Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 01:41:13 -0400 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> Subject: Re: ADORNO VIZ. LUKACS? Well, I'm grateful for your assistance in any case. Interesting though, that of all the insults I've hurled at various people on countless occasions, I don't recall ever once accusing anyone on this list of being a capitalist, let alone a capitalist porker. Of all the inferences that can be made by others about my mental state, doesn't it seem peculiar that this is the one that has been made? Is it possible that such a characterization of what it is that bothers me about so many people in the academic knowledge industry, in its very inaccuracy, is symptomatic of the inability of said people to listen and hence respond to anyone they don't already know, to pay attention without projecting onto other people extraneous, preconceived agendas? But back to the main point. I enjoyed re-reading "Reconciliation Under Duress" in AESTHETICS AND POLITICS, which is indeed the same essay as that in volume 1 of NOTES TO LITERATURE. (I was also impressed in re-reading "Commitment" in the former volume as well, which is a brilliant critique of Sartre and Brecht.) Adorno does a bang-up job exposing the basis of all of Lukacs' bad judgments in the realm of literature. It is breathtaking to see him in action, and the argument against Lukacs on aesthetic matters appears to be definitive. But there is one little bit in which Adorno passes summary judgment without justifying himself, and this is what mosts interests me: Adorno claims in passing that THE DESTRUCTION OF REASON exemplifies the destruction of Lukacs' own reason, and that the irrationalist idealist philosophy Lukacs excoriates was itself a protest against reification. This is just what I do not believe, and here Adorno exposes his own fatal flaw. Oversimplifications and ideological shortcuts notwithstanding, Lukacs' hard line is exactly what appeals to me. Lukacs cut his teeth on the very philosophies he later came to reject, and in his better moments he surely must have understood what it was he was rejecting. I do not believe the