Gary,

I'm still being completely consumed by my conference paper, so I thought that what I could do is post the introduction to my paper. Here it is:

Secularity, messianism and redemption
In the thought of Theodor W. Adorno

by Trevor Maddock

Perhaps no one person typifies 20th century German thought more than the philosopher and musicologist, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). Born in Frankfurt to a middle-class Jewish father and Catholic mother, Adorno experienced directly the First World War, then the Weimar Years and the advent of Nazism, the life of a refugee, and the post-war reconstruction of Germany. He attended the University of Frankfurt, studied composition with Alban Berg, and advised Thomas Mann on the musical aspects of the writing of his great elegy to the 20th century, Doctor Faustus. Adorno returned to German academic life after the war and died at the height of the student upheavals in the last years of the 1960s – to some extent he may have even died because of those upheavals. Secular in orientation, his critical philosophy owes much to radical strains in German Jewish thought in the era following World War One. This was a sub-culture searching for its Judaism in time of upheaval and was replete with theological concepts and ideas. Adorno’s major influence at this time was the idiosyncratic Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940, leaving behind some of the most unique and important writings of the century. Messianism, redemption and secularism were the constant foci of Benjamin’s attention. The following paper shows how these ideas manifest themselves in Adorno’s thought and give what otherwise would be a relentlessly negative view of both culture and the life that sustains it a touch of something positive, not the last and final judgment but something different. Negation, writes Adorno, ‘can pass over into pleasure but not into positivity’. The transformation of negativity is indeed something greater than judgment, far greater – it is laughter.

While living in the US in the years during and immediately after the Second World War, Adorno wrote an aphoristic work, called Minima Moralia. In his book on aesthetics, he describes black as the dominant colour of the 20th century palette, and it is the literary equivalent of black that colours Minima Moralia. It draws on a ‘melancholy science’. The book is at one with Benjamin’s earlier collection of aphorisms, One-Way Street. The Australian literary theorist, Dorothy Green remarked of Minima Moralia that:

'the twenty years between its first publication in 1951 and its availability in English in the 1970s [have] provided appalling evidence of the truth of its central prediction: that there would be a further advance in the collectivisation and dehumanisation of mankind, which capitalism now demands for its survival.'

The book covers a range of topics from the most personal to the most general, comprising direct experiences, confessions, observations and criticisms, and philosophical reflections. It is in the course of such reflections that the concept of redemption is raised, at the very end of the book, as if it and it alone has the power to make sense of this work and the world that inspired it. It is as if only redemption has the capacity to bring about an aesthetic transformation, to lighten the blackness, to overcome the melancholy – melancholy – and indeed that is exactly what Adorno intends. In an aphorism entitled ‘Finale’ he writes:

'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from self contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible, but beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.'

Green’s claim to the contrary, Minima Moralia is not a work of prescience or prophesy – in this sense there is no apocalyptic vision in Adorno’s writings. In the same context, Benjamin said of Kafka that the latter listened to tradition and he who listens hard does not see. This is also true of Adorno. His conception of philosophy comes not from some prescient vision of the future of a world that created Auschwitz and the atomic bomb but from the philosophical tradition itself, a tradition that demands not only the perspective of messianism and redemption, but also – and at first glance paradoxically – that thought be completely secularised if such a perspective is to be found. As he remarks:

'The idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this is where it takes us. It is why one who believes in God cannot believe in God, why the possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by him who does not believe.'

What follows is an account of Adorno’s approach particularly to the tradition of Western metaphysics inaugurated by Aristotle and brought to an apparent end by Immanuel Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason. It is Adorno’s approach to this tradition that leads him ultimately to secularism, redemption and messianism.