Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes - Volume 5 E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 434

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 5" comprises the five books "Adorno in 60 Minutes", "Habermas in 60 Minutes", "Foucault in 60 Minutes", "Rawls in 60 Minutes", and "Popper in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? For Adorno it is the dialectical development of civilization from the Stone Age up to capitalism along with the alienation of Man from Nature that goes with it. Habermas, by contrast, sees in this historical process of development the chance to gradually improve society through the emancipatory power of language in communicative action. Foucault remains sceptical here and reveals to us the rigid structures in which we, as modern individuals, are trapped. Rawls develops a complex and compelling procedure for the creation of an ideally just state of affairs. Popper, finally, establishes a quite new theory of science whereby every scientific truth has only a provisional character so that it must eventually be relieved and replaced by better truths. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Great Thinkers

in 60 Minutes

Adorno in 60 Minutes

Habermas in 60 Minutes

Foucault in 60 Minutes

Rawls in 60 Minutes

Popper in 60 Minutes

Walther Ziegler

Adorno

in 60 Minutes

Translated by Alexander Reynolds

Inhalt

Adorno’s Great Discovery

Adorno’s Central Idea

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Self-Repression Through Reason: The Example of Odysseus

The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade as a Consequence of Enlightenment

The Co-Optation of the Individual by the Culture Industry

Negative Dialectics – Overcoming Language and Liberation from the Dictatorship of the Concept

Of What Use Is Adorno’s Discovery for Us Today?

Truth Beyond Words – Can One Think Conceptually Against the Concept?

Must Enlightenment and Science Really Always End in Totalitarianism?

The Whole is Not Falsifiable – Adorno’s Critique of Popper and of Positivism

Can ‘Wrong Life Be Lived Rightly’ After All?

The Power of Negative Thinking – Negation That Finds No Rest in Any Affirmation

Bibliographical References

Adorno’s Great Discovery

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) counts still today as one of the most charismatic and intellectually imposing thinkers in the whole history of philosophy. Already during his lifetime he exerted great influence on the student movements that so deeply marked the post-war German Federal Republic and indeed on the intellectual climate of this young republic in general. No other German intellectual of the period between 1959 and 1969 lectured so frequently on public radio and TV channels as did Adorno.

As did Sartre in France, Adorno became, in Germany, a charismatic point of orientation for student protestors and indeed for the New Left as a whole. He also resembled Sartre in other respects: both men were small and stocky, wore horn-rimmed glasses to correct their overstrained sight, and were known to have conducted many affairs with attractive women. His lectures, that many students from other parts of Europe and even from America travelled thousands of miles to attend, were always packed – though very few of those who attended them could honestly claim to have understood all that they heard there. The immensely complex lines of reasoning spun out at the lectern by the little bald man in horn-rimmed glasses, and such strenuously abstract books of his as the late masterpiece Negative Dialectics, are still looked on today in Germany as intellectual hurdles that only the greatest intellectual athletes can hope to clear.

His work contains, among other things, a rigorous critique of the capitalist system, so that he is often considered to have prepared the ground for the great wave of social protest that shook many countries in 1968. There is certainly some truth to this, even if he was dismayed by many aspects of this great revolt that broke out, also at his own German university, in the year before his death and refused, to the disappointment of some of his admirers, to play the role of a leader of this movement.

Adorno’s central idea is a paradoxical and provocative one. Modern capitalist society has gone entirely and fundamentally astray. Individuals in this society enjoy, indeed, unprecedented advantages in terms of mobility, technology, medical care and other forms of prosperity; but at the same time we have lost, collectively, all that makes life really worth living, namely: a sense for Nature (including, perhaps most importantly, for the natural beings that we ourselves are) and, in the end, even the ability to love:

This, modern Man’s loss of the ability to love is, Adorno believes, a direct consequence of the commodity and consumer society. Human beings become calculating and calculable because in a society based solely on “exchange value” everything and everyone has a fixed and determined price. Every commodity, and first and foremost the commodity that is an individual’s labour-power, is and has to be carried to market and sold. This leads, in the end, to human actions and relations appearing to those involved in them as external, exchangeable “things” that they themselves, as humans, have no real part in. In a society where nothing is ever done unless it is paid for, the once-natural concern for the fate of others gradually vanishes. Everyone fights for their own advantage alone. “Me Incorporated” becomes a symbol of our modern world.

What’s more, Adorno is not criticizing here just the fact that in market societies like ours everything is appraised in terms of supply and demand; he is also pointing out that consumer societies make it their job to awaken ever new artificial “needs” in the consumer, so that commodities become, in these societies, fetishes that enjoy an almost religious veneration.

