File spoon-archives/frankfurt-school.archive/frankfurt-school_2000/frankfurt-school.0003, message 18


From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk>
Date:          Wed, 22 Mar 2000 15:24:07 +0000
Subject:       Re: Re: Teddie Goes 21st Century--1 [ZEN]


Thank you for supplying the relevant passage. And it is clear that 
the target is the consumerist appropriation of such mental gymnastics 
and not the original thought or spirit. 

I am not trying to promote zen buddhism in any way but I am sure that 
a very sound PhD thesis could be constructed carefully comparing its 
strategies for a strict, displined thought beyond the boundaries or 
constraints imposed by thought with Adorno's "negative dialectics". 

Many commentators have observed that Adorno seems to be thinking from 
positions which he himself appears to have rendered untenable... 

Again I am not siding with such criticisms. Just would not expect 
Adorno to be too harsh on zen. And in this quote, he isn't... 

> "The corny exoticism of such decorative world views as the astonishingly consumable Zen Buddhist one casts light upon today's restorative philosophies. Like Zen, they simulate a thinking posture whi
> h the history stored in the subjects makes impossible to assume. Restricting the mind to thoughts open and attainable at the historical stage of its experience is an element of freedom; nonconceptua
>  vagary represents the opposite of freedom. Doctrines which heedlessly run off from the subject to the universe, along with the philosophy of Being, are more easily brought into accord with the worl
> 's hardened condition and with the chances of success within it than is the tiniest bit of self-reflection by a subject pondering upon itself and its real captivity." 
> 
> from: _Negative Dialectics_ by Theodor W. Adorno, translated by E.B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973), p. 68. 
> 
> Now, regardless of what Zen Buddhism originally meant in China or Japan centuries ago (which I assume was reactionary in its own right), isn't it obvious that this passage characterizes to a T what 
> en has meant to American consumer culture since it was put on the market in the 1940s by the Kerouac crowd?  This is the type of quote that earned my respect for Adorno.
> 

   

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