adorno on impatience

I'm having a lot of fun reading Adorno's lectures titled _Problems of Moral Philosophy_  published by Stanford in 2001. He makes a valuable point about the impatience some people have for philosophic activity:

[begin Adorno] I have found again and again that when carrying out theoretical analyses -- and theoretical analyses are essentially critical in nature -- that I have been met with the question: 'Yes, but what shall we do?', and this question has been conveyed with a certain undertone of impatience, an undertone that proclaims: 'All right, what is the point of all this theory? It goes on far too long, we do not know how we should behave in the real world, and the fact is that we have to act right away!' I am not blind to the motives behind this protest, particularly in the light of the atrocities perpetrated under the Nazis, and also of the difficulties of direct and effective political action in our own day, difficulties that lead people obsessively to put such questions as: 'Very well, if there are barriers everywhere and every attempt to create a better world is blocked off, what exactly are we supposed to do?' But the reality is that the more uncertain practical action has become, the less we actually know what we should do, and the less we  find the good life guaranteed to us -- if indeed it was ever  guaranteed to anyone -- then the greater our haste in snatching at it. The impatience can very easily become linked with a certain resentment towards thinking in general, with a tendency to denounce theory as such. And from there it is not very long before people start to denounce intellectuals . . . This reproach about the uselessness of theory, this impatient need to hurl oneself into action without delay spells the end of any kind of theoretical work and contains within itself, teleologically, as if it had been assumed from the outset, a relationship to a false, in other words, an oppressive, blind and violent form of practice. [end; pp. 3-4 in _Problems of Moral Philosophy_]

Comments

[perezoso]

The denial of essences and platonic Realism (not at all literary realism, remember) seen in Hobbes is not particularly postmodern, unless you want to count, well, Hobbes/Locke/Hume as postmodern as well; and of course the positivists continued that empirical critique of platonism and Cartesianism; Wittgenstein's Tractatus is quite explicit in its denial of any sort of essences or cartesian res cogitans. So I don't think it's correct to even bring in the postmodernist terminology, and wasn't Derrida himself often following Heidegger? I think there are idealistic hints to Derrida, and that it is really thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Quine who make a clean break from metaphysics and platonisms...

quote: " But what gives the whole system movement in Marx is still the work of ideas; namely, the dialectic, which can only make its presence felt via thoughts, however dependent these might be on material factors."

Yes but as he said in the comments on the Holy Family: thought is not separate from matter. It is not a dualism of mind/matter, of res cogitans/res corpus as might be suggested by Hegel's dialectic. Matter--the human brain, not mind or soul or synthetic a priori--thinks, conceptualizes, intends. But I think Marx (as in the material on Feuerbach) was wrestling with how to account for intention and will instead of just a blind determinism. So, in a sense many of these marxist themes are quite related to the evolutionary psych. debates, regarding intention, genetics, organism/environment, etc. If I correctly recall Skinner in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he also claimed that Marxism contains a certain primitive behaviorism, but that he hadn't yet been able to get rid of the Rousseaian, rather than Hegelian, concepts of freedom. In a very real sense I think that Rousseauian concept of freedom is a rather fundamental--and dangerous--flaw to marxism.

[John S. Ransom]

I'm not in the least bit opposed to including elements of the modern period of philosophy -- Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Diderot -- in a 'postmodern' framework. I think it's unmaterialistic not to. Postmodernism is not sui generis. It would be *incredibly surprising* if postmodernism didn't have A LOT to do with modernism. That's why it's called postMODERNISM. Please excuse the capitalizations.

Let me make a comparative point: I think there are elements of 'modernity' in ancient Greek thought. I mean, of course there are! To quote Will Ferrell in the Ben Stiller vehicle 'Zoolander,' am I taking crazy pills?

None of this should surprise anyone. But it is a mark of the immaturity of critics of postmodernism that they believe they are criticizing postmodernism when in fact they are criticizing philosophy, in ways that are quite similar to the kinds of attacks philosophy has endured since Aristophanes.

