I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Today, I’m continuing my close reading of Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope. Something I really appreciate about Han’s writing is how he shares and critiques ideas from many thinkers who I might not otherwise meet. Today, I’ll share some ideas from German critical theorist Theodor Adorno.
Adorno’s 1951 book Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life critiques the alienation, commodification, and loss of individuality we suffer under capitalism, fascism, and mass culture. It consists of 153 aphorisms and short essays reflecting on the nature of modern life from a critical theory perspective. Critical theory is a school of thought and philosophical perspective that analyzes and challenges systemic power relations in society. It proposes that knowledge, judgments of truth, and social structures are fundamentally shaped by power dynamics between dominant and oppressed groups.
Adorno, born 1903 in Frankfurt, Germany, was classified as non-Aryan because of his Jewish ancestry. His father was a wealthy wine merchant who had converted from Judaism to Protestantism and his mother was a Catholic singer of Corsican background. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Adorno lost his teaching position. The Institute for Social Research (the famed Frankfurt School, where critical theory developed) was shut down. He went into exile, first to Oxford then to the U.S. Adorno began writing Minima Moralia in 1944 while living as an exile in the U.S.
After WWII, he returned to Frankfurt in 1949, and became a central intellectual figure in rebuilding German critical thought. His work wrestles with how culture becomes complicit with power and whether hope is possible after Auschiwitz.
Adorno on Hope, truth, and art
In The Spirit of Hope, Byung-Chul Han writes of Adorno’s ideas about hope:
Adorno… conceives of hope as a medium of truth. For thinking that hopes, truth is not something that once was and is retrospectively brought to life, but something that first needs to be wrested and gained from the false, from the badly existing. The place of truth is not that beeness [what has been, the past] but the future; it has a utopian, messianic core. The task of truth is to lead us out of an existence that has been recognized as false.
In the end hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized. [from Adorno’s Minima Moralia]
In what sense can hope negate reality and then give us truth? I understand this to mean that hope looks towards an unreal future, one that does not yet exist. Hope says “no” to the bad present. It refuses to accept that the current state of things is the final word.
The “cardinal untruth” to Adorno is to simply accept a bad reality. You give it a stamp of approval or inevitability. You are saying that the badness is natural and unchangeable.
Recall that Adorno was a critical theorist — he critiqued the world as it is with its social structures that control and oppress. Truth to Adorno is not merely a description of what is; it is a recognition via hope of what could and should be instead.
Han continues:
In Minima Moralia, Adorno states: ‘Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.’ As a ‘descendant of magic’, whose ‘taboo … distinguished from the sacred from the everyday, seeking to keep the former pure’, art now represents an ‘autonomous sphere’ in which the logic of the ‘world as it is’ does not apply. Art thus insists on the ‘right to be different’. It thereby opens up a space of possibilities in which we glimpse – as in a flash – the premonition of a higher truth.
Beauty, says Adorno (quoted by Han) provides a purposeless alternative to the purposefulness of domination:
In the magic … of beauty … the illusion of omnipotence is mirrored negatively as hope. It has escaped every trial of strength. Total purposelessness gives the lie to the totality of purposefulness in the world of domination, and only by virtue of this negation … has existing society up to now become aware of another that is possible.
Art and hope are intertwined as ways of recognizing and expressing what might be instead of what is. Hope says “no” to a bad reality. Art is a laboratory where the no can be processed and visualized. Art’s greatest power lies in its uselessness and purposelessness. It’s not used to control and oppress. It’s used instead to create worlds that don’t exist. And in doing so, it exposes the real world as something constructed and could therefore be different.
Dialectics and the Frankfurt School
Thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research at Germany’s Goethe University starting in 1923 founded The Frankfurt School, the start of critical theory. Theodor Adorno was a key member. They critiqued capitalism, fascism, and mass culture, bringing together Maxism with Freudian psychoanalysis.
The defining feature of all critical theory is the rejection of positivism which says “truth is what we can see, measure, and verify right now.” Critical theory says that if you only look at what is, you are trapped by it. Intsead, you must look at the gap between what a society claims to be (e.g., free, rational, and just) and what it actually is (e.g., oppressive, chaotic, unfair).
While the whole gorup used dialectics, they didn’t use them as negatively as Adorno did. Hegel, the originator of the dialectical way of understanding, proposed that processes unfold from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. In this view the conflict between thesis and antithesis lead to progress and a higher resolution. Adorno rejected synthesis. He believed that attempts to resolve the tension between thesis and antithesis too early produced a lie. He stood in the uncomfortable “No.”
Adorno was skeptical of almost everything, but he admired high modernism and abstraction. If an artist paints a tree, he would think, they are just copying what is, the bad reality. But if an artist like Mark Rothko creates a massive, pulsing void of color, they are creating something that has no equivalent in the everyday world. The abstract work becomes the autonomous sphere that Han proposed. It forces the viewer to confront a truth that can’t be put into words or understood in terms of reality. Artwork can then be a premonition of a world where we aren’t just gears in a machine, but rather beings capable of experiencing the sublime.