Another quote from Gadamer's Truth and Method on experience:
'Experience stands in an ineluctable opposition to knowledge and to the kind of instruction that follows from general theoretical or technical knowledge. The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience. That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences. The consummation of his experience, the perfection that we call "being experienced," does not consist in the fact that someone already knows everything and knows better than anyone else. Rather, the experienced person proves to be, on the contrary someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.'
Gadamer says that experience involves insight, which is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we called experience in the proper sense.
In the 'Introduction' to his Adorno: Disenchantment and the Ethics J.M. Bernstein writes thiis interesting passage:
By staking his philosophy on the critique of scientific rationalism Adorno is following what is by now a well-worn path. Almosty all critiques of scientific rationalism share the attempt to demonstrate that it posseses necessary conditions that it cannot eschew, take account of, or get on level terms with. However, since in almost cases what these demonstrations reveal are nonrational conditions of rational thought, then they suffer from two deficiencies: they leave the gap separating justifying reason and motivating reasons unabridged, and thereby leave the non-rational exposed to sceptical from reason (or the inversion of this: simply espouse the cause of the nonrational).
"....where the only way to become a member is to cut your own head off and at the same time cut the head off one of the others, who would, siumultaneously, also become a member. Through this mutual act, we follow each other into the most impossible, that which we could not live together or give to each other, death itself. Which means, of course, that anyone who accomplishes this act will die. A community of dead people. Or, even better: a community of the dying.."
Adorno,in contrast, expands reason. He does so in terms of a critique of an instrumental scientific rationalism, which argues that scientific reason is involved in a process of systematically negating particularity in favour of universality. The expansion by highlighting the constitutive role of sensuous particulars in rationality to give us a practical ethical reason concerned with a damaged life and its insight that a wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
I dipped back into Bataille this morning after I read this lovely post over at mezomian community? on community. I decided I'd go crude. So Bataille viruently opposes a positivist scientific reason with eroticism, the body and mysticism. Let's stick with this stark dualism as away of reading Bataille.
Or rather, I should say that I picked up Denis Hollier's Against Architecture, rather than read Bataille. I couldn't stomach returning to On Nietzsche. Hollier says:
Philosophy's precise function lies, according to Bataille, in this empire of theory where all the ideological practices limiting language to an instrumental function are gathered. Philosophy's special domain is the trash cans of science. Philsophers, sciences garbage men, eliminate or recuperate its refuse, reducing it to nothing or boiling down to samness.
Science, in the course of its development, produces waste products that upset it...Philsophy's task is to demonstrate that there is nothing threatening about them, either because they are not, in fact, foreign at all, and do escape science's jurisdiction; or because they have no reality ...What is essential is that nothing exists outside fo a theoretical horizon; nothing escapes examination in the distancing that is theory; nothing exists that cannot be mentioned, that has no name, that cannot be subsumed into some conceptual abstraction.
I haven't able to access J.M. Bernstein's seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit these last few days. The site has been down. Then my server was down.
With Seminar 4 we have shifted from consciousness to self-consciousness. This seminar is a long way from those who continue to mis-read Hegel in terms of being a Platonist logicist metaphysics that denies the existence of individual things; Hegel's metaphysics really being about God; and the metaphysics is the foundation of modern statism and totalitarianism.
We jump straight in once again to soemthignh that has been going on for a while. It takes a while to pick up what is going on, and to figure out which bit of the text we are working from, and how Bernstein is reading this well-known passage.
Hegel says:
'SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or "recognized"'...Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other.' (para 178-9)
I have just come across this selection from Hans Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, where he says that "the concept of experience seems to me one of the most obscure we have." I agree with that.
Gadamer says:
'What concerns Aristotle about experience is merely how it contributes to the formation of concepts. If we thus regard experience in terms of its result, we have ignored the fact that experience is a process. In fact, this process is essentially negative. It cannot be described simply as the unbroken generation of typical universals. Rather, this generation takes place as false generalizations are continually refuted by experience and what was regarded as typical is shown not to be so. Language shows this when we use the word "experience" in two different senses: the experiences that conform to our expectation and confirm it and the new experiences that occur to us. This latter---"experience" in the genuine sense---is always negative. If a new experience of an object occurs to us this means that hitherto we have not seen the thing correctly and now know it better. Thus the negativity of experience has a curiously productive meaning. It is not simply that we see through a deception and hence make a correction, but we acquire a comprehensive knowledge. We cannot, therefore, have a new experience of any object at random, but it must be of such a nature that we gain better knowledge through it, not only of itself, but of what we thought we knew before i.e. of a universal. The negation by means of which it achieves is a determinate negation. We call this kind of experience dialectical.'(p.354)
Gadamer then turns to Hegel as he gives a dialectical account of experience. Gadamer says:
'Heidegger has pointed out, rightly in my opinion, that..Hegel is not interpreting experience dialectically but rather conceiving what is dialectical in terms of the nature of experience....According to Hegel, experience has the structure of a reversal of consciousness and hence it is a dialectical movement....the philosophical mind realizes what the experiencing mind is really doing when it proceeds from one to the other: it is reversing itself. Thus Hegel declares that the true nature of experience is to reverse itself in this way...What Hegel thus describes as experience is the experience that consciousness has of itself.'