[perezoso]

I tend to be suspicious of all literary nomenclature so I don't care for "postmodernist" as applied to like Hume. I would say Hume is a skeptic, however trite that may sound. I guess various figures in Plato's dialogues show this as well, but I think the greek type of skepticism is quite limited and primitive in comparison to the Humean version. And really Humean skepticism could be quite harmful in some contexts. It may not be a logical law that the mack truck travelling down the 101 will crush you and your family if you dashed in front of it, but were you to act on that very infinitesimal chance that newtonian inertia was to be reversed, you'd be roadkill in a moment, right.

But the other point I want to make before I bow out of this thread is that Marx is not in the least postmodernist. He's very much a believer in external realism as Searle calls it. There is no room for idealism or some sort of postmod relativism--it is economics and politics based on economics. Marx also was quite willing to question not only capitalism but the tradition of western culture, art, and literature: he's contra-asethetics I believe, quite different than current postmod leftists. And while Marx's economic analysis may not be entirely worthless ( but mistaken--and dangerously so-- in certain aspects), his fundamental ontology is not skeptical nor relativistic at all. It's nearly Aristotelian, but shorn of theology and idealism.

[Matt]

"So I don't think it's correct to even bring in the postmodernist terminology, and wasn't Derrida himself often following Heidegger? I think there are idealistic hints to Derrida."

And as it was told, so it was: Heidegger he sayeth unto Derrida, "either you are with me or you are against me," and Derrida he sayeth back, "Je suivre!"

http://personales.ciudad.com.ar/Derrida/frances/heidegger.htm

http://personales.ciudad.com.ar/Derrida/frances/langue_philosophique.htm

What an (un)timely post; as we've something of a history of deflating the mighty sails of the Theory-hunters round here, needless to say (see also the Adorno quote linked/relinked to from here:

http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/08/prosthetic-thoughts.html
)

A certain Adorno is very good for these sorts of things.

[Matt]

or the continuation, dear general reader, of the same Adorno quote quoted, rather. In which he briefly takes on Fichte, etc. And of course somewhat strikingly this (perhaps already referenced? sorry if I'm killing the joke):

"It is no accident that the celebrated unity of theory and practice implied by Marxian theory and then developed above all by Lenin should have finally degenerated in [Stalinist] dialectical materialism to a kind of blind dogma whose sole function is to eliminate theoretical thinking altogether. This provides an object lesson in the transformation of practicism into irrationalism, and hence, too, for the transformation of this practicism into a repressive and oppressive practice. That alone might well be a sufficient reason to give us pause and not to be in such haste to rely on the famous unity of theory and practice in the belief that it is guaranteed and that it holds good for every time and place.

For otherwise you will find yourself in the position of what Americans call a joiner, that is to say, a man who always has to join in, who has to have a cause for which he can fight. Such a person is driven by his sheer enthusiasm for the idea that something or other must be done and some movement has to be joined about which he is deluded enough to believe that it will bring about significant changes. And ultimately, this enthusiasm drives him into a kind of hostility towards mind that necessarily negates a genuine unity of theory and practice."

[Bud Morans]

Moderate the damn comments already. I don't want to have to scroll through 20K of crap from the Troll of Sorrow (or whatever else he calls himself on a given day.)

[....................]

which comment do you disagree with?

ou think adorno is the authentic marxist?

he's not-- he metaphysician..like you.

try the problem of the rentiers

or any number of other of the mistakes of Capital (like class struggle, which means petit-bourgeois leftist like LS crew put away)

has matt christie, the great LS hatchetman ever wrote like one coherent paragraph? oh he can spam derrida, but is a bit stymied by a categorical syllogism

[Matt]

There it is finally, that old categorical syllogism. Every LS author is in charge of the threads to their own posts.

[Bud Morans]

Matt, the authors here are great. But you have a problem with a creep who has no life (considering the volume of crap he spews here and elsewhere) who probably lives in his Mom's basement and has at least one restraining order against him (likely from a good looking woman at the convinience store where he buys his coffee--the only time he gets out of the house.) Given the way he writes and how often he writes, that's not invective, but probably a charitable guess. Why not put him (and your other readers?) out of his misery?