For many people in today’s society, for example, a car is much more than just a means of getting around. They invest their own identity in this lifeless object to such an extent that they derive their whole sense of their value as human beings from the make and quality of car they own. Capitalism turns individuals into dependent beings, penetrating and deforming their whole character. Adorno believed so strongly in this notion of our having been wholly and entirely distorted by the world we have created that he included in his most personal work, the Minima Moralia, a pithy little thesis that turned completely on its head the famous thesis of a philosopher, Hegel, whom he greatly admired but who had taken, in the end, a positive and even apologetic stance toward the modern world around him. “The truth is the whole”, Hegel had concluded in the 1820s; just over a hundred years later, Adorno’s conclusion was:

This general suspicion cast upon modern capitalist society in its entirety earned Adorno the reputation of being the most significant of the various representatives of what is called “Critical Theory”, a body of thought which did indeed set itself the task of analysing and critiquing capitalist society not just, as Marx and the early Marxists had, in its economic basis but in all its social and cultural ramifications. Since all the thinkers associated with this current in social philosophy had been associated, in the 1920s and 30s, as teachers or researchers with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, “Critical Theory” is also sometimes referred to as “the Frankfurt School”.

The “Frankfurt School” thinkers included, besides Adorno, such writers famous in their own right as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. These philosophers all sharply criticized the ossified structures of post-war capitalist societies. In practicing this critique they still made frequent reference to Marx and continued to describe themselves as philosophical “materialists”.

But in the face of the degeneration of Soviet Marxism into Stalinism and of the transformation, in the West, of the “proletarian” more and more into a “consumer”, the Critical Theorists came to consider world communist revolution as a less and less realistic prospect. They replaced Marx’s notions of the inevitability of the worldwide overthrow of the existing order and the imminent realization of a classless society with the notion of the need for a permanent critique of existing society. Hence the name “Critical Theory”.

It was in exile from his German homeland that Adorno authored, together with Max Horkheimer, his friend since their student days, the book that counts as the primary work of Critical Theory: The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The two men, like the other prominent Critical Theorists Fromm and Marcuse, had had to flee to the USA, due to their Jewish origins, when Hitler seized power in 1933. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the country that gave them refuge, counts still today as one of the most important standard works of sociology and social philosophy.

The book represented a watershed in social philosophy because it was the first to develop a “critique of critique”. “Enlightenment”, embodied in the works of such great early-modern thinkers as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume and Locke, had been, itself, a great enterprise of social critique.

These 17th and 18th century “Enlighteners” critiqued feudalism, the divine right of kings, religion and all superstition and aspired to free human beings once and for all from all the old irrational constraints passed down from the Middle Ages. “Who should rule the people if not the people themselves?” ran one of their progressive rallying cries. The Enlightenment, in other words, was the great age of critical thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer returned from their American exile, however, bearing with them a great suspicion of this generally accepted truth. The whole critically emancipatory movement that was the early modern Enlightenment signified for Europe, they now argued, not just the welcome opening of a new era but also a sort of calamity. It too, then, needed to be subjected to a rigorous critique. The Enlightenment era, indeed, had seen much progress in political, intellectual and technical fields; but all these improvements had had a troubling “flip side” to them.

Already the opening sentence of the first chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment sums up the problem:

The Enlightenment, so ran Adorno’s argument here, had originally pursued the progressive aim of relieving human beings of the fears that had tormented them through so many dark centuries: fear of Nature, of wild animals and of failed harvests, as well as irrational, superstitious fears such as that of the Last Judgment, the Apocalypse or the Devil. The Enlightenment did indeed aspire to let the light of science and reason shine on and illuminate every area of human life, driving out and replacing that irrational belief whereby our destinies are determined by imponderable higher powers.

Enlightenment marks the end of the thousands of years in which peasants gazed fearfully up at the sky and made sacrifices to the thunder-god to dissuade him from ruining their crops with hail or heavy rain and the beginning of an era in which storm-clouds are scientifically dispersed by the release of chemicals from aeroplanes. In our enlightened age Nature is no longer experienced as all-powerful and threatening. Rather, our modern combine-harvesters, pesticides, fungicides and factory-farming methods have made of it something that we completely dominate and control. And yet today, in the phrase of Adorno’s already quoted, “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”. Because total control over Nature has its price:

The more perfectly human beings succeed in controlling the world and our own coexistence by means of hyper-modern machinery and sophisticated social institutions the farther we remove ourselves not only from external Nature but also from that Nature which constitutes our own most intimate inner being. Adorno gives a grave diagnosis, perhaps the gravest diagnosis possible, of our modern civilization. We may indeed, through the unleashed power of science and an omnipresent social administration, have raised ourselves to the position of lords over Nature. But in doing so we have enslaved ourselves. We have become the manipulated victims of the mass society that we ourselves created.

Our lives consist in phantasms and illusions. We still, indeed, have a subjective sense that our day-today experience is a real one. We think we live in a real world with all its problems, worries and bright spots of hope and joy; but in reality we find ourselves in a mere appearance of life or, as Adorno calls it, an “entangling web of artificial blindness”. This extends so far, Adorno argues, that what appear to be “people” are often just irrelevant epiphenomena on the surface of what is in fact a person-less mass:

We become, in a phrase coined by Adorno’s colleague Marcuse, examples of “one-dimensional Man”, incapable of desiring anything except that which the consumption-goods industry trains us to desire by dangling it before our eyes.