I've always found Blanchot hard to read and I've struggled with interpreting his texts and his idea of the limit-experience.
So in this post I'm just going to take the easy way out and juxtapose two texts about Blanchot.
The first is one by Matt over at Long Sunday, who has a post on Blanchot's politics of writing. Matt asks:
Does Blanchot present a "negative eschatology?" In a time––this moment, now––so saturated with capitalist noise and whining about the "victory of (neo)liberal democracy" and its accompanying, mantric, superficially (neo)Hegelian echoes of an "end of History"––we might do well to heed the warnings contained in Derrida's later writings, particularly Specters of Marx....Writing, finally no less homesick than speaking, remains a potential site for a certain kind of politics--one not without fragility or risk... Is Blanchot's politics of writing diagnosably apocalyptic? ...Writing then refuses the present, but never in the same way as the phrase, "end of history," forecloses on the present (or never in the same way twice). If writing has the power to transform eras, or if writing itself is the change between eras, there is a sense in which writing both hears and refuses its own present––or at least its own presence as a representation of power (over the future, for instance). Blanchot's politics of writing is, at least in Leslie Hill's reading, nothing if not a responsibility (very much in the sense Derrida gives to this word) to alterity and to the Other (as irriducibly other).
One kind of writing is poetry. I'm going to montage Kevin Hart's text to Matt's text.
I've generally interpreted Blanchot as working in the romantic tradition. Kevin Hart says that Blanchot rejects the romantic notions of genius and imagination. So how does Blanchot understand poetic writing? Hart says:
For while Blanchot speaks with Georges Bataille of 'inner experience', of 'a voyage to the end of the possible in man', he identifies an event that explodes rather than preserves an interiority, that exposes the individual to the community that precedes him or her both in fact and by right...Blanchot will therefore evoke an experience that comes at the limit of power, where all dialectical possibilities are exhausted, including those upholding meaning and truth, and especially those that underwrite the myth of coherent selfhood. It is in art, Blanchot tells us, that we characteristically feel the pull of this limit. We find ourselves losing the origin that once attracted us to a work, and being approached by an irruption in immanence, not a transcendence but an infinite dispersal of indeterminate being. As if trapped, we yield to the fascination this irruption exerts in language, giving ourselves over to the allure of the imaginary.
I use the first person plural not to suggest that the experience is universal but to indicate that, for Blanchot, no 'I' can rightly claim to know it. Like Rilke, Blanchot will propose that the artist’s experience is a foretaste of death, a dissolution of individual consciousness as ground of possible experience...With implacable logic, Blanchot will tell us that the experience of writing is never a 'lived event'; it does not engage 'the present of presence' and is 'already nonexperience'. This is not because the writer encounters being in an eminent sense, an eternal One that eludes the present as much as it does the past and the future.
Rather, it is because fascination reigns in an absence of time, before any effective stirrings of negativity, at the threshhold of logic and history where, as Hegel observes, being is 'neither more nor less than nothing' The ontological indeterminacy where the dialectic begins is, on Blanchot’s interpretation, also thatwhich the dialectic never quite overcomes and which he believes idles behind its each and every moment, remaining forever in excess of Spirit. It marks a limit ofexperience, and it offers itself as an experience of the limit. We cannot live this neutral indeterminacy--the very thought implies recuperation of a transgression---and we cannot escape the trial to which it summons us. This, then, is the danger to which art exposes us: 'the menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside, a neutral existence, nil and limitless.
That writing is the truth of the sacred, and the sacred is the truth of writing. And more: that writing indicates the final truth of religion, namely that the sacred expiates itself in the realisation of community. Blanchot turns out to be an apologist after all: art is of value because it discloses the meaning of being...Blanchot ultimately wants to affirm that there is one sacred, that it is the neutre, that it constitutes 'the most profound question' and that 'writing ... is present in the language where the real is articulated'. And he also wishes to claim not only that the neutre is unpresentable but also that art presents it as unpresentable. In this hyperbolic sublime we pass from a romanticism to a mysticism. The form of divine communication is preserved while its religious content is expiated.
I'm not doing an either politics or mysticism here. Both are bound up together.
I picked up a copy of J.M. Bernstein's Adorno: Disenchantment and the Ethics today. It is a companion volume to his earlier Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermans and the Future of Critical Theory (1994).
The lack of concern with the ethical in the social sciences has always suprised me, given the interest in poverty, social deprivation, social deviance and social development; the implicit evaluative critique with its ethos for changing society, and the deep concern with ethics in everyday life. There has been a closure around the ethical field. Hence the significance of the work of Habermas.
In the Introduction to the Adorno text Bernstein writes:
The project of modernity has failed politically and ethically...The simplest, most widely recognized, and most economical way of stating the ethical failure of modernity is through Nietzsche's notion of nihilism: "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why'? finds no answer. By seeking to provide a wholly secular form of life we have espoused, above all, the values of scientific rationality and truth; in pursuing these values, in ordering our intellectual and practical lifes in accordance with their dictates, all other values and ideals tendentially lose their rational appeal until, eventually, even the worth of scientific rationality and truth become problematic for us. Modern, secular reason is self-undermining.
