6 ms·

The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On

58 points by kwindla 7y ago

scottlocklin 7y ago
"Quack's book has re-release." Adorno largely deserves to be forgotten. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#Overall_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#...
- efficax 7y ago
  The studies on the authoritarian personality are hardly the cornerstore of Adorno's work (he was primarily a philosopher) and in any case, one imperfect social study does not invalidate the entirety of his thinking by any means.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    The article is an announcement of the re-release of his "studies" on the "authoritarian personality." The fact that it doesn't dwell on the actual content of the book it's touting ought to tell you something about its quality.
  - uxp100 7y ago
    I've seen "The Authoritarian Personality" recommended online (by philosophy minded people, not as accepted social science), so I think it's good to point out how flawed it is. There is a tendency for philosophy fans to excuse errors in work with, oh they are primarily a philosopher, and then turn around and say, cite Foucault's "Madness and Civilization" as a reliable source of information a paragraph later. In fact, this very article is a "review" (in the way NYRB does it) of a new edition of "The Authoritarian Personality" which calls him "a great polymath." Since this article is in some ways advertising the very thing you call "hardly the cornerstone" of his work, the best thing for the top comment to be to inform people of it's flaws. In fact, I think it's irresponsible for NYRB to publish this, and mention his stupid opinions about Jazz, which are not really on topic or important, and not mention criticisms of the re-release that prompted the piece.
- mlevental 7y ago
  hn loves to react this way to "continental" philosophy - latch on to one thing that is intelligible to them and then extrapolate from that. eg I got into it without someone about Marx earlier this week that had never read any Marx! I mean nevermind that adorno is socially validated - ie his peers, those that are actually qualified to assess the value of his work, respect him and his arguments right? that doesn't matter because hackers are qualified for anything right? like let some metaphysics philosopher read a machine learning paper and dismiss its claims because they're not ontologically sound (or something like that) and you'll have all of hn rolling in tears at the sheer audacity of not knowing calculus (or something), but do the inverse and you're a hero. the truth is it takes a lot of effort to earnestly engage with both kinds of material so lazy people in both groups use lazy heuristics. the way I see it is you have two options if you want to be honest: either take up the mantle and dig in (read adorno and around adorno) or shutup (quit pontificating just to sound smart). both are completely tenable paths to being a responsible intelligent person.
  - viburnum 7y ago
    I’ll admit it, I couldn’t understand any of the Adorno I read in school, except for the part where he hated jazz, so I wrote him off. On the whole I haven’t found much useful in the Frankfurt school, especially compared to what your average anthropologist is up to.
    - rllyboredonline 7y ago
      I'd recommend One-Dimensional Man by Marcuse. You're not going to extract anything too wild out of it, but the picture he paints of 50's American consumerism is worth it.
    - wbl 7y ago
      Sexual Taboos and the Law Today is a good intro but you need to know Freud well. The problem is very few know Freud and Marx.
  - nradov 7y ago
    But that's a circular argument. What makes his peers qualified? What is the root of qualification in a field where the foundational axioms are ultimately subjective and there is no reliable source of objective truth? Or to put it another way, what makes this branch of philosophy any more respectable than astrology?
- voidhorse 7y ago
  It's fine to dislike Adorno, but to say he largely deserves to be forgotten is preposterous. He's arguably the first thinker to attempt to recast and reformulate philosophy in such a way that it could remain critically potent in the modern world. To take such a hand-waving, dismissive attitude toward all of his contributions, which are dense, difficult, and backed by a deep study of the history of western thought, based on the flaws of one study (by the way, Adorno himself even admitted to not being the best equipped to conduct sociological studies like this, he was first and foremost a critic and philosopher) is ridiculous and in fact the very imprint of the sort of limited uncritical/psuedo-critical forms of modern thinking he constantly rallied against.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    > He's arguably the first thinker to attempt to recast and reformulate philosophy in such a way that it could remain critically potent in the modern world. Citations needed. That statement doesn't even mean anything. I'm pretty sure if it does mean something, it applies more readily to someone like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, hell even Richard Rorty or David Stove. It would be nice if you could name "all of his contributions" or even one of his contributions beyond the book touted in this review: I don't think there are any worth talking about. He really deserves to be forgotten. Unless you think "everything I don't like is Hitler" is a great contribution to Western Philosophy.
    - voidhorse 7y ago