This suspicion that we might be victims of a total manipulation is not a new one. It is as old, indeed, as Plato who, already two and a half millennia before Adorno, imagined, with his famous “allegory of the cave”, the manipulation of men chained up in a cavern into no longer recognizing the real world outside as the real world and into taking for reality what were in fact just shadows flickering on the cavern wall.

Adorno, however, goes a step further than Plato. Whereas Plato’s “allegory of the cave” still allows the imagined human prisoners the chance of climbing up toward the light and attaining the real world, in Adorno’s vision the imprisoned are damned to remain imprisoned forever. Plato urges us to keep our inner eye fixed on the truth, believing that this alone will enable us to lead a good and authentic life. But Adorno’s assessment of the present human condition is much more pessimistic. We have by now all become too firmly lodged into the mechanism of the capitalist world, as its living working parts, for us to manage to leave “the cave” at all:

And even if we feel that something is not as it should be with our life, that something has gone seriously wrong with the world, we are hardly in a position to correct it, since:

This dark, pithy phrase of Adorno’s is famous in the German-speaking world and often cited. Even eighty years after being set to paper it still sums up the sense of uncertainty and inescapable self-contradiction that plagues modern Man. On the one hand we citizens of Western civilization enjoy, to a degree that no one ever has before, the blessings of the technical and medical innovations, as well as all the more frivolous benefits in the way of consumer goods and media spectacles, that characterize modern capitalist society; on the other hand, however, we have a sense that we are losing ourselves in these new structures and stimulations and are becoming slaves not just to our real material needs but also to many false needs that this modern capitalist society creates and implants in us. We experience a deep longing for some life more “real” than the flood of distracting stimuli that fills and forms every minute of our day; but somehow we never manage to actually live this “real life” that we long for, because we feel ourselves, by now, much too comfortably at home in the false one. Many people today, for example, would find it completely impossible to live without a TV set, which evening after evening carries into their living room a pseudo-world which is compellingly entertaining – but at the same time utterly unreal.

Even Adorno’s critics concede that his critique of post-war consumer society puts its finger on many valid truths and that much of what he says applies as well, or even better, to the society of our twenty-first century than it did to that of the twentieth. Is the life we lead really a “false life”? Are all our thoughts and actions directed by powers that we cannot really call our own? And if so, how can Adorno know that it is so? Has the project of the Enlightenment, namely, that of freeing Man from superstition through reason and science, really ended up achieving the opposite aim from the one it set itself? Is Critical Theory right? Does science and its rational calculations give rise, in the end, to the danger of a new barbarism? Adorno’s answers to these questions are always highly original and always fascinating.

Adorno’s Central Idea

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

The decisive catalyst for the forming of Adorno’s central idea was surely the experience of German Fascism and the Holocaust that it committed. On his return, then, from his American exile to a Germany almost totally destroyed by the war, it was two key questions, above all, that preoccupied Adorno. The first and most important of all was: how can we prevent Fascism, and most particularly such fruits of Fascism as the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz, from ever occurring again?

The second question was a more retrospective and analytical one, though to answer it was certainly to go some way toward answering the first: how was it even possible that, after hundreds of years of European humanism and Enlightenment, barbaric totalitarian rulers and regimes should have come to power, in the middle of the twentieth century, in no less than three great European countries: Spain, Italy and Germany?

Already during his exile Adorno had carried out social-psychological research related to this question and he continued these researches once back in Germany. The results, which were published in 1950 under the title The Authoritarian Personality, were shocking. Adorno’s evaluation of the various interviews conducted for the study concluded that, even after the experience of Nazism, some two thirds of the German population still took a sceptical attitude to the notion of a democratic political system. Half of the Germans interviewed rejected the idea that they and their countrymen bore any share of guilt for the terrible actions of the Nazi regime.

And a large proportion of them gave answers which were at least indirect indications that their personality-structures were such that they would willingly submit to some new authoritarian “strong man”, were one to emerge. But for Adorno these empirical findings were not the decisive thing. They revealed only facts which he had in any case already suspected to be the case. His great philosophical question was rather the following: how was it possible, after all the sterling service to the cause of the Enlightenment that is to be found in the work of men like Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Leibniz, Kant, and Locke, for Europe and its population to still remain so susceptible to lapsing back into the darkness of brutal barbarism?

The answer that he offered to this question became the point of departure for the whole of Critical Theory. Enlightenment and modern science, argued Adorno, have indeed freed human beings from superstition. But they have established in its place a purely instrumental explanation of the world which is really no less dangerous. Because this strictly technocratic, instrumental account of the world and its meaning is one which runs a serious risk of leading back into the very irrationalism that it was meant to liberate from.