Bernstein says that the effect of nihilism has been the increasing rational incoherence of modern moral values and ideals, and their consequent increasing practical inadequacy for the purposes of orientating and giving meaning to everyday life. That helps to make sense of the conservative return to the Judaic/Christian tradition as the ethical foundation of western civilization.
Habermas argument in the opening chapter of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity works within a philosophical tradition, which holds that since the Enlightenment, 'modernity' has been taken as the central concept in theorising about the self and society. This category has been used as the intellectual and historical philosophical framework within which to locate social and political thought, not just in the West, but across the world.
The significance of modernity rests on the perception of a ruptural break from the past and the emergence of a new civilisational complex which informs all spheres of human existence. It encapsulates the societal shift from traditional to modern societies as well as the intellectual and philosophical justification on which that society is founded---that is, the move was in detaching itself from the past and standing on its own reflexivity:---creating its normativity out of itself, as Habermas puts it. Modernity grounds itself. See the Young Hegelian..
Modernity can be seen as as a category to describe the coalescence of particular developments that occurred in Europe in the long sixteenth century that gave birth to a new epoch. These in turn both generated, and contributed, to particular philosophical developments associated with the Enlightenment and the freedom of subjectivity. This ethos of subjective freedom of individuals provides the critieria for subjects to orient themselves in the new order that had come into being.
It was held that, when modernity is understood as a particular kind of society and civilization and as a philosophical ethos associated with that civilization, it forms the ground of a particular experience that was seen to be both historically inevitable and universally applicable. Habermas explores this experience through the aesthetic understanding of modernity as expressed by Baudelaire and Benjamin: modernity is experienced as the transitory, the fleeting and the contingent: as a now time.
Habermas gives due weight to Hegel as the theoriest of philosophical modernity and to Hegel's argument that the subjective freedom of individuals is the philosophical principle of modernity that works away to transform the different institutions into embodying the principle of subjectivity.
Hegel argues that if modernity is self-grounding, then the critique of modernity can make use of no instrument other than reflection: out of the principle of the Enlightenment itself.
Can Hegel do it? Habermas has big doubts. He reckons that Hegel becomes ensnarred in dilemmas and contradictions. Have a look at the doubts about Hegel at this post by Allan Wittman over at Long Sunday
I have taken this quote from Kevin Hart from a public lecture delivered in 1996 entitled The Experience of Poetry, because it offers us some insight into the ethics of Levinas.
"My backdrop this evening is the deep romantic chasm of experience and understanding. Levinas proposes a way beyond romanticism by aligning experience and presence then distinguishing experience and epiphany, and he is led to do so by taking exception to one aspect of the reduction. In the Crisis Husserl proclaims, 'when I practice the reducing epoche on myself and my world-consciousness, the other human beings, like the world itself, fall before the epoche; that is, they are merely intentional phenomena for me'...Declining to regard the other person merely as a phenomenon for me, Levinas turns to name and explore a gap between consciousness and obligation. His analyses of the sites where pre-original alterity coincides with the other person - death, sexuality and fecundity - illuminate much that I would gather under the heading 'the experience of poetry'. Unlike Levinas, though, I preserve the word 'experience' while resetting the concept so that it does not presume a fusion of subject and object. Levinas speaks of ethics, not poetry; even so, his studies of the prophetic word and the vulnerability of Saying, could tell us a great deal about poetry. This is not a path I propose to take this evening, even though I will not be going in another direction. To repeat: my response to the deep romantic chasm is that any gap between experience and understanding is foreshadowed by a division in experience itself. Poetry does not reveal the meaning of being through the genius of a poet, but holds being and meaning together for a while in an intense and unequal relationship."
Nor am I much interested in aligning experience with presence with its fusion of subject and object either. Why should we 100 years after The Phenomemology of Spirit? Seems like philosophical regression to me. Moreover, aligning experience with presence, with its fusion of subject and object, sounds like mysticism to me. What is missing from this is the idea of a habitus, and the undergoing an ordeal which is at the same time a transformation.
Nor am I interested in poetry holding meaning and being together in an intense and unequal relationship. 'Tis Levinas and the pre-reflective ethical openness to alterity that concerns me. How do we approach, given the critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject of modern metaphysics?
Hart offers us a signpost.Levinas and his conception of the ethical obligation to the other is indicated by the phrase 'Declining to regard the other person merely as a phenomenon for me, Levinas turns to name and explore a gap between consciousness and obligation.' That makes sense.
Levinas works in the tradition of the monadic phenomenology of Husserl, which proposes the reduction as a methodological preface to thought, a leading back to the living present of intentional experience, even if it never manages to attain such purity. Levinas rightly recoils from treating organic beings as phenomena just like trees or stones. There is no way you are going to get the ethical from 'phenomena.'
What this suggests is that the pathway to Levinas is through Husserl Likewise with Derrida. Husserl's phenomenology is Derrida's most immediate philosophical heritage. Derrida usually characterises the traditional concept of experience in the philosophical tradition of the West as "the experience of presence," an absolute proximity to consciousness of that which is experienced. The justification for this association of "experience" with "presence" is Derrida's reading of Husserl's phenomenology as carring the traditional sense of experience as an experience of presence to its most explicit expression.