      Sure, I can clarify. By critically potent, I mean specifically philosophy that can serve as a value critique--"moralizing philosophy" if you will. Wittgenstein's philosophical work is incredible and was fundamental to the discipline and to logic and mathematics, but his work is typically not value critique (excepting Culture and Value which is not considered important by most readers of his oeuvre). Heidegger is, I suppose, another contender, but again, I don't consider the majority of his philosophy oriented around value critique (though his essays on technology do fit into this category and are excellent). Heidegger's thought, I find, is also less coherent, and he really stood by this image of the philosopher as "holier than thou" bearer of truths (this is actually touched upon in the article) which is an old model (actually, a mythic model concerned with power) that I think is impracticable. Not to mention, Sarte's conception and formulation of existentialism had a much greater general impact on human thought than Heidegger's, which, though in vogue for a while, has been mostly re-confined to the academy. I'm not as familiar with Richard Rorty's work as I should be, so he may qualify. But Adorno has him beat on timing--Rorty's Bibliography doesn't start until '52 (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/rr/biblio_2007.html https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/rr/biblio_2007.html). Meanwhile, Horkheimer and Adorno had already published Dialectic of Enlightenment at that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno_bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno_bibliography). I am not familiar with David Stove or his works. So he may qualify. I'll certainly check him out later, however! As for the works of Adorno's that are worth reading: Negative Dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Aesthetic Theory, His works on Hegel. And there's more--those are the major works. Your last sentence smacks of someone who has never even read a page of Adorno but rather has some generic, skewed conception of "critical theory" and thinks that's an adequate account of the thought of a philosopher (which, clearly being familiar with philosophers and the depth of their works, seems absurd that you'd adopt such a reductive and uninformed viewpoint on the matter). It's the equivalent to thinking Wittgenstein is reducible to a concern over "mere semantics" or Heidegger is reducible to, and dismissable on account of, his nazism. Rather presumptuous and rather close-minded.
voidhorse 7y ago
I'm a big fan of Adorno's work. I think American/Anglo readers struggle with it for two reasons: 1. It's largely consumed in translation. Normally, this isn't so problematic, but in addition to being incredibly philosophically dense, Adorno's work is rhetorically and compositionally complex, rife with structures that are rather difficult to translate, punning, particular sentence arrangements, etc. 2. It's unashamedly steeped in tradition and assumes a lot of knowledge of the history of Western thought. Adorno's texts are rich with allusions that require knowledge of philosophical and literary history, which can really confound those engaged in a superficial or cursory reading--it's easy to miss his point if you're not on your toes. If you're curious, I recommend David Held's Introduction to Critical Theory which does a great job of framing the work of the Frankfurt school. This article also does quite a nice job of summarizing his work. I also think Adorno's critique of Existentialism and Heideggerean philosophy (mentioned in the article), (also contained in Negative Dialectics) actually serves as a great precis of key components of his thought.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  Or, more cynically, people struggle with it because they have literally no education in philosophy - so reading Adorno is sort of like reading Knuth before you've written a single program.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    The Art of Computer Programming contains all the introduction necessary for someone who has never written a computer program. It even explains the flowchart thing. A better analogy might be trying to read TAoCP without knowing algebra.
  - voidhorse 7y ago
    I think this issue is also often coupled with another problem: a good portion of people seem to harbor an assumption that one can simply comprehend any philosophical work (or really, any work of the liberal arts, be it philosophy, history, or literature) without perquisite knowledge. Hand the average person a highly specialized work on mathematics, biology, or computer science and they'll quickly explain to you that they lack the prerequisite training or reading to understand it. Hand them a philosophical tract or a novel of literary merit and they seem more likely to either attempt to struggle through it, ignoring things they don't 'get' to come up with a impoverished sense of the work, or they'll claim the language is too (and unnecessarily) foreboding and dense, but not necessarily the subject matter--there's no sense that the difficulty lies in lack of training, but rather in something inherit in the work (conceived as a flaw or virtue). The onus is on the work to be comprehensible, rather than on the reader to comprehend--yet the obverse relation is oft upheld for texts in the sciences (in the rooms of average opinion. Specialists, of course, feel quite differently). There seems to be less general acknowledgement of the fact that dedication to the tradition and assimilation of historical concepts is just as requisite in the humanities as it is in the sciences. It's odd how certain subjects are victim to the full fury of uninformed opinion while others are immune. Ask anyone of his politics and he'll (usually) soon explain his view and why its correct, all the while finding the fact that he hasn't studied any political history, political science, political economy, or political philosophy totally irrelevant. Ask the same fellow his thoughts on a mathematical conjecture and he'll quickly scramble his way out of the conversation. It probably comes back to the mild religiosity our culture maintains about the sciences--its seems a profane thing for mere laymen to opine on the word from on high. Meanwhile the things of men are open to all cant and blasphemy.