There's lots of great stuff in the Adorno lectures put out by Stanford. Those and the essays in the volume entitled _Critical Models_ are terrific introductions to his thought. Glad to see somebody picking out a choice bit--one of many. Speaking of _Critical Models_, it might be interesting to tie this into the essay translated there as "Marginalia to Theory and Praxis."

[...............]

the creep is you, satanist

go dat satan phuck? better bombs in middle east than piss phucking cafe-scum like you

u have no arguments-- adorno was a bad joke--even a mockery of the bad jokes of marxism

start with karl popper--ideology is not true; capital is not true

fuck you stalinist clowns

[John S. Ransom]

Bud Morans, I was just reading that Marginalia essay you mention above today at work! Know why? We lost the Internet today so I picked up the book that has that essay in it. I will take another look at it tomorrow and maybe say something about that.

[John S. Ransom]

We can also keep in mind in this context the commitment to 'practice' by fascists and Nazis. One of the slogans of fascism: 'Non mi ne frega niente,' which means 'I don't give a damn; I don't care.' Also, 'Credere! Obbedire! Combattare!', that is, 'Believe! Obey! Fight!' 'Chi se ferma e' perduto' - 'He who stops is lost.' 'Chi osa vince!' - 'Who dares wins!' Nazism is also well-known for its opposition to 'cafe' intellectuals. They are 'decadent,' according to Hitler.

[................]

and all the small farm owners, "kulaks," bourgeois intellectuals liquidated in the of name of revolutionary "praxis" are they nazis too?

you keep making the bubblegum fallacy that analysis and proof--analytical philosophy-- are some sort of fascist plot; quite the contrary; it's ideology (and hegel is as much a fascist as anyone) and aesthetics that lead to brownshirts and stalinists. and stalinism, marxist or not was fascism

the real anti-fascists were people such
as Popper and Russell.....the continentalist hands a bit bloodier than are brits and americans (recall heidegger and de man .etc)

[Perseus]

and I realize you're tired of any sort opposition to your assumed heroes such as Adorno and Marx Derrida, but why should say the average caucasian American lend his support to an Adorno-like Marxism? Do you really think you or academic leftists or longsunday will convince anyone why adorno is necessary? To be honest a sort of freudian analysis addressed to why american college type feel drawn to marxism would be better; the bourgeois left sees marx as a replacement for religion.... or perhaps its really as Nietzsche observed, slave morality, resentment, etc.

"political pwoer flows out of the barrel of gun"--and that gun might be an AK, or Luger (gotta admit the Wehrmacht had some cool gear) or even a humble smith and wesson.

[John S. Ransom]

Perseus writes:
and I realize you're tired of any sort opposition to your assumed heroes such as Adorno and Marx Derrida,
[end]

I don't feel tired.

[more Perseus]
but why should say the average caucasian American lend his support to an Adorno-like Marxism? Do you really think you or academic leftists or longsunday will convince anyone why adorno is necessary?
[end]