If the pathway to Levinas is through Husserl (and, preumably Heidegger),then we come upon a fork: one leads to aesthetics and the other to ethics. It is an oppositional polarity within the contemporary Continental philosophical scene (including the North American, British, and Australian outposts?) since many who take the aesthetic pathway appear to treat ethics as trivial or secondary. Those who take the ethics pathway have little time for serious aesthetics.
It appear that Levinas and his students represent one of the few ethical possiblities with their concern for the priority of the other person and of responsibility. It would also appear that Levinas, and his students, have almost no direct engagement with the Frankfurt School and its ethical concerns. Levinas appropriates Jewish religious traditions of interpretation to develop a (humanistic?) ethics.
What Hart is suggesting is that Levinas' analyses of the sites where pre-original alterity coincides with the other person ---death, sexuality and fecundity---is the ground for ethics. Even though I have no idea what pre-original alterity means (does pre-original mean pre-reflective?) I can see that this phenomenology is outside of, and disconnected from, the phenomenology of Hegel.
Yet this is an ontology of social space that is constituted ethically; a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life. This suggests that practical conflicts can be understood as an ethical moment in the movement occurring within a collective social life and give us the formative process of ethical life practical conflicts in which conflicts would make subjects aware of the underlying relations of recognition. This gives us an ethically textured conflict model of social progress (isn't this what Marx latched onto?) that makes the role of struggle, conflict and transgression a part of the ethical.
Aren't the concerns of both Levinas and Hegel with injustices to the other? Is not this injustice enacted in cultural practices of sacrifice and scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of demons and monsters, and the reduction of the other to the same in laws of immigration?
Why should we take Levinas' pathway to the ethical, rather than Hegel's? I can see the Levinas' emphasis on unsettling the self in order to open the self to the other. Does not that pathway also lead to an ethics whose response to big time evil is to say that suffering is truly useless; that only my own suffering undergone for another is capable of meaning; and that ethical responsibility is based on a refusal to justify another's suffering.
It is not clear to me why we should walk down Levinas' ethical pathway.
We are back to listening to J.M Bernstein's 1994 seminar on Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit held in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
At the moment---Seminar 3---we are dealing with the 'Introduction.' Lots of personal memories are coming back; memories of spending the early 1990s struggling with particular passages, and having to move through the text slowly, line by line as I puzzled my way through the words and the sentences. I recall that despite the torture and slow progress I was excited by the text: what excited me about the 1807 Hegel is the insight that history is formative of consciousness, rather than the Enlightenment's conception of history as the negative removal of illusions/ideology to arrive at truth. I've always felt that The Phenomeology was a rupture or transgression in the philosophical tradition, in that it opened up a way of doing philosophy differently.
In stepping into the movement of the 'Introduction' we are a long way from a conception of social life in which the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all. The 'Introduction' does not mention Hegel's idea that social space is constituted ethically, as a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life.
In Seminar 3 Bernstein explores that the way that Hegel characterises the collapse of one configuration of consciousness determines the rise of another configuration, as we embodied, passionate, desiring beings try to find our own place in the world. This process gives rise to the detailed history of the process of training and educating (Bildung) consciousness itself up to the level of science.
Though we desire to find our place, we cannot get satisfaction, and so our conceptions within a horizon of understanding of a form of life, continually change:
"The progress towards this goal [of knowledge} consequently is without a halt, and at no earlier stage is satisfaction to be found. That which is confined to a life of nature is unable of itself to go beyond its immediate existence; but by something other than itself it is forced beyond that; and to be thus wrenched out of its setting is its death."(138)
"Consciousness, therefore, suffers this violence at its own hands; it destroys its own limited satisfaction. When feeling of violence, anxiety for the truth may well withdraw, and struggle to preserve for itself that which is in danger of being lost. But it can find no rest."
What is the procedure/method that guides the form and shape of story:
"...it may also be of further service to make some observations regarding the method of carrying this out. This exposition, viewed as a process of relating science to phenomenal knowledge, and as an inquiry and critical examination into the reality of knowing, does not seem able to be effected without some presupposition which is laid down as an ultimate criterion."
Bernstein says that my concepts, which help shape the particular object of a computer, are generated by consciousness that takes up an intentional way of relating to the object. If consciousness is the intentional relationship between the subject and object, then consciousness has its own form of the relationship, and what it means to have a world. Each form of consciousness stipulates its own criterion of truth and what it is to know that.
Consciousness measures itself against its own standard, and so no standard needs to be presupposed. The new object emerges when there's a failure of correspondence between the form of knowing and the object: there is a failure in its own internal terms. A gap opens up between the form of knowling and the object:
"Hence consciousness comes to find that what formerly to it was the essence is not what is per se, or what was per se was only per se for consciousness. Since, then, in the case of its object consciousness finds its knowledge not corresponding with this object, the object likewise fails to hold out; or the standard for examining is altered when that, whose criterion this standard was to be, does not hold its ground in the course of the examination; and the examination is not only an examination of knowledge, but also of the criterion used in the process."
The abrupt ending to Seminar 3 is a pity because it is towards the end of the Introduction that Hegel addresses what he understands by experience:
"This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself---on its knowledge as well as on its object--in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely, what is termed Experience."
This is a dynamic historical understanding, which is very modern as it creates normativity out of itself. Is that not how modernity understands iself? It is self-grounding? It grounds itself on its own contradictions.
