The mataphysics of Adorno?

I have already written about the similarity of two philosophical directions that are usually portrayed as not only distinct but opposite: the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and Heidegger's resurrection of metaphysics. My intent is not to show that these two systems actually are one and the same, but to highlight the differences by showing how the systems follow diverging trajectories from the same starting points. In a previous post I have already quoted from Adorno's reply to Popper that sparked of the so-called positivism debate, but there is another part in Adorno's speech that is quite interesting, the part where he argues that theory can not be reduced to a set of testable hypotheses:

Facts are not the ultimate point in society, at which cognizance can find a foothold, because cognizance itself is mediated by society. Not all theorems are hypotheses; theory is the telos, not a tool of sociology.

What is interesting is the use of the word "telos", borrowed from metaphysics, and the context it was used in suggests that Adorno used it intentionally. If we first turn to the notion of telos, it is - broadly speaking - the goal that a given phenomenon is moving towards because of its own inner logic. The "self-realization of Spirit" in Hegel might be one such example, or in Aristotle the movement of matter towards form, or in Marxist eschatology the second coming of communism, the end of history as the necessary result of that very history. If we translate Adorno into Heideggerian, his argument goes something like this: by virtue of his being-in-the-world, man is called upon by being to uncover truth (truth as unconcealment is a formulation that both Heidegger and Adorno used) and put himself in the service of being. For Adorno then though must be critical not by choice, but because of its ontological position. Ironically it would seem the base of critical thought is built on the uncritical, the matter-of-fact of metaphysics. But is it really that simple?

The main difference, and it is a fundamental one, is in the way Adorno and Heidegger think about being. The very formulation Sein indicates that Heidegger - somewhat in Platonist manner - still envisioned an abstract Being beyond all concrete being. This can be seen in his idea of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit): for him things can become part of history only because they have an inherent characteristic, that is historicity. It is not the fact that they are part of history that makes them historical, quite the opposite: that they are part of history only proves that they posess the inherent characteristic of historicity that allowed them to manifest themselves in history in the first place. The obvious logical problem with a notion of being abstracted from all being, of historicity abstracted of all history, is that - as structuralism has taught us - every being of something implies a not being of something else and vice versa. Only concretely can the two - being and not being - be distinguished. A purely abstract being must therefore also be a purely abstract not being. We see that an idea of a purely abstract being is utterly useless. Heidegger grounds society and history in something beyond themselves, abstract being and an equally abstract historicity, supplies them with a base that curtails change. Adorno on the other hand sees change as the very essence of history - that is to say history as a process of change has no base outside itself. It is the dialectics of history that are its driving force. His position is as much a critique of Heideggerian metaphysics as it is a critique of Kantian epistemology, as can be seen from the following quote:

The matter, the object of social cognizance is not free of normative content [Sollensfreies], it is not merely being there [Daseiendes] - this it becomes only by the workings of abstraction. Values do not exist beyond it on a horizon of ideas.

Let's think a chair, shall we?

A bizarre turn of phrase has become widespread among second-rate philosophers these days, so widespread that it is quite annoying. Where we would usually expect the formulation "think about object x", we are hit over the head with the abomination "think object x". The people writing in this manner obviously missed the introductory course to philosophy, where they would have learned about two philosophical positions on the relationship between subject and object that were held by some unenlightened spirits in the dark ages. At one end we have naive nominalism, which states that subjective concepts have no equivalents on the level of the object; Hume, while living after the end of the dark ages - but who was still pretty much untouched by the light of reason - was a proponent of this view: he held that things like causality are purely subjective phenomena and do not exist objectively. At the other end we have naive realism, which states that there can and does exist an unmediated relationship between object and subject, that the object is transparent to the subject. This is the problem that Adorno adressed when he was talking about the non-identical: about that, which can not be subsumed under the concept. Some proponents of positivism - who are, to be fair, like Hume a product of the post-dark-ages, but whom we have to thank for the contemporary "eclipse of reason", as Horkheimer put it - can be counted as members of this camp. What both camps would agree upon is that the formulation "think object x" is quite felicitous. It can be understood in two ways: when we say for example "think democracy", this might imply that democracy is a pure phantom of the mind, without any correlate in the real world. This belief lies at the heart of bourgeois morals: ideals are to be thought about, not acted upon. Another way we can understand the formulation "think democracy" is that, to put it bluntly, I take the object as it is, stick it into my brain and let it swirl around a bit in there. This is the belief at the core of the bourgeois work ethic, it is what Marx meant with the term commodity fetishism and what Lukacs meant with the term reification: the misapprehension that sees subjective phenomena - social relationships - as objective, as somehting pertaining to the commodity itself. To "think democracy" is therefore the purest manifestation of the deformations democracy has undergone in capitalist societies, it is the point at which we can see even language itself bent and twisted by the untrue society, proving the value of the marxist idea of base and superstructure.

