An excellent quote from this review of Raymond Geuss' Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005) by Alasdair MacIntyre. The essays are responses to concrete invitations to address a particular topic in a specific forum and they stand in the tradition of the early (i.e., pre-1970) Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, although the specific version of the Critical Theory Guess favors contains a stronger Nietzschean component than most other versions. That is what captures my interest.

MacIntyre observes:

Adorno was as one with other early members of the Frankfurt School in holding that the kind of social order which they inhabited not only frustrates the satisfaction of human needs and oppressively distorts human relationships, but also inculcates illusions about its own character, illusions that inform not only many of our everyday beliefs, but the standard academic disciplines. We therefore have to learn how to outwit the social order in order to understand it, and we can begin to do so by identifying the significance of a variety of at first sight insignificant phenomena, to which we find ourselves responding as participants in the form of life to which they belong. In thinking about those phenomena and about the dominant social order we proceed dialectically through a series of denials, so that we arrive at a negative understanding, one that enables us to understand the social order that we inhabit from a point of view that is not its own, so escaping from the established consensus and becoming able to identify the radical defects and failures of the social order. Adorno believed that the interpretive knowledge thus gained had enabled him to recognize that the social order in which he found himself was one so evil that it was impossible to live rightly in it. Indeed he argued that the notion of a perfected human life is incoherent. Thus he found himself inescapably condemned to inhabit a culture in which the demands of spirit could no longer be met, so that in his time -- and surely he would have said also in ours -- the individual consciousness is doomed to be an unhappy consciousness.

To put it in more psychoanalytic language repressive norms do not stand outside repressed desire, but are exactly repressive in so far as they take part in that desire. It is exactly as a productive aspect of repression that desire, the body and pleasure impose themselves. Happiness can only be found in unhappiness.

Is not the theme of the experience of a self divided against itself a central one in French 20th century philosophy? A plausible account.

J.N .Findlay argues that Hegel’s three exemplary states of Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness need not be given the philosophical or religious content that he gives them. He says:

One might, for instance, illustrate them by (a) the empty self-satisfaction of a mechanist who believes that all organic and psychic action can be mechanistically explained, without attempting to show how this is possible; (b) the equally empty self-satisfaction of a theoretical mechanist who also believes that it will never be actually possible to give an adequate explanation of organic and psychic action in mechanistic terms, or who thinks that a non-mechanistic explanation is equally feasible; (c) the tormented state of one who believes that a mechanistic explanation of life and consciousness is possible but despairs of ever finding it, who always dreams (Andacht) of an unattainable mechanistic explanation, who always treats non-mechanistic explanations as a pis aller for mechanistic ones (Freud), and who drags in the priestly scientist to validate his philosophical and moral opinions.)

Comments

Posted by: Dr. Spinoza | March 23, 2006 3:24 AM