If I were the average caucasian American, I would lend my support to Adorno-like Marxism because members of the 'Frankfurt School' keeps a lot of the insights associated with Marxism while learning from the worst tragedies of the twentieth century, Stalinism and the Holocaust. As part of that, they were among the first to raise the red flag on the powers of normalization -- the ways societies shape us 'behind our backs' in ways that make the notion of consent a bit moot. Their reflections on fascism and Nazism were quite insightful -- among the best of the day and very much worth reading now. A bit more recently, someone like Marcuse makes many of the same points about the power of -- for lack of a better word -- 'normalization' in _One-Dimensional Man_, a work that is quite accessible, and which any normal, American caucasian can easily grasp. The idea that everything gets so obscure when someone like Adorno is mentioned -- it's just not true. Plato is more obscure; much more abstract. Adorno is an 'actual' philosopher -- he talks about our world. I don't agree with everything he says about the world, but he does have a method, as it were, that could have a lot of value for caucasians from the United States. If the basic method of science (to paraphrase Adorno) is organized around 'falsifiability' as a checking procedure designed to constantly adjust thinking in relation to an intuition, the basic method of the Frankfurt School is to constantly check the relation of what one says and does to the totality. And so Adorno is constantly worrying 'out loud' in his writings and talks about the extent to which this or that line of reasoning or assumption reinforces or manages to loosen the grip being applied to individuals by an ever more powerful and intrusive social totality. For instance, in _Dialectic of Enlightenment_, Adorno and Horkheimer talk about Donald Duck. They point out that the beatings and defeats Donald Duck constantly suffers at the hands of more clever chipmunks or whatever prepare the masses to suffer defeat and humiliation in silence. As that small example shows, they are among the first to talk about the effects of new media, including television and the movies. American caucasians could do a lot worse than to read an article or two by Adorno on, for instance, the topic of TV. And so no, I don't think Adorno is a waste of time at all.

And then, in making fun of Adorno, you employ one of the methods he championed -- namely, the Freudian one. Well what's goose for the sauce is duck for the goddamn swan: if we can learn more about the attraction of college professors to Marx via a Freudian analysis, where effective human motivation is located below consciousness, then we can also learn from (as opposed to constantly *whining* about) someone like Marcuse who argues in _One-Dimensional Man_ that precisely what has happened in the post-war era is that the Totality, the 'administered society,' has managed to get hold of the Freudian Id; to inject into it in a preconceptual way preferences and dislikes that coincide with the management of the whole; programming consumerism and conformity into whole populations in order to keep the machine running smoothly.

[8-ball]

Yeah well "theorists" can prattle on about donald duck or the freudian id but some data-based research on the disparities between rich and poor and on other absurdities of a pure free market economy would be far more efficacious. I read some Marcuse years ago, and would agree his sort of Freudian based leftism is interesting yet still mostly speculative and also as error-prone as is freudian ego psychology.

A Rawlsian model of social justice--based on a equitable distribution of resources, while still recognizing a certain degree of meritocracy--has many advantages over marxist-freudian or laissez faire models. That is what I think authentic ethics is about--providing a sort of foundation for economics and politics. It's been some years since I read it, but it seemed to me that Rawl's Theory of Justice, however flawed, does provide rational means (the veil of ignorance for one) for establishing a social contract without all the problems of Hobbes and Locke or the possible totalitarianism of Marx (or Rousseau). What is wrong with identifying social and economic injustice in various geographic locales--such as extreme disparities in wealth and standards of living--and then trying to ameliorate those injustices, by establishing a more equitable system of distribution, based on an entitlement to jobs, housing, necessities, technology, culture, etc.? That doesn't entail maoism and putting doctors in the fields, but perhaps a sort of rationalist socialism--and not necessarily making everyone "equal" in terms of wealth but closing the gap a bit more and keeping finance, corporate power and speculation under control. Raising taxes --property, luxury, income, and most importantly , net worth-- on the very wealthy , and even threatening strikes or worse, if the legislators did not follow up on that, could be one practical rather than theoretical sort of economic and political plan to improve many urban areas. That needn't mean a statist Robin Hood collecting from the rich to provide welfare to gangstas; it means a restructuring of the "private sector" so that qualified people do have decent employment and housing, and keeping management from becoming the little potentates and barons that they dream of being. Apart from those sorts of reforms, you might as well side with Mao..or John Dillinger maybe

[Steve]

Bud,

I think the LS authors tend to catch on eventually, that it's either all troll all the time, or everyone else. 'tis a proven fact.

["troll"]

yeah man...im a "troll" oooo deep stuff.

hey hipster aesthete-leftist... which part do you disagree with in regards to my point on hobbes and marx? yr the troll, puto.--- and you're mastered rawls as well.

lets compare out graduate GPAs how about that, hepcat.

ur not a leftist..."troll" is a right wing term--typical fratboy slander..that u really-- frat boy who read some lukacs one day in hopes of what? getting some from the latte-chick at starbucks ..or was it latte -boy, schwinger

[Steve]

cute; reminds me of grade school.