Stance of undefeated despair

In his essay on Kafka Walter Benjamin reports about a discussion Kafka had with Max Brod. They started off talking about the end of civilization and at one moment Kafka remarked that we are just nihilistic, suicidal thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as an evil demiurge and the world as his sin. "No," Kafka responded, "nothing like that, we are merely the result of a bad day, a gloomy mood." From this Brod gathered: "Then there is still hope?" At which moment a broad smile illuminated Kafka's face: "As much hope as you like, endless hope ... just not for us."

In the story At the building of the Chinese wall there is a myth about a royal message sent out to a lowly subject. The story also exists independently under the title A royal message, following a pattern that was not unfamiliar to Kafka: structuring his stories like fractals. The same structure can be found in The Process, where the entire novel is condensed into the story from the introductory scriptures of the Law. A royal message starts like this:

Der Kaiser - so heißt es - hat Dir, dem Einzelnen, dem jämmerlichen Untertanen, dem winzig vor der kaiserlichen Sonne in die fernste Ferne geflüchteten Schatten, gerade Dir hat der Kaiser von seinem Sterbebett aus eine Botschaft gesendet.

The king - so it is said - had sent to you, the individual, pitiful subject, the shadow that is chased to the remotest corner by the light of the royal sun, to you of all people the king had sent a message from his dying bed.

The message must be very important because the king had it repeated to his ear, before finally nodding his approval to the messanger and sending him on his way. But there is a problem: the messenger - the fittest man in the whole of the land - can not move forward for the mass of the people. He will never be able to leave the inner palace, and even if he could by some miracuolous fate achieve this, it would be in vain, because there are steps beyond that, and then the yard, after that the outer palace, and again steps and yards. It is quite impossible that you, the lowly subject, will ever receive the royal message,

- Du aber sitzt and Deinem Fenster und erträumst sie Dir, wenn der Abend kommt.

- But yet you sit at your window and dream it into existence as the evening comes.

In both stories we can see a sense of hope in spite of hopelessness. This feeling resonates in Adorno's and Horkheimer's metaphor of the message in a bottle (that their theory is intended for some imagined future recipient, for a time when things will not be as bleak). More recently though it is what John Berger described as the Stance of undefeated despair in his report from Ramallah. The New York Times write - almost cynically - about the "densely populated Gaza Strip", completely ignoring the question whence this overpopulation comes from: it is the progressing stranglehold of the Israeli occupation that is robbing Palestinians of living space. Ironically, the same world-view is found among Jews, persecuted in Europe, and Palestinians, persecuted by Israel. Ironically, a wall is featured in both stories. Berger notes that "oddly, it doesn’t look final, only insurmountable," and continues:

When it’s finished, it will be the 640-km-long expressionless face of an inequality. At the moment it’s 210 km long. The inequality is between those who have the full arsenal of the latest military technology to defend what they believe to be their interest (Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, F16’s) and those who have nothing, save their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.

Dialectical literature

Bertolt Brecht considered using the term "dialectical theatre" for what has later become known - more appropriately - as "epic theatre". Such lax usage of the term dialectics is not particular to Brecht, Benjamin also made quite inappropriate references to dialectics. If we were to seek a properly dialectical piece of literature we would have to look at Hölderlin's magnificent elegy Hyperion. That the novel is dialectical is no coincidence since Hölderlin was a good friend of Hegel and they shared ideas and ideals: Lukacs describes - not without irony - how Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling had in their youth planted a tree in honour of the French revolution and danced around it. Lukacs interprets Hyperion as an elegy for the heroic phase of the bourgeois revolution, for the time the bourgeoisie glistened in the light of a grandiose self-deception, as Marx noted: "Its gladiators found in the rigorous classical legacy of the Roman republic the ideals and artistic forms, the self-deceptions it needed to conceal from itself the limited bourgeois character of its struggles and to raise its passion to the height of a great historical tragedy." If reactionary interpreters of Hölderlin (among which Lukacs forgets to mention Heidegger) tried to cleanse him of all historical content (class struggle), Lukacs commits the fault to interpret motifs and characters from Hyperion with a direct recourse to historical circumstances. The path I would prefer - and it is the path I also take with philosophical systems - is to treat the text as a coherent whole in which every element is first of all to be interpreted in context of the work and only then can the work as a whole be put into historical context. In the case of Hyperion the task therefore starts with uncovering the dialectical structure of the work.