William Burroughs Baboon has started reading Habermas' 1987 text, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Even though the French poststructuralist radical critique of reason can be considered the point of departure for the Twelve Lectures, the text is also a response to Horkheimer and Adorno's core argument that there is a fundamental flaw in the reason of modernity, and that this flaw gave rise to domination. Over at Thinking Culture Paul Privateer says that in this text:
"...Habermas attempts to recover the project of modernity, one that he sees as unfinished not bankrupt, from the specters of post-modernity; from Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault. On Habermas' account the project of modernity needs to be reconstructed not deconstructed, and those who critique it are correct on nearly every technical point but wrong in the most important way. They are wrong as to what it means, and they are wrong in which direction they take in trying to deal with the very real problems they see."
There is very little light in this debate. So the map provided by Habermas does help us to chart the issues and conflicts of this most difficult of philosophical terrains. We need all the help we can get to traverse this terrain and not get lost.
The only other weblog in Australia interested in Habermas is Ali Rizvi's Habermas Reflections. This has now become a Habermas resource site, due to the pressure on Ali to finish his PhD. I thought that I might re-read the Modernity text with WBB, and who knows, an online reading group/conversation may even begin to happen.
In the Introduction to the Habermas text Thomas McCarthy states that the themes raised by the debates within the philosophical discourse of modernity include:
'the overwhelming "impurity" of reason, its unavoidable entanglement in history and tradition, society and power, practice and interest, body and desire'.
McCarthy states that Habermas's strategy in these lectures is to return to those:
'
... historial "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that lead to this outcome [the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason]; his aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centre reason by reason understood as communicative action.'
The key to Habermas's approach is his rejection of the paradigm of consciousness and its associated philosophy of the subject in favour of the through-and-through intersubjectivist paradigm of communicative action. This is what he sees as the road open but not taken a the critical junctures in the philosophical discourse of modernity.
Habermas agrees with the radical critics of the enlightenment tradition that the paradigm of consciousness is exhausted and, like them, he views reason as inescapably situated in history, society, body and language.
I briefly mentioned here Adorno's understanding that something historical has undercut the possibility of experience. The sense Adorno suggests is one of a loss of something--actual lived experience?--- that had once been existed and which has been seriously damaged.
Has it something to do with narrative of the old (pre-industrial) story teller? Is that romantic nostalgic dreaming of a robust notion of experience prior to the alienations of a damaged, modern life? Walter Benjamin's turn back to a happy and innocent childhood, before the split between subject and object and the fall into language, most certainly romantic nostalgia.
Tis fantasy.
Has lived experience become disconnected from a narrative continuity which has been replaced by information and spin, and become a series of shocks?
Is that traumatic shock and general unintelligibility what we see when we listen to the stories of those caught up in the London bombings on the media? There is no general narrative that makes sense of this kind of shock, or that of the Bali bombings. These events are shocks.
What is most noticeable about the conservative politics of terror in the mass media is that it is little more than a manipulation of public opinion through fear to keep conservative governments in power.
Yeah, I know, that's crude. But let us put that politics to one side for the moment and get back to understanding the crisis of experience.
Is that what Benjamin and Adorno were getting at with their argument that a coherent and unified understanding of a pre-reflective experience was no longer possible?
That encounter with death could be seen as a primal experience.Is that experience of modern life worth rescuing? It suggests happiness in a world free from terror. Is it undamaged experience? Or is the meaning of life an image of life without history?
Bernstein interprets Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as a radical reworking of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. He says:
I think that it is both helpful and accurate to see the conceptual figures of pure insight and faith suspicion and trust, desired independence and disavowed dependence, mastery and slavery as structuring the dialectic of enlightenment.
So we understand the dialectic of enlightenment as taken over from Hegel as the dialectic of desired independence from nature in which an enlightening reason seeks, through knowing and labour, to master nature and become independent of it, without acknowledging its pervasive dependence. What drives the dialectic is fear of nature and the liberation of human beings from fear through reason as a strategy for self-preservation turns them into masters.
This post is crossed post from philosophy.com where I'd started re-reading that text. The way I'm going to read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of a conversation with J.M Bernstein's 1994 seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit is more appropriate here. It is an attempt to develop the conversational aspect of philosophy now that Trevor and Joanne have sadly dropped away and the comments are few and far between.
In the note to the lecture on the Introduction Bernstein says that Hegel was fighting against the instrumentalization of reason that was resulting from the natural sciences-humanities split. That interpretation accords with my reading here.
I'm listening to the seminar now. It jumps in straight away and we pick it up already going. The lecture is talking about the historical formation of consciousness that downplays individual intention, and highlights us as passionate, desiring creatures in history seeking satisfaction.
How does this happen? Hegel says:
"...because this exposition has for its object only phenomenal knowledge, the exposition itself seems not to be science, free, self-moving in the shape proper to itself, but may, from this point of view, be taken as the pathway of the natural consciousness which is pressing forward to true knowledge. Or it can be regarded as the path of the soul, which is traversing the series of its own forms of embodiment, like stages appointed for it by its own nature, that it may possess the clearness of spiritual life when, through the complete experience of its own self, it arrives at the knowledge of what it is in itself." (para.77)
The authority for this particular form of life is given by us, as subjects. So it can be changed for a new way of doing things with its particular understandings--- or forms of conciousness/embodiment---by us. Thsi is what we do all the time, right?
