite beautiful that this difference isnt quite defined in translation from the German, it might also be argued that this is the exact reason that the Enlightenment failed in such a drastic and barbaric way in Germany. I find it ironic that Adorno and Horkheimer's work that tries to teach the dialectic still lacks a proper English language translation. No doubt because of the exact same translation difficulties.

I gave up reading the Dialectic of the Enlightenment in the English version because of the poor translation and continued in the German version. Strange that my intellect can comprehend something in German but that I still would have difficulty translating this into the English.... Do you also have this "spiritual" problem sometimes?

You betcha, this is exactly what I was getting at. Love where you've taken it. I know that these types of problems are common to working between any two languages, and it's endlessly fascinating to me to know that there are some things that can only be wobbily translated.