The dialectical structure can be found on two levels: 1. the fabula, 2. explicit reflection by the characters. If we first turn to the fabula, we could read the three main characters as a dialectical whole. On one side we have the warrior Alabanda, the fiery youth who inflames Hyperion and moves him to action. On the other we have Diotima, Hyperion's great love, representing nature in its harmony, who has a rather passivizing effect on him. It is these two forces that are fighting inside the protagonist and which determine the state he finds himself in. Upon meeting Alabanda we can find Hyperion speaking these words in revolutionary fervour (first is the original, followed by my less then perfect translation):

Ich will, sagt ich, die Schaufel nehmen und den Kot in eine Grube werfen. Ein Volk, wo Geist und Größe keinen Geist und keine Größe mehr erzeugt, hat nichts mehr gemein, mit andern, die noch Menschen sind, hat keine Rechte mehr, und es ist ein leeres Possenspiel, ein Aberglauben, wenn man solche willenlose Leichname noch ehren will, als wär ein Römerherz in ihnen. Weg mit ihnen! Er darf nicht stehen, wo er steht, der dürre faule Baum, er stiehlt ja Licht und Luft dem jungen Leben, das für eine neue Welt heranreift.

I want to, I said, take a shovel and hurl the manure into a pit. A people, where spirit and greatness do not spur spirit and greatness, has nothing in common with others, who are still human. It has no rights, and it is mere farce, a superstition, to believe such corpses can be honoured like a roman heart were beating in their chest. Away with them! The rotten tree can not stand where it stands, it is obscuring the young life, the ripening new world.

But alas! upon meeting Diotima, we find the same Hyperion speaking these words:

Was kümmert mich der Schiffbruch der Welt, ich weiß von nichts, als meiner seligen Insel.

What do I care for the shipwreck of the world, I know of nothing but my blissful island.

We find the protagonist being subject to the balance of two moments, on one the warrior principle, a disharmonious activating force, on the other love, a harmonious passivizing force. The second level where we come across dialectics are reflections by characters. The way Hyperion envisions the perfect order of the world is fundamentally dialectical. He wants to bring society in harmony with nature once again, and at the core of nature he finds the principle of beauty. How does Hyperion envision this principle? As a balance of contrasting forces, or - may I be so bold to say - of dialectic moments. When describing the ideal people, the Athenians, he says:

Kein außerordentlich Schicksal erzeugt den Menschen. Groß und kollosalisch sind die Söhne einer solchen Mutter, aber schöne Wesen, oder, was dasselbe ist, Menschen werden sie nie, oder spät erst, wenn die Kontraste sich zu har bekämpfen, um nicht endlich Frieden zu
machen.

Man is not created by an extraordinary destiny. Great and colossal are the sons of such a mother, but they never or only late become beautiful beings, or, what is the same, human, if the contrasts are in too sharp an opposition to come to peace.

Continuing, he discovers dialectics as the essence of philosophy (something else Hegel agreed on with Hölderlin):

Das große Wort, das εν διαφερον εαυτω (das Eine in sich selber unterschiedne) des Heraklit, das konnte nur ein Grieche finden, denn es ist das Wesen der Schönheit, und ehe das gefunden war, gabs keine Philosophie.

Only a Greek could find the great word, the εν διαφερον εαυτω (The one that is differentiated in itself) of Heraclitus. It is the essence of beauty and before it was found there could be no philosophy.