Hegel then remarks on the way to understand this having a world or form of life.In para 78 he says:
"Natural consciousness will prove itself to be only knowledge in principle or not real knowledge. Since, however, it immediately takes itself to be the real and genuine knowledge, this pathway has a negative significance for it; what is a realization of the notion of knowledge means for it rather the ruin and overthrow of itself; for on this road it loses its own truth. Because of that, the road can be looked on as the path of doubt, or more properly a highway of despair."
The story that is told by Hegel is this:
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em>"For what happens there is not what is usually understood by doubting, a jostling against this or that supposed truth, the outcome of which is again a disappearance in due course of the doubt and a return to the former truth, so that at the end the matter is taken as it was before. On the contrary, that pathway is the conscious insight into the untruth of the phenomenal knowledge, for which that is the most real which is after all only the unrealized notion. On that account, too, this thoroughgoing scepticism is not what doubtless earnest zeal for truth and science fancies it has equipped itself with in order to be ready to deal with them — viz. the resolve, in science, not to deliver itself over to the thoughts of others on their mere authority, but to examine everything for itself, and only follow its own conviction, or, still better, to produce everything itself and hold only its own act for true."
In his chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno, entitled 'Negative Dialectic As Fate' J.M. Bernstein gives us a good interpretation of the core thesis of Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.
He states:
Dialectic of Enlightenment is the attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of how it is possible that the rational process of enlightenment which was intended to secure freedom from fear and human sovereignty could turn into forms of political, social and ultural dominaton in which humans are deprived of their individuality and society is generally emptied of human meaning.
I'm re-reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit which is online. It is a text that you can read paragraph by paragraph. I would prefer to read in terms of a seminar in conversation with others than on my own, but that option is not available to me.
The next best thing is to read the text in conversation with a seminar given by somone else: in this case J.M. Bernstein's given in 1994. Bernstein had written, 'Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory', which I'd read in the mid-1990s.
Alas, I cannot recall what I'd read there. I do remember that the effect of the text was to leave my struggles with Habermas on moral philosophy, and return to Hegel to gain an understanding of ethics.
I mention this because J.M. Bernstein has a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno, which is entitled 'Negative Dialectic As Fate.' I find it very illuminating.
Bernstein argues that Adorno is a Hegelian doing philosophy after Hegel. This is what one expect in the sense that to be writing philosophy after the French Revolution is significantly different from writing philosophy after Auschwitz.
What does that mean?
Bernstein says:
Adorno's philosophy is the articulation of what it is to be a Hegelian after Hegel, after Marx, after Nietzsche, and above all after two centuries of brutal history in which the moment to realize philosophy, the hope of left Hegelians like Marx, was missed (ND,3)... Hegelian philosophy after Hegel is philosophy after philosophy was supposed to have ended. So philosophy continues, "lives on"( ND,3), through critical engagement with the conceptions of reason that were to enable us to stop philosophizing and live a human life. We have philosophy because such a life is not available, which is also an Hegelian idea, namely, that philosophy speaks to the need of culture which that culture cannot satisfy.
Deleuze is deeply anti-Hegelian, but interestingly so as he is concerned with ontology. Consider this passage from this text Giovanna Borradori.
He says that Hegel argues that the difference between one entity and another, what allows us to identify it, is established in contrast to what it is not. Well yes and no. An entity is also becoming for Hegel. But let us continue.
Borradori says that Deleuze argues that this difference is "external" to the entity in question or the properties that make it up because difference is unnecessarily translated into negation. In Hegel's terms, it is only via the universal that the particular becomes accessible to knowledge, the universal being the negation of the particular. Subsuming difference under negation is, thus, the major mistake Deleuze imputes to the dialectical tradition.
That sort of goes over my head. It is not clear to me why subsuming difference under negation is a major mistake.
Borradori goes on to say that it is the detour through negation that keeps the dialectical conception of difference "external" to difference itself, or difference in kind. If we want to reach difference in kind, we cannot address the entities and their properties externally, by negatively comparing them to all others, but internally, that is, by asking what are the "things themselves" rather than what they are not.
I'm not sure that I get this.
I have spent a lot of time escaping from the view that things are self-contained substances to seeing things in terms of contradictory developmental tendencies that actualize within sets of relationships. That reworking of Aristotle is how I understood Hegel. Deleuze goes on to argue that a thing:
"... is the expression of a "tendency." A tendency is a phase of becoming. Is there a correspondence between a thing and a tendency? Not a one-to-one correspondence because things are composites (des mixtes) of at least two tendencies. A tendency can express itself only insofar as it is acted upon by another tendency and, therefore, tendencies never come isolated from one another but always in pairs."