The cause of the problem here is that the concern animating science and scientific investigation has tended, from the start, to be that of how whatever is investigated and scientifically understood can be put to use:

“Find out what can be done with it” is the overriding imperative of modern science. Scientists, Adorno points out, do not wish just to rationally analyse and understand the world and the things that make it up but want in every case also to control these things. With every new bit of knowledge that is acquired one further step is taken in the moulding, dominating and manipulating of Nature. This is why science, in its very essence, has, as Adorno puts it, something “dictatorial” about it.

Darwin’s scientific development of a theory of evolution, for example, was originally very much an act of liberation: namely, from the irrational biblical myth of Man’s creation, overnight, directly by the hand of God. Very soon, however, a highly irrational use and applicability was found for this eminently rational discovery of Darwin’s. With his hypothesis of a process of “natural selection” in the animal kingdom Darwin had in fact, probably unintentionally, created a seedbed for the much more sinister hypothesis that such a principle of selection also governed human evolution.

Already half a century before Hitler the British scientist and philosopher Herbert Spencer took the doctrine of “natural selection” and applied it to the sphere of human society and history, founding what came to be known as “Social Darwinism”. He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and declared the struggle between peoples, races and nations to be a natural process. Darwin’s “natural selection” was suddenly no longer just a description of the interaction of certain natural forces; it was now made exploitable in terms of a specific human agenda, in this case a targeted agenda of “race war”. It was this agenda that was eagerly pursued a few decades later by the hundreds of real or purported scholars, professors, doctors and geneticists who were appointed, under Hitler’s Nazi regime, to newly founded university chairs in “Racial Science”. These supposed “scientists” spent their time gathering anatomical data on members of various ethnic groups, ranging from skull dimensions and physiognomies to height, skin pigmentation and IQ. Where this ended we already know.

With the rise of the “race delusion”, then, we observe an initially rational science turning into an irrationalism contemptuous of human beings. In the wake of Darwin’s originally rationally-grounded hypothesis regarding the origin of species and their development through natural selection there gradually grew up, under the covering mantle of science, the irrational myth of an “Aryan race” whose superior genetics would ensure their dominance over all the rest of the world:

To illustrate this inherent tendency of Enlightenment to turn back into the mythical superstition that it originally set out to overcome Adorno uses the anthropological concept of the “horde”. Such “hordes” had existed already in the properly speaking “mythological” era of humanity, the Stone Age, when the individual members of a mass of hunters or gatherers felt themselves bound together as if into a single body by the common belief in some mythical story or symbol – for example, the whole “horde”’s identification with a single “spirit animal”.

In the modern era, Adorno notes, such “hordes” make their appearance again. But this time what binds them together are purportedly rational explanations provided in the name of science: e.g. that certain masses of people “belong together” by reason of their all stemming from some single genetically identical sub-species or some “community of the race”. Such “scientific” arguments were, and continue to be, advanced even where the differences between one supposed “race” and another prove to be minimal.

Those individuals too, then, who buy into this notion of a modern “horde” in the form of a racially defined “national community” are succumbing, centuries after the supposed age of Enlightenment, to the superstition that the Enlightenment felt it had put an end to. Only this time it is a “scientific” superstition. This is, however, Adorno further argues, not just a matter of a lapse back into barbarism but rather displays a quality of its own which must be sought in the logic of the Enlightenment itself:

The good intentions of the movement of Enlightenment, in this case those behind the call for the equality of all human beings, are interpreted here by Adorno as also, unintendedly, paving the way for totalitarianism. He points out that these good intentions could easily, much like the results of the university chairs in “Racial Science”, be misused as bases for the reduction of all citizens to compliant members of a single “fraternity of shared blood”. Because, under such circumstances, anyone who dared to criticize the regime was taken thereby to have quit the genetically-defined egalitarian “horde” and to have automatically become an “enemy of the people”: someone who wanted to place himself outside of, or even above, the fraternal, equal “community of the nation”.

The movement we call Enlightenment began as a critique of the power of Nature over Man and specifically of the notion that certain social institutions were so rooted in Nature that they could not be opposed or altered. It aspired to replace this power of Nature, and of the “second Nature” of supposedly eternal social institutions, with the critical power of Reason. But in the end it succeeded only in replacing those constraints of Nature and “second Nature” expressed through the taboos of myth and religion with equally constraining taboos in the form of pseudo-science and its instrumentalizing rationality:

Even after the period of Fascism and the Second World War science and technology have still proven unable to free the human race in any real sense but have rather bound us into ever new forms of machinery. The institution of capitalism itself, Adorno points out, has now come to be perceived by many as eternally, immovably rooted in Nature, much like the social institutions that Enlightenment had most vigorously criticized, such as the divine right of kings or the “natural” inequality of the different classes of men. Many scientists look on egoism and the singleminded pursuit of personal profit as absolutely necessary natural drives, without which there would be no spirit of invention, no economic growth and no opening-up of new resources.

Best-selling books like The Selfish Gene by the respected scientist Richard Dawkins suggest that the “possessive individualism” which characterizes more and more cultures around the world is firmly rooted in unalterable natural fact.