For dialectical thinkers from Heraclitus onwards the internal forces of the contrasting moments are the driving force of change - as the dialectics of Spirit was the driving force of history for Hegel, so class struggle was the driving force of history for Marx. Heraclitus had thus avoided a problem all prima philosphia had been stuck with - the problem of the prime mover. Heraclitus answered simply that movement had no prime mover, because there is no initial static state that needed to be moved. Change is the perpetual order of the world and this change does not result from a first cause, but from the dialectics of nature, from intrinsic properties of each and every object existing in nature. Compare now Alabanda's opinion on the matter:

Ich fühl' in mir ein Leben, das kein Gott geschaffen, und kein sterblicher gezeugt. Ich glaube, daß wir durch uns selber sind, und nur aus freier Lust so innig mit dem All verbunden.

In me I feel a life that no god has spawned and no mortal created. I believe that we exist through ourselves, and that we are so deeply connected to existence merely by free will.

Other examples of dialectical thought can easily be found, but I will take that I have provided sufficient examples to convince the reader of my point that dialectics are the fundamental structuring principle of the novel. Now we can move one step further, and see at what point Hölderlin surpassed his friend Hegel. I will attempt to prove that Hölderlin's dialectics are not merely subjective as Hegel's, but that it represents a first step towards materialism (of course - historically speaking - it was a step into a blind alley since Marx found the path to a materialist dialectics through Feuerbach). The element that transcends mere idealism is destiny. If for the conservative Hegel the march of spirit towards self-realization is determined only by its own inner dialectics (Hegel had found the decadent protocapitalims of Germany quite comfortable) for Hölderlin it is destiny that opposes the self-realization of the harmonious society. Destiny - of which Hölderlin has but a vague understanding - is the force that opposes the harmony towards which humanity is striving. It is the material force which prevents the subjective dialectics, the self-realization of spirit, to take its course. As opposed to Hegel and the bourgeoisie as a whole, Hölderlin was not prepared to shed the great ideals that propelled the bourgeoisie to power like a worn-out coat. But for him destiny was an arbitrary foreign force, he did not yet understand society as Marx did: for whom the failure of great bourgeois ideals was the natural order of things since they were a tool the bourgeoisie used and that it discarded as soon as it ceased to fulfil its function. Hölderlin can be compared to Kafka and Euripides: for all of them destiny is a foreign element that crushes the individual, but none of them had a full understanding of the material basis of destiny, none of them understood, as Brecht did, that people make their own destiny, that - as Marx had put it: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under circumstances of their own choosing, but under given and inherited circumstances. The tradition of all dead societies burdens the minds of the living like a nightmare." If they did, they could have said as Brecht did in the closing lines of the Threepenny opera:

Verfolgt das Unrecht nicht zu sehr, in Bälde
Erfriert es schon von selbst, denn es ist kalt.
Bedenkt das Dunkel und die große Kälte
In diesem Tale, das von Jammer Schallt.

Do not persecute injustice too harshly,
outside it will soon freeze by itself.
Think of the darkness and the great cold
in this valley that echoes with wailing.

The metaphor strikes back

Metaphors are sneaky little buggers. True, they might help you get your point across more clearly and vividly and are particularly suited to become part of intellectual world history - few people are unaware that capital lives a "vampire like" existence, that religion is the "opium of the people", that capitalism encloses us in an "iron casing" etc. Of course there are those instances of metaphors gone terribly wrong, like the one about the "base" and "superstructure" which has caused terrible misunderstandings, but there is another way metaphors can, like Frankenstein's "monster", develop a life of their own and take vengeance on their creator. One such unruly metaphor is Plato's cave. Plato meant to illustrate his theory of the double realms (ideas and phenomena), but ended up showing that his theory is logically inconsistent. The main problem of his conceptualization is (as Aristotle showed in his Metaphysics) that it does not show how these two fundamentally distinct realms, the realm of ideas and the realm of phenomena, can have anything in common, how ideas can spawn phenomena as their imperfect images. Even before Aristotle answered that they can not, at least if we understand them as independent spheres, Plato's cave showed the flaws of such conceptualization. In the story Plato describes people in a cave, chained so they can move neither their bodies nor their heads. Behind these people there is a fire and in front of the fire figures are carried to and fro. The imprisoned know nothing of this, but see only shadows of objects being thrown on a wall in the cave. Since they can not see the origins of the shadows, they mistake them for the figures themselves. Ah! but you will notice that all of a sudden we are confronted not with two - as Plato would have us believe - but with three spheres: that of shadows (phenomena), that of figures (ideas) and that of light. The latter has no equivalent in Plato's philosophy, indeed even Aristotle's solution to the problem of incommensurability does not solve it with recourse to the mysterious third element. The metaphor of the cave was centuries before its time, a true prophesy of things to come: it was only Kant who discovered that the subject is the source of light that is joining phenomena and nuomena.