Smokewriting puts it this way:
Way back at the start of his career, he uses a Hegel - Jean Hyppolite’s Hegel - as the figure of a tendency in French philosophy that has to be overcome, namely the 'anthropologising' of difference--- i.e. understanding absolute difference as contradiction ...But it's arguably Hegelianism as a historical phenomenon that Deleuze, in his earliest work, saw as a problem---something that, in Dialogues he describes as a dead weight, embodying...everything stultifying about the French academy...What Hegelianism was, for Deleuze, was the way in which this tendency made itself felt in the 40s and 50s. Arguably it’s the Hegel of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence that comes under attack in Difference & Repetition and Logic of Sense, just as it’s the existentialist Hegel of Wahl and Kojeve who comes under attack in Nietzsche & Philosophy.
In the mid-1870s Nietzsche went through a phase of celebrating science worship based on viewing natural science as the paradigm of all genuine knowledge. The period came to an end with Human, All-too-Human.
In the early 1880s a skepticism towards science developed that questioned whether science could picture reality understood as the world-as-it-is-in-itself. Nietzsche rejected the Kantian distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal world. In his later works he repeatedly endorses a scientific perspective whilst questioning science from the perspective of an artistic interpretation of phenomena).
Positivism: the death rattle of the Enlightenment.
That's Nietzsche:
Against positivism, which halts at phenomena,'There are only facts',I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact 'in itself': perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing (WP, 267).
I've finally got myself a copy of Gilles Deleuze text 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' that came out in 1962. At long lastI can see how he uses the materials of previous philosophers to build his own one based on a field of forces.
Now, it is true that not many in the English speaking world really care about making the long and arduous detour through Nietzsche and the various interpretations of his texts. Nietzsche's reception in Australia for most of the 20th century has mirrored that of England. He was read by artists, novelists and poets. He has only been taken up as a philosopher by Australian philosophers working within the continental tradition in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Within this Australian reception Deleuze's 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' is interpreted as being instrumental in turning French philosophy of the sixties and seventies away from Hegel and towards Nietzsche. It is held to be a seminal post-structuralist text that not only illuminates Nietzsche's thought, but also enables a deeper understanding of the works of French philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard.
But you have to know your philosophical tradition to read Deleuze, as Deleuze views the fundamental antagonism and opposition to Hegel as an urgent and central element of his reading of Nietzsche.By posing Nietzsche as the ultimate anti-Hegel presents Nietzsche appears in the position of negation, of reaction, and of ressentiment. Such a stark opposition, appears, from the perspective of Hegel's dialectics to imply the initiation of a new dialectical process.
I'm going to read this book from the perspective of Nietzsche as a critical dialectical thinker in the sense of a living dialectics and his texts embodying a (revised) dialectical thinking. Does not Nietzsche's early text, 'The Birth of Tragedy' present a "semi-dialectical" argument based on the Dionysus/Apollo opposition? Similarly with 'The Genealogy of Morals' opposition between master and slave morality? Or active and reactive forces in 'The Will to Power.'
That interpretation should make reading a '60's Deleuze on Nietzsche interesting, as it is reading the 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' text against the grain. That would be to see Deleuze as attempting to create an autonomy from Hegel's terminology, and to transport a revised dialectics to Deleuze's terrain of sense and value.
Is the significance of Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche to be found in counter-ontology developed through a discourse of the body? Is a materialist ontology based not on the interactions of organic bodies but on connected flows of matter where the route called Deleuze-Nietzsche leading?
What is the value of a vitalist materialism compared to say Adorno's materialist ontology? Or to the reductive one of scientific materialism? We should ask this given the Deleuzian claim to be making new beginnings and opening up new possibilities from the rubble of our philosophical history and tradition.
Hegel's central ethical/political concern is the classical one of how to make civic obligation converge with private interest and satisfaction.
It reworks the classic concept in the light of the individuality of modernity. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel sets up the antithesis of Plato and Rousseau with great clarity:
The lack of subjectivity is really the defect of the Greek ethical idea . . . Plato has not recognized knowledge, wishes, and resolutions of the individual, nor his self-reliance, and has not succeeded in combining them with his idea; but justice demands its rights for this just as much as it requires the higher elucidation of the same, and its harmony with the universal. The opposite to Plato's principle is the principle of the conscious free will of individuals which in later times was more especially by Rousseau raised to prominence: the necessity of the arbitrary choice of the individual, as individual, the outward expression of the individual. (LHPh, II, 114, 115)
For this reason, the market must not be allowed to become the state’s guiding spirit.
What Hegel does is attempt to understand the state (ie., the political community) as the realization of human freedom as radical self-dependence. The state is any ethical community which is politically organised and sovereign, subject to a supreme public authority and independent from other such communities.
For Hegel acting ethically involves the transcendence of pure self-interest.He understands this, not in terms of Kant's categorical imperative that subordinates one's individuality to an abstract principle of selflessness or universality; but as involving individuals freely acting on shared communal values. This involves pursuing actions whose ends and means, whilst reflecting shared interestsand culture of a community, also reflect the self-conceived interests of individuals. Ethical life, then, involves a kind of harmony between what individuals consider worthwhile ends and acceptable means for pursuing them and those activities that sustain and reinforce the community as a whole.
Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit (Geist) as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Recognition is the core of Hegel's conception of ethical life. Not only do I have to be aware of myself as a desiring subject but I have to be recognized as such; and to be recognized as a person who expercises their free will.