On top of this comes the problem of “the technological veil”. Since, with every passing year, technology is pervading our world more deeply and thoroughly, a thicker and thicker veil is coming to cover its original function as a mere tool to achieve ends chosen by human beings. Technology is acquiring a life of its own.

What were once just technical means to ends have now become “fetishized”, often tempting their users into fantasies of megalomania:

The movement of Enlightenment, then, so Adorno concludes, and all the technological development that went along with it have ended up becoming the very opposite of what they set out to be. Instead of liberating the human race, they have brought us into new and threatening structures of dependence.

Self-Repression Through Reason: The Example of Odysseus

Adorno offers as a concrete example of this dialectical reversal the story told of the experiences of the Ancient Greek hero Odysseus. This legendary hero embodies in his own person, argues Adorno, the dialectic of Enlightenment. Odysseus stands out from the other heroes featured in Homer’s account of the Trojan War and its aftermath in relying not just on strength and martial valour but also, to a great degree, on reason and intelligence. For this reason, Odysseus represents, within the mythical world of antiquity, the earliest personification of the rational type of human being typical of our modernity. He is, as Adorno puts it

The success that Odysseus achieves he achieves above all thanks to rational calculation and to an iron self-discipline and self-control. It is by a clever and disciplined trick, for example, that he succeeds in doing what no one had ever done: hearing the seductive, but fatal, song of the Sirens and living to tell the tale. Many ships, as the myth goes, had been drawn into shipwreck by the Sirens’ entrancing song. Odysseus, however, orders his crew to put wax in their ears as they row past the Sirens’ island and has them tie him, their captain, to the mast so that – although he can hear the song – he is powerless to do what many others have done and throw himself on the rocks to hear it better. Odysseus does what no one has ever done, then, and survives. But he does this only at the cost of having himself put in chains: a mythical image that Adorno interprets as an allegory of the modern subject’s denying his own natural desires.

Adorno sees the same modern self-denial expressed in still more symbolical terms in another key episode of Homer’s “Odyssey”: the encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus. Held captive by Polyphemus, Odysseus succeeds in escaping only through a literal self-denial. On being asked his name by the monstrous one-eyed Cyclops Odysseus had cunningly replied “Nobody”. So that, when Odysseus and his men have put out the Cyclops’s one eye and this latter is reduced to appealing to his fellow monsters to prevent his prisoners’ escape, he can only cry out “Nobody has blinded me! Look for nobody!” – an appeal which leaves his fellow Cyclops puzzled and causes them to return to their own caves, thinking there is nothing wrong. Odysseus survives here too, then. But here too he does so only at the price of self-denial.

Just this, Adorno contends, is the inevitable fate of modern Man. Survival in mass society demands of us adaptation, self-repression and self-denial. Odysseus lived through all of this before us, back at the very dawn of civilization:

“With the Odyssey, then”, so argue the authors of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Homer composed nothing less than “the basic text of European civilization”19. His legendary figure of Odysseus anticipates the new human type that was going to dominate all the subsequent centuries of human history:

The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade as a Consequence of Enlightenment

Adorno and Horkheimer find further indication of the truth of their basic thesis that Enlightenment runs a risk of turning into its opposite in the philosophy propounded by the Marquis de Sade, who was certainly a “man of the Enlightenment” at least in the sense that he lived most of his life, which ran from 1740 to 1814, in the 18th century, called the siècle des Lumières.

De Sade is known to most people only because of his perverse sexual practices. He was, however, besides being the man who gave his name to “sadism”, also the author of numerous books and a prominent representative, along with La Mettrie and D’Holbach, of French philosophical materialism. This philosophical movement looked on itself as the spearhead of the 18th-century Enlightenment. In the years before and during the French Revolution these men critiqued religion as mere superstition and proposed a vision of the world that was strictly materialistic, natural-scientific and even, as some of them put it, “mechanical”.

Human beings are in reality, so ran the argument of these French philosophical materialists, not creatures of God, nor are they beings of pure spirit guided by abstract moral laws. Rather, they are living, material beings guided by the physical laws of Nature and to understand human beings one has to investigate these laws.

Thus La Mettrie for example, in his highly successful book L’Homme Machine, gave an account of the human being as a “man-machine”, a kind of perfectly functioning piece of clockwork. “The human body,” wrote La Mettrie, “is a machine that winds up its own springs” 21 .

The other man of the Enlightenment D’Holbach, who wrote over four hundred articles on the natural sciences for Diderot’s great Encyclopaedia, considered the sole cause of action in human beings to be our natural drives: “Man is a being purely physical […] His visible actions are […] the natural effects of his peculiar mechanism […] All that he does, all that he is, is nothing more than what universal Nature has made him.” 22

As regards morality and moral philosophy, these French philosophical materialists defended the view that what human beings ought to do was simply follow the promptings of their natural drives, i.e. of their self-interest. The time, they argued, had come to recognize once again those claims of Nature which had, for thousands of years, been repressed and denied in the name of “God” or of “the higher, spiritual principle in Man”. What is “moral”, it should henceforth be accepted, is simply what is natural, what Nature prompts us to do.