A priori, a posteriori or Heidegger contra Kant

Recently I have become interested in the problem of epistemology and Kant's Critique of pure reason seemed like a good starting point. Kant makes quite a convincing point about a priori categories, namely time and space. He claims that these categories are preconditions for any sensory and cognitive activity. Categories should be distinguished from ideas and concepts: that the subject necessarily has an a priori category of time does not mean that it has a positive idea of time (the fact that the idea of time is culturally specific - linear and circular time being two most common examples - would obviously disprove that) but that there necessarily exists a category which allows phenomena to exist in the relationship of before and after. If this were not an a priori category no meaningful interaction would be possible, because we would not be able to conceptualize things like action/reaction, cause/effect, even a notion of self - which is at its core a notion of temporal continuity - would be quite impossible. After proving this point Kant is content to leave the matter as it stands and does not investigate into the origins of these a priori categories. He was wise enough to know that in the context of his philosophical system this endeavour would have been futile. The problem is that it is framed as an epistemological, not ontological, problem. In the context of idealism with its fixation on the primacy of the subject all ontology boils down to epistemology in the end, that is why the answer necessarily eluded Kant.

Fast forward then to Heidegger, a man who could have been a great philosopher, were his tremendous sagacity not coupled with an even greater measure of senselessness. To put it more precisely: a man, who refused to take the obvious step all the inconsistencies and paradoxes of his system called for - the step from metaphysics to materialism - only for the sake of acting as a mouthpiece of the Third Reich, even as the Reich had been long dead. I will be so bold to take this step, the step his servile cowardice prevented him to take, for him. For Heidegger in Being and time then the starting point was not epistemology, he took a broader perspective and claimed that being-in-the-world is antecedent and is a precondition for knowing the world. This allows us to solve the riddle of the origin of a priori categories: they are ontological characteristics of the subject's being-in-the-world, time and space are something that the subject shares with the object, and only by virtue of this commonality can the subject know anything about the world. For Kant a priori categories were something at home in the subject, they were something the subject imposed on the world, no wonder then that the object - the infamous Ding an sich - eluded him. The truth is that a priori categories are not merely subjective and it is this fact which makes cognition possible in the first place. The problem with Heidegger is that upon discovering this fact he ran amok and tried to subsume everything to the realm of Dasein. While there can be no doubt that time and space as physical categories are things society and individuals can have little influence on, Heidegger envisions the whole of society to this be similarly beyond reproach and adds history to boot. His philosophy becomes a giant apology for the status quo, the most ferocious one since Hegel, indeed ferocious enough that Heidegger's epitaph might have read: "No, you must not think everything is true, merely that it is necessary."

sterile sexuality

When Habermas was first writing about the public sphere he used the ideal types of mass and public to define the degree of "publicness" of an opinion. I thought it might be useful to pursue the same path to define an aesthetic public sphere. That is why I am - among other things - reading Freud's mass psychology and ego analysis. In it Freud notes that the libidinous binding force of the mass is unrealizable or zielgehemmt - the pleasure derived is not from fulfillment but from deferment. It is this element that makes the bond permanent: the mass does not satisfy its victims, for if it did, it would cease to exist. It does not disappoint them, for if it did, it would cease to exist. Rather it promises and what it promises is another promise. This is an interesting vantage point to approach the culture industry from since it is this infernal characteristic that makes up for its noxious character: the products of the culture industry are not even vulgar, they do not even satisfy the most base and primitive desires, the way folk culture used to. Rather they induce a perpetual frustration. This is the point a lot of misunderstanding of Adorno originates from: people charge him with elitism since he supposedly favoured elite over popular culture. Far from this Adorno and Horkheimer claimed in Dialectics of enlightenment that the problem of the culture industry is that it is neither high culture that marks the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, nor is it popular culture of those excluded from elite culture, it is imposed on the masses by elites.

The following video by Britney Spears is a good case in point:

Britney Spears - Womanizer (Clip Video)
Uploaded by Britney_Jean_Spears