Adorno's interpretation of Hegel is that he sacrifces individuality upon the altar of universality. Another quote from 'The Supramundane character of the Hegelian world from 'World Spirit and Natural History: An Excursion to Hegel,' the second section of Part three of Negative Dialectics. Adorno states:
The world spirit is said to be 'the spirit of the world as it explicates itself in human consciousness: men relate to it as individuals to the whole, which is their substance'. There Hegel is telling off the bourgeois conception of the individual, its vulgar nominalism. The very grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial, makes him an agent of the universal, and individuality a deceptive notion. On this, Hegel agreed with Schopenhauer; what he had over Schopenhauer was the insight that the abstract negation of individuality is not all there is to the dialectics of individuation and universality. The remaining objection, however - not just against Schopenhauer but against Hegel himself is that the individual, the necessary phenomenon of the essence, the objective tendency-, is right to turn against that tendency, since he confronts it with its externality and fallibility. This is implicit in Hegel's doctrine of the individual's substantiality 'by way of himself'. Yet instead of developing the doctrine, Hegel sticks to an abstract antithesis of universal and particular, an antithesis that ought to be unbearable to his own method.
This means that individual freedom does not get sacrificed in the service of the whole or state. A proper understanding of the logical structure of the text reveals that the whole both sustains and must be sustained by its parts. Hegel holds that the state "rests on the self-consciousness of subjectivity" and individual freedom. The implication of this assumption is that the state's institutions must 'be sustained and activated by that subjectivity and freeedom.
I mentioned in the previous post that Hegel's understanding of individuality is tied to our relationships with others and to the national culture. This means that we are not just individuals selfishly pursuing our own interests.
An ethical life includes our families, diverse as they are today - partners, male and female, children and stepchildren, young people desperate for a good education and the chance of a satisfying job, and ageing parents who are both providing and in need of care. As well, family units sit within a neighbourhood and wider community of other families that identify with a common cause, that of a decent life with those we love. This is the basis for a conception of ethical life.
In the Philosophy of Right Hegel makes the following comments about ethical life in the liberal nation state:
142 ... ethical life is the concept of freedom developed into the existing world and the nature of self-consciousness.146 ... This ethical substance and its laws and powers are on the one hand an object over against the subject ..
147 On the other hand, they are not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, his spirit bears witness to them as to its own essence in which he has a feeling of his selfhood, and in which he lives as in his own element which is not distinguished from himself. The subject is thus directly linked to the ethical order by a relation which is more like an identity than even the relation of faith or trust.
153 The right of individuals to be subjectively destined to freedom is fulfilled when they belong to an actual ethical order, because their conviction of their freedom finds its truth in such an objective order, and it is in an ethical order that they are actually in possession of their own essence or their own inner universality.
As individuals we belogng to, and are a part of, an ethical order.Hegel’s portrayal of the modern subjectivity presupposes civil society at its basis, according to Blasche. Only the subject who is free of the responsibilities of traditional family life is in a position to pursue his own interests and determine his own will. A historically contingent conception of civil society thus serves to ground Hegel’s account of the family and of modern subjectivity.
I've always thought that Adorno misread Hegel whilst defending him from the postivists. Consider these two passages from second section of Part three of Negative Dialectics entitled 'World Spirit and Natural History: An Excursion to Hegel.'
The first paragraph is taken from an entry called 'The Supramundane character of the Hegelian world spirit':
"By Hegel, however, notably by the Hegel of Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right, the historical objectivity that happened to come about is exalted into transcendence: 'This universal substance is not the mundane; the mundane impotently strives against it. No individual can get beyond this substance; he can differ from other individuals, but not from the popular spirit.'The opposite of the 'mundane', the identity to which the particular entity is unidentically doomed, would thus be 'supramundane'. There is a grain of truth even to such ideology: the critic of his own popular spirit is also chained to what is commensurable to him, as long as mankind is splintered into nations." (p.323)
The Philosophy of Right is structured in terms of the liberal national nation-state whose life is divided into the family, civil society and the state.
Adorno then says:
"To gild the heteronomy of the substantially universal, Hegel mobilises Greek conceptions this side of experienced individuality. In such passages he vaults all historic dialects and unhesitatingly proclaims that morality's form in Antiquity, the form which was first that of official Greek philosophy and then the one of German Gymnasien, is its true form: 'For the morality of the state is not the moralistic, reflected one in which one's own convictions hold sway; this is more accessible to the modern world, while the true morality of Antiquity has its roots in every man's stand by his duty.'" (pp.324-325)
That interpretation ignores the way that Hegel places the individuality to the forefront and centre of internal, dynamic logic of the ethical life of civil society.
The core idea of Hegel's ethical is that I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harming myself because the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all. Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life.
Ethical life is not about moral principles such as the categorical imperative; it is about the ways in which both particular actions and whole forms of action injure, wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about the secret bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of all those around us.
Throughout his texts Adorno often talks about the disintegration and withering of experience; the marrow of experience being sucked out, and the dying of experience. This Benjamin kind of language is often used as an index for a general crisis of modern life.
I'm unsure what this means. I struggle with the conception of experience.
In an empiricist culture experience means unmediated sense perception of the individual subject. Empiricism has no understanding of the interdependency of subjects with each other and with the historical world; nor does it have a grasp of the historical nature of experience being shaped by economic busts and booms or major economic reforms to educational institutions that throw us out of work.