The most radical of all these French philosophical materialists of the 18th century was the Marquis de Sade. He too understood himself to form the “spearhead” of Enlightenment but he was still more ruthlessly consistent than even thinkers like La Mettrie and D’Holbach in tracing out the logical consequences of the notion of “a life in conformity with Nature”. If we acknowledge, argued de Sade, that we are simply and entirely natural beings whose actions unfold from our inner drives as the hands of a clock from its inner clockwork, then we are bound also to recognize our innate aggressiveness as a natural and acceptable thing, and this right up to the point of the pleasure we take in murder. In one of his main works, Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded, de Sade even describes murder as a necessary component part of Nature: “And where does this impetuous inclination come from? From Nature. Murder is one of its laws. Whenever Nature feels the need to murder it inspires us with the inclination to do so and we obey whether we wish to or not.” 23

De Sade’s line of argument is simple. If everything human is, in the last analysis, a matter of natural predisposition and if Nature, in its turn, is something that science proves to be completely value-neutral, then one cannot consistently pass a negative value-judgment on murder, since this too is merely an event in Nature. De Sade has his heroine in this novel appear first in the role of an enthusiastic “Enlightener”, critiquing the Catholicism in which she has been raised on the grounds that scientific proof for it is lacking:

He then, however, has her engage in a whole series of criminal experiences, including even committing several murders, until she finally, stripped of all illusions, comes to the conclusion that the exercise of violence is always a part of every human life. The condition, then, of a truly enlightened, free, and self-determined life consists not in renunciation, humility and a “love of one’s fellow man” for which there is no scientific foundation but rather in a Nature-based “right to everything”, not excluding the use of violence and even murder. Adorno and Horkheimer see in this argument of Juliette’s a dangerous modern scientific attitude which is oriented exclusively to such natural elements, determinable by the positive sciences, as instincts, drives and really quantifiable crimes, and which accepts these latter too as growing spontaneously out of our nature:

In the midst of the French Revolution de Sade issued an appeal to his fellow Frenchmen to “make one more effort if you want truly to become republicans!”26 This was the title of a sort of libertine manifesto read out, in the midst of an orgy, by one of the protagonists of his 1795 novel Philosophy in the Boudoir. In it, those already engaged in the project of revolutionary republicanism are encouraged to carry the Enlightenment’s demand for individual liberty through to its logical conclusion; having already dispossessed the clergy and beheaded the king, it argues, they should take the final step of declaring themselves in favour of the absolute freedom of the individual. This means, for de Sade, a declaration that one is in favour of the absolute freedom to commit any crime. With ruthless logical consistency de Sade demands the founding of a completely libertine state and an attitude of “enlightened” tolerance vis-à-vis such associations devoted to uninhibited indulgence of the instincts as an imagined “Society of the Friends of Crime”.27

Adorno and Horkheimer consider this, de Sade’s radical demand for a “freedom to commit any crime”, to be evidence supporting their thesis that the Enlightenment, despite its beginning as a rational movement to liberate Man from religion, can always, due to its materialism and rationalism, end up turning into its opposite, i.e. into a complete unfreedom and even into a threat to human life arising from the justification of violence as a natural human drive:

The Co-Optation of the Individual by the Culture Industry

The dialectic of Enlightenment becomes especially recognizable if one takes a closer look at the modern entertainment industry and at mass cultural production in general, to which Adorno refers by the general term “culture industry”. One of the ways in which Enlightenment had originally set out to free people was that of cultivating them into creative and imaginative individuals. Insofar, however, as the world the Enlightenment produced is one of mass media, the people that have actually been created tend to be passive consumers who seek from culture only instantaneous pleasure. The original task assigned to art, which was that of touching people’s emotions and prompting them to reflect on their situations, has been lost almost without trace. The art of narrative, for example, survives in our fully “enlightened” world only as variants on the same “stock plots”, mechanically injected with maximum amounts of “fun factor”, rolling off the same production line. Modern Man is bombarded with “light entertainment” as intensely and as ceaselessly as the soldiers in the trenches of the First World War were bombarded with shells and gunfire:

In this way, an art that had once been defined by each work’s unique individuality degenerates into a mass product, such as the productions of “the cinematic arts” in our present day whose quality tends to be measured solely in terms of the number of tickets sold at the box office. The script that swims, as regards its theme or the way the scriptwriter handles it, against the tide that forms the “mainstream” has little or no chance of ever actually being made into a film:

The goal, then, of capitalist media- and art-production is to achieve the maximum profit possible. But at the same time the system trains, as it were, the taste of those who live under modern capitalism to be always and everywhere an easily exploitable “mass taste”.