[............]

freak, yr not a philosopher. get that yet? postmod is not philosophy anyways---its sort of heidegger meets marxist anthropology bric a brac. and quite im sure i know Capital better than u as well.

care to debate surplus value theory? discussion of the commodity?

yr nothing: another mommy boy aesthete tryinf to find some like-minded bathhouse closet cases to hang with

an old school leftist-- like ed abbey or chris lasch, even abbie hoffman-- would have knocked yr fratboy ass out

[Steve]

this may come as a shock to you, but i like Ed Abbey. and i despise fratboys.

please, tell me what philosophy IS, won't you? Otherwise you're just giving Quine Russel Popper etc. a pretty phucking poor name. But surely you've already had that thought.

[Denali]

What would Cactus Ed think of all this Adornoing, pomo-ing, and Zizeking? Zizek sometimes shows a bit of an old anarchist spirit, at least in person--but his writing seems far mroe psychoanalytic than marxist. I suspect Abbey would have detested the postmod. left and Zizek.

Abbey's intellectual product obviously is not in the Russell category, but I think he was sort of an inductivist and materialist at heart. He was not so fond of academics--there was a parody of that old freak Bookchin in one of his later books-- nor of formality or aesthetics. He surely had limits and was not exactly PC, but there was a certain Bakuninian courage to his character which seems missing from so much of blogland. I mean, he laid women. He drank and climbed mountains and wandered through the wilds of Utah, and found time to read philosophy and geology, history etc. He didn't remain sequestered in some big coastal city or college cafe scene.

Abbey's not the greatest stylist and bit too much of the luddite for most of us--but there was something admirable in his simplicity, his Nietzschean naturalism, and the dedication to environmentalism and taking on the corporate goons. Ed knew what the stakes of apathy and decadence were. I suspect he would have been mightily pissed at 9-11 but would not have sided with BushCo. He might have aligned with the liberal hawks but still demanded the investigation into BushCo lies and manipulations.

The postmod. type would detest that sort of non-PC machismo and probably find Abbey's writing rightist but they would do well to read some of him. Maybe. Or maybe just go to Nietzsche or Bakunin instead.

[Steve]

Yeah, Abbey..he had his moments. A bit of that machismo goes a long way, maybe, but he also knew how to be alone. And he laid women, or perhaps cacti. Hey, you know not all of the people here simply hang out in "college cafes" all the time, right? Apathy and decadence, well, in Abbey's grip they were sort of worn smooth into virtues, all the while never letting up on the good fight, full of piss and vinegar as they say; on that we may agree. But this "postmod" fantasm you keep citing is still clichéd, hollow and wrong or at least misplaced (there is good and bad "postmod" just as there is good and bad anything) and while everyone needs a whipping post (Abbey had environmentalism)...this one's doing you no favors, you know; you're smarter than that.

[Fritz]

OK enough with Abbey: what about say the Surrealists? You think Andre Breton and his pals woudl have been down with the Derridean programme? Ich weisse nicht (i do bad deutsch better than bad gaul, aber ich kenne ein bisschen franzoische lesen). Breton was as left as leftists get, methinks, and not completely unskilled in dialectics. And he had the spine to denounce the Stalinists (and fascists) early one and was in solidarity with Trotsky. From what I gather he was a bit arrogant, macho, difficult, not PC as it's conceived now, but a decent mensch. OK there was a trifle too much diablerie and bad Freud to the surrealist movement but also some real subversion which the academic left sorely needs. The surrealists were all about inclusion too--they could embrace Marx and Freud, at least to some extent, but also Lewis Carroll and Eskimo shamanism...and it wasn't so much about queerness as the beats were....Magritte and that freaky art-jass may be dead (tho in a writer like Ballard one might still trace that surrealist edge and splendid amorality), but there's sort of an absence left....the spectre of surrealism