58 points by kwindla 7y ago

"Quack's book has re-release." Adorno largely deserves to be forgotten. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#Overall_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#...

efficax 7y ago
The studies on the authoritarian personality are hardly the cornerstore of Adorno's work (he was primarily a philosopher) and in any case, one imperfect social study does not invalidate the entirety of his thinking by any means.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  The article is an announcement of the re-release of his "studies" on the "authoritarian personality." The fact that it doesn't dwell on the actual content of the book it's touting ought to tell you something about its quality.
- uxp100 7y ago
  I've seen "The Authoritarian Personality" recommended online (by philosophy minded people, not as accepted social science), so I think it's good to point out how flawed it is. There is a tendency for philosophy fans to excuse errors in work with, oh they are primarily a philosopher, and then turn around and say, cite Foucault's "Madness and Civilization" as a reliable source of information a paragraph later. In fact, this very article is a "review" (in the way NYRB does it) of a new edition of "The Authoritarian Personality" which calls him "a great polymath." Since this article is in some ways advertising the very thing you call "hardly the cornerstone" of his work, the best thing for the top comment to be to inform people of it's flaws. In fact, I think it's irresponsible for NYRB to publish this, and mention his stupid opinions about Jazz, which are not really on topic or important, and not mention criticisms of the re-release that prompted the piece.
mlevental 7y ago
hn loves to react this way to "continental" philosophy - latch on to one thing that is intelligible to them and then extrapolate from that. eg I got into it without someone about Marx earlier this week that had never read any Marx! I mean nevermind that adorno is socially validated - ie his peers, those that are actually qualified to assess the value of his work, respect him and his arguments right? that doesn't matter because hackers are qualified for anything right? like let some metaphysics philosopher read a machine learning paper and dismiss its claims because they're not ontologically sound (or something like that) and you'll have all of hn rolling in tears at the sheer audacity of not knowing calculus (or something), but do the inverse and you're a hero. the truth is it takes a lot of effort to earnestly engage with both kinds of material so lazy people in both groups use lazy heuristics. the way I see it is you have two options if you want to be honest: either take up the mantle and dig in (read adorno and around adorno) or shutup (quit pontificating just to sound smart). both are completely tenable paths to being a responsible intelligent person.
- viburnum 7y ago
  I’ll admit it, I couldn’t understand any of the Adorno I read in school, except for the part where he hated jazz, so I wrote him off. On the whole I haven’t found much useful in the Frankfurt school, especially compared to what your average anthropologist is up to.
  - rllyboredonline 7y ago
    I'd recommend One-Dimensional Man by Marcuse. You're not going to extract anything too wild out of it, but the picture he paints of 50's American consumerism is worth it.
  - wbl 7y ago
    Sexual Taboos and the Law Today is a good intro but you need to know Freud well. The problem is very few know Freud and Marx.
- nradov 7y ago
  But that's a circular argument. What makes his peers qualified? What is the root of qualification in a field where the foundational axioms are ultimately subjective and there is no reliable source of objective truth? Or to put it another way, what makes this branch of philosophy any more respectable than astrology?
voidhorse 7y ago
It's fine to dislike Adorno, but to say he largely deserves to be forgotten is preposterous. He's arguably the first thinker to attempt to recast and reformulate philosophy in such a way that it could remain critically potent in the modern world. To take such a hand-waving, dismissive attitude toward all of his contributions, which are dense, difficult, and backed by a deep study of the history of western thought, based on the flaws of one study (by the way, Adorno himself even admitted to not being the best equipped to conduct sociological studies like this, he was first and foremost a critic and philosopher) is ridiculous and in fact the very imprint of the sort of limited uncritical/psuedo-critical forms of modern thinking he constantly rallied against.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  > He's arguably the first thinker to attempt to recast and reformulate philosophy in such a way that it could remain critically potent in the modern world. Citations needed. That statement doesn't even mean anything. I'm pretty sure if it does mean something, it applies more readily to someone like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, hell even Richard Rorty or David Stove. It would be nice if you could name "all of his contributions" or even one of his contributions beyond the book touted in this review: I don't think there are any worth talking about. He really deserves to be forgotten. Unless you think "everything I don't like is Hitler" is a great contribution to Western Philosophy.
  - voidhorse 7y ago
    Sure, I can clarify. By critically potent, I mean specifically philosophy that can serve as a value critique--"moralizing philosophy" if you will. Wittgenstein's philosophical work is incredible and was fundamental to the discipline and to logic and mathematics, but his work is typically not value critique (excepting Culture and Value which is not considered important by most readers of his oeuvre). Heidegger is, I suppose, another contender, but again, I don't consider the majority of his philosophy oriented around value critique (though his essays on technology do fit into this category and are excellent). Heidegger's thought, I find, is also less coherent, and he really stood by this image of the philosopher as "holier than thou" bearer of truths (this is actually touched upon in the article) which is an old model (actually, a mythic model concerned with power) that I think is impracticable. Not to mention, Sarte's conception and formulation of existentialism had a much greater general impact on human thought than Heidegger's, which, though in vogue for a while, has been mostly re-confined to the academy. I'm not as familiar with Richard Rorty's work as I should be, so he may qualify. But Adorno has him beat on timing--Rorty's Bibliography doesn't start until '52 (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/rr/biblio_2007.html https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/rr/biblio_2007.html). Meanwhile, Horkheimer and Adorno had already published Dialectic of Enlightenment at that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno_bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno_bibliography). I am not familiar with David Stove or his works. So he may qualify. I'll certainly check him out later, however! As for the works of Adorno's that are worth reading: Negative Dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Aesthetic Theory, His works on Hegel. And there's more--those are the major works. Your last sentence smacks of someone who has never even read a page of Adorno but rather has some generic, skewed conception of "critical theory" and thinks that's an adequate account of the thought of a philosopher (which, clearly being familiar with philosophers and the depth of their works, seems absurd that you'd adopt such a reductive and uninformed viewpoint on the matter). It's the equivalent to thinking Wittgenstein is reducible to a concern over "mere semantics" or Heidegger is reducible to, and dismissable on account of, his nazism. Rather presumptuous and rather close-minded.