What Adorno finds most astonishing, however, is the contradiction between two facts. Firstly, the fact that many TV viewers, for example, do complain about the boringly repetitive and predictable programme of “entertainment” which they are offered, and which only presents to them in countless slight variations images of the happiness and adventure that their own lives lack. And secondly, the fact that these viewers nonetheless return to their TV sets regularly every night:

When people seek refuge in the fictional films and TV series produced by the entertainment industry they do so, argues Adorno, in full awareness of what they are doing. Why do they opt in this way to hoodwink themselves, instead of going in search of a truly lived life? Adorno’s answer here is, as so often, a bitterly disillusioning one:

If Adorno is right, then, we surrender ourselves so uninhibitedly to the pleasures of the “false life” because we feel that we would no longer be up to the task of living any true one. Adorno even estimated his own chances of being able to live such a “true life” as very low. This is why his most personal book, the Minima Moralia, bears the highly significant subtitle Reflections from Damaged Life.

Negative Dialectics – Overcoming Language and Liberation from the Dictatorship of the Concept

There is one further fateful factor, argues Adorno, that runs as a red thread through the whole of human history. This is language. Because ever since the Stone Age human beings have been giving names to things and to other animals. We have named many animals, for example, in terms of the way that they have looked or sounded to us, calling a certain bird a “cuckoo” or a certain, apparently slow-moving animal a “sloth”. But this practice of ordering the world around us in terms of separating and classifying words and notions, which may seem on first consideration to be something completely harmless, in fact leaves a profound mark on our whole way of thinking and tends to become, so argues Adorno, a dangerous “instrument of power”. 33 Because, even if we are not aware of it, a claim to power or domination is indeed always latent, in more or less disguised form, in the concepts that we employ and in the words that express them:

Concepts, then, are, in Adorno’s view, “idea-tools” by means of which we seize hold of the things of the world, set up Nature before ourselves and divide and label it in such a way that it can be dominated and manipulated by us. For example, the gardener draws such beings as caterpillars and snails under the common classifying term of “pests” so that, once labelled in this way, he will be better able to combat them with some “pesticide” produced especially for this purpose. Already latent, then, in the very concept “pest” is the subjective power-claim of human beings directed to the protection of their crops and other cultivated plants. For wild ducks, however, and other such creatures that nourish themselves on snails, and indeed for ecologically-minded humans for whom an intact food chain and a diversity of species are important concerns, snails and caterpillars are not “pests” at all but rather very useful beings. Thus concepts, Adorno argues, do not in the end reflect objective reality, let alone anything that we can call “the truth”, but rather serve only subjective interests in domination.

“Conceptualizing” a thing, then, being always a subjective and a specifically targeted operation, never really does justice to the character of the thing conceptualized. By drawing a plant or an animal under the generic concept “pest” or “weed” what one really expresses is a power-interest: one which dictates that the plant or animal in question be destroyed. Caterpillar and dandelion are identified, respectively, by these two terms as representatives of a class of things that must be eliminated and thus as things which, considered on their own terms, they are not:

In this way we brutally cram the frame of our concepts over the diversity of the world, regardless of whether these concepts actually fit the world or not. But since concepts and words always inflict in this way a kind of violence upon the object they are used to designate, our language itself is nothing other than a mechanism of domination, an accumulation of power-related subjective interests.

Thus, language and words have, since time immemorial, served the powerful as means of manipulation. It is not just in totalitarian states that we observe such phenomena as the deployment of concepts like “enemy of the people” or “class enemy” in order to demonize certain sections of the citizenry. Comparable linguistic manipulations occur, in more subtle ways, also in democracies. Thus, for example, after Germany had lost two world wars in succession the name “War Ministry”, which had originally been applied to the section of the German government in charge of military matters, was scrapped. Germany remilitarized, indeed, even after the Second World War. But the concept used to name and think about this department of the government was henceforth “Ministry of Defence”. Indeed, in the immediate postwar period it was even proposed that this Ministry be re-established under the name “Ministry of Peace”.

The choice of these names, which was in each case at the same time the choice of a concept through which to understand the thing so named, was clearly intended to discourage or even prevent an otherwise obvious mental association: namely, that between the building-up and arming of an army and the notion of actually making war. In other words, it was a way of controlling and combating the great resistance to the idea of rearmament found in the warweary German population after 1945.

It has been a perennial practice of politicians to use the power of names, and of the concepts that names define, to achieve their ends. The German Christian Democratic Party, for example, after having been heavily defeated by the Social Democratic Party in the parliamentary elections of 1972, established a party-internal “work-group on language”. This group was tasked with finding a way to take the key concepts, “freedom”, “justice” and “solidarity”, that had helped the Social Democrats win the elections and to reflect these concepts in the Christian Democrats’ programme so as to regain the advantage in political argument.

Some years later the Christian Democrats fought back to electoral victory using the slogan “Freedom, not socialism!” The chief political strategist of the party, Alfred Dregger, had very deliberately chosen just these two concepts to campaign on. The slogan strongly associated the Social Democrat leader Helmut Schmidt with the notion of a regression back to socialism and its planned economy while presenting Helmut Kohl, the Christian Democrat leader, as the embodiment of “freedom” and “progress”. The strength of the association established between ideas here remained undiminished despite its having been, in historical fact, rather the Social Democrats who were, for more than a century, the main political force standing for these two values of freedom and progress. It is quite possible, then, to use words and concepts to manipulate, as in these specific cases of political self-presentation and propaganda.

Names and concepts, however, as Adorno further argues, exercise a still greater power, and this in a second, much wider context. Quite generally speaking, it is only within a framework established by them that names and concepts allow us to think at all. Whoever tries to clearly conceive of an idea without making use of some form of language in doing so will have immediately to recognize to what extent we find ourselves prisoners in the iron house formed by the words and sentences of whatever language we speak. Escape from such an “iron house” of names and concepts appears impossible. We are and remain therefore, argues Adorno, slaves of language and of its false names and concepts.

Adorno’s sombre conclusion, then, is that what he calls the all-encompassing “entangling web of artificial blindness” does not consist, in the end, just in the dialectic of Enlightenment and in the scientific positivism to which this dialectic gave rise, nor even just in the capitalist economic and social system. Language too is a part, and an extremely dangerous part, of this “entangling web of artificial blindness”. From the day of our birth onward, we live and move in a completely manipulated world and even our speech itself is an aspect and expression of this universal manipulation:

But if “the whole” really is an entirely “false whole” and if we are all, as Adorno maintains, imprisoned within such an all-encompassing “entangling web of artificial blindness”, then it follows logically that this imprisonment, and this induced blindness to the truth, must apply also to Adorno himself. The question, in other words, necessarily arises of how Adorno can possibly know that our universe is an entirely manipulated universe if, as follows from Adorno’s own logic, he himself is a part of the “false whole”? Adorno would not be Adorno if he did not also have an answer to this question:

It is suffering, then, that signals even to the manipulated human faculty of reason that something is not as it should be and that we need to make things different from how they are. This is Adorno’s explanation of why, despite the total manipulation that characterizes our world, we are nonetheless able to experience our false condition as indeed false. We do so simply because we suffer from it. But how, above and beyond the mere fact of suffering from this condition, can we actually know and analyse it as a false one? Adorno proposes that there be applied here the dialectical method of Critical Theory:

What does this mean, concretely? We must, argues Adorno, come, through our dialectical thinking, to understand ourselves as being, at one and the same time, expressions of this “entangling web of artificial blindness” and agents capable of critiquing it. That is to say, each of us must become thesis and antithesis combined in a single individual. But this is only possible, he goes on, where we learn to turn, in a second movement, our critical thinking against ourselves. Concretely, this means that, after having completed a mental stocktaking of all that we hold to represent objective reality, we must then go on to train a certain critical suspicion upon our own selves. That is, we must confess to ourselves the possibility that everything that we believe we know might well be an illusion born of manipulation which needs, not just in its individual details but in its entirety, to be tested and verified once again from the bottom up.

Adorno’s philosophical project, then, consists in a permanent criticism of thought by thought itself. It is only thanks to such permanent self-critique that we might have a chance of recognizing our false life as indeed just that: false. Adorno describes this important dialectical process, whereby the subject first constructs a world and then critically unmasks the construction, in extremely personal terms as something which he had felt, since his earliest youth, to be a kind of vocation:

How, though, is it possible for the individual subject to “break through the fallacy”, as Adorno puts it, of the subject’s own construction of reality? Adorno gives us at least an indication as to how we might do this. We need to try to bring about a fundamental transformation in our perception, that is, in the whole way in which we arrive at what counts for us as “knowledge”. All too often, as we have seen, the effort to “know” things is an effort just to find labels for them in order better to control them. And the labels found, such as “pest” or “weed”, are often labels that do a kind of violence to the things known. The practice of “knowing” in this way, then, must be largely given up if knowledge is to be anything like true knowledge:

A “true exertion” of human cognitive powers, in other words, and a true knowledge of the object, arise only where:

But such a “passive” experience of the truth of the object, which is a truth lying beyond all concepts and beyond the claims to mastery implied in concepts, is something that is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to describe. This experience of a “truth beyond concepts”, argues Adorno, is certainly no easy thing to communicate. It exists, however, none the less. At this point Adorno’s critique is directed against the fact that we nowadays tend to accept nothing as “true” that cannot be put into words and communicated. There is, however, Adorno argues, beyond this kind of truth a truth that escapes every sort of communication but exists nonetheless:

Truth is objectively possible, even when it is of such a kind that it can no longer be plausibly communicated to a conversation partner. And now Adorno draws a radical conclusion. It is the destiny, and indeed the true vocation, of philosophy to have to generate truths which escape the domination of conceptual thinking and are, consequently, no longer to be directly expressed in words and most definitely not to be “expounded” in the formal and systematic way in which philosophy has traditionally been expounded:

Of What Use Is Adorno’s Discovery for Us Today?

Truth Beyond Words – Can One Think Conceptually Against the Concept?