7 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More readable than the old translation of negative dialectics, January 27, 2007
This review is from: History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (Paperback)
It's translated into contemporary English, sometimes I concede with jarring effect. Older Adorno texts were translated by bitter, twisted, and prematurely aged graduate students into something isomorphic with prewar Hoch Deutsche, making them murky beyond belief.
Here, the import of Negative Dialectics is that at some point, the so-often-misrepresented thought midcentury has a ground.
Why in fact should there be no concentration camps, even if God is dead, was a question which was in my experience answered with moral seriousness until about 1980, perhaps more precisely until 1982, when with the permission of Holocaust victim descendants, a group that at times called itself the Falange entered a refugee camp (which is where women and kids take refuge) and started systematically slaughtering people.
Called unserious, it was the deliberate failure to reify dialectical terms so as to somehow justify any specific instance of suffering.
As did Kant, it called on us to remember that we're not able to stand outside of philosophizing.
As far as I can understand, the notion of a constellation is one in which we simultaneously realize that a "thing" was the product of an act in history (some Greek guys pointing to stars and finding shapes) but with permanent reality, a reality as real as we are going to get.
For example, cf p. 173 of this book for "freedom". Here we realize that whatever else it is, ordinary Americans don't mean by "freedom" what they have, for trivially, had they had it they would not seek it. But we do, usually getting what we call jack: cf. most of Ray Carver's stuff.
Ray Carver documents adventures in all twelve tones. Most superficial readers read-into his stuff a religious *aufhebung* based on his confession of alcoholism but most such confessors do anything but come to Jesus, using the word "spiritual" and not "religious".
Perhaps (to continue philosophizing based on this starting point) that we really have it, because "freedom" means "the pursuit of happiness", permission to enter a race.
But from his European perch, I can see Adorno replying that Spartacus had this, Hobbes' troglodyte had this, Hegel's Slave had this.
And we have to realize that dialectically, as Americans, we have to shuttle between two forms of language.
In one, we are "free" and have "choice". So they tell us, even when we're perp-walked for making "bad" choices (hey, I thought I was free, o never mind).
In the other we find the daily language of I have to go to work I have to go to church I have to pick up the kids. This form of language speaks of at least a partial determination, in which we have agreed to sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of a final goal which we do, I concede, get to choose, sort of (we can't choose, of course, to become rich criminals...I guess...although this is precisely who we celebrate).
My head hurts.
But what Adorno has done, with far more mastery than the overrated head case of a late Wittgenstein, and far more personal self-control (cf. Wittgenstein's Poker), is show that the existence of the confusion is prior to Wittgenstein's attempts to demonstrate a false syllogism: if it is a confusion, it cannot exist.
[The late Wittgenstein is a male syllogism, seen when we males are lost when driving: there is a confusion, I'm lost, but since I am an adult male as was the late Wittgenstein, I cannot be confused therefore the Question is a pseudo-problem.]
[My guess is that when in California and driving with nee Karplus to the all you can eat fish place, Adorno would pull into a gas station and ask directions. Fortunately for the ladies, Wittgenstein wasn't married.]
"Freedom" can like "art" name something not quite existing, a child in the birth canal. Why the hell not? Admitting the confusion PREVENTS us from killing in the name of "freedom".
This is moral seriousness on steroids. Contrast "analytic" philosophy which today makes the kow-tow to prephilosophical thinking apologetically so the janitor won't turn out the lights or ask for a living wage, and then proceeds unreflectingly yet under the name of philosophy to reach silly conclusions such as "it is a necessary truth that all people have a brain".
There is not now, and I hope there never will be, Adorno for Dummies. But this series of lectures is accessible because the lecture format, in which we watch a man thinking, is a scene of Negative Dialectics.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