voidhorse 7y ago

I'm a big fan of Adorno's work. I think American/Anglo readers struggle with it for two reasons: 1. It's largely consumed in translation. Normally, this isn't so problematic, but in addition to being incredibly philosophically dense, Adorno's work is rhetorically and compositionally complex, rife with structures that are rather difficult to translate, punning, particular sentence arrangements, etc. 2. It's unashamedly steeped in tradition and assumes a lot of knowledge of the history of Western thought. Adorno's texts are rich with allusions that require knowledge of philosophical and literary history, which can really confound those engaged in a superficial or cursory reading--it's easy to miss his point if you're not on your toes. If you're curious, I recommend David Held's Introduction to Critical Theory which does a great job of framing the work of the Frankfurt school. This article also does quite a nice job of summarizing his work. I also think Adorno's critique of Existentialism and Heideggerean philosophy (mentioned in the article), (also contained in Negative Dialectics) actually serves as a great precis of key components of his thought.

pasabagi 7y ago
Or, more cynically, people struggle with it because they have literally no education in philosophy - so reading Adorno is sort of like reading Knuth before you've written a single program.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  The Art of Computer Programming contains all the introduction necessary for someone who has never written a computer program. It even explains the flowchart thing. A better analogy might be trying to read TAoCP without knowing algebra.
- voidhorse 7y ago
  I think this issue is also often coupled with another problem: a good portion of people seem to harbor an assumption that one can simply comprehend any philosophical work (or really, any work of the liberal arts, be it philosophy, history, or literature) without perquisite knowledge. Hand the average person a highly specialized work on mathematics, biology, or computer science and they'll quickly explain to you that they lack the prerequisite training or reading to understand it. Hand them a philosophical tract or a novel of literary merit and they seem more likely to either attempt to struggle through it, ignoring things they don't 'get' to come up with a impoverished sense of the work, or they'll claim the language is too (and unnecessarily) foreboding and dense, but not necessarily the subject matter--there's no sense that the difficulty lies in lack of training, but rather in something inherit in the work (conceived as a flaw or virtue). The onus is on the work to be comprehensible, rather than on the reader to comprehend--yet the obverse relation is oft upheld for texts in the sciences (in the rooms of average opinion. Specialists, of course, feel quite differently). There seems to be less general acknowledgement of the fact that dedication to the tradition and assimilation of historical concepts is just as requisite in the humanities as it is in the sciences. It's odd how certain subjects are victim to the full fury of uninformed opinion while others are immune. Ask anyone of his politics and he'll (usually) soon explain his view and why its correct, all the while finding the fact that he hasn't studied any political history, political science, political economy, or political philosophy totally irrelevant. Ask the same fellow his thoughts on a mathematical conjecture and he'll quickly scramble his way out of the conversation. It probably comes back to the mild religiosity our culture maintains about the sciences--its seems a profane thing for mere laymen to opine on the word from on high. Meanwhile the things of men are open to all cant and blasphemy.