Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

1. The Consequences of Disenchantment

DISENCHANTMENT AND EXPERIENCE Understanding the critical role that spiritual experience plays in Adorno’s philosophy will require coming to grips with his view of the present as characterized by the atrophy of experience. At the root of this idea is a thesis about disenchantment that encompasses both a social history and a critique of modern philosophy in so far as it is unable to reflect critically on that history. Disenchantment is essentially describable in terms of a specific type of distortion within reason produced by a process of rationalization. Kontos describes this quite succinctly. The force behind disenchantment is rationality, or, more precisely, rationalization. Rationality, unlike reason, is concerned with means, not ends; it is the human ability to calculate, to effectively reach desired goals. It emanates from purposive practical human activity. It is this-worldly in origin. It has infinite applicability and an extraordinary expansiveness under certain circumstances. Indeed, it can be quite imperial. It transforms what it touches and, finally, it destroys the means-ends nexus. (1994, 230) What lies behind this, as Weber puts it, is the notion that “one could in principle master everything through calculation” (1989, 13). It is important to see here (and it is something I shall continually emphasize) that there is nothing malign in itself about the purposive-practical attitude that is affiliated with 9 1 The Consequences of Disenchantment disenchantment. Following from the way that Adorno reads the disenchantment thesis, the distortion that leads to the harmful consequences of disenchantment occurs when the calculative thinking associated with the purposive -practical attitude begins exclusively to usurp the authority to determine when experience can count as cognitively significant. This is when the practical human interest in control over nature takes on the encompassing form of instrumental reason. The disenchantment thesis is therefore guided by a sense that rationalization pushed to the limit has as a consequence the dissolution of the cognitive worth of forms of experience that do not fit the typical means-end schema of calculative thinking. In a passage strongly suggesting the influence of Simmel, Weber himself had made this point in his remark on the feelings of young people about science, namely that it is an “unreal world of artificial abstractions, which with their lean hands seek to capture the blood and sap of real life without ever being able to grasp it” (1989, 15). Something important about experience slips through the fingers of scientific cognition, Weber is suggesting.1 What drives disenchantment, as Bernstein has argued, is the “extirpation of what is subjective” (2001, 88). He takes this to be equivalent to the anthropomorphic quality attaching to our everyday empirical concepts, and the way in which they make objects available in terms of their subjective effects. Order is gathered from “how things affect and appear to embodied, sensuous subjects .” Bernstein asserts that the extirpation of the subjective is equivalent to what he calls the “self-undermining dialectic of scientific rationalism” (p. 10). While I think this formulation is essentially right, I am going to give it a somewhat different emphasis in what follows.2 I believe it is entirely right to describe the rationalization process that leads to disenchantment as a form of abstraction . And this abstraction, as Bernstein has demonstrated, is essentially a denial of dependence.3 However, what I want to suggest is that the rescue of philosophy ’s dependence is, for Adorno, primarily a move in the cognitive self-reflection of scientific rationalism, rather than an ethical imperative. What I mean by this (and it is a central thesis of this work) is that the revelation of dependence is scientific rationalism’s recognition of itself as a distorted, constricted form of cognition, and that its being this way is due to nonrational causes (hence its dependence). The recovery of the subjective is the route to the revelation of dependence, but it is not by itself a reconciled reason in waiting. In this sense, my interpretation of Adorno’s model of philosophical critique will be resolutely negative. Spiritual experience, I will argue, is the awareness of scientific rationalism about itself in its self-reflection. Or, in other words, it is the revelation of scientific rationalism as a form of experience (and this means: as a form of experience premised on the mutilation of experience). Any hints of a reconciled reason that appear within it are nothing but the inverse image of its disclosure of the mutilated character of experience in the present. 10 ADORNO [18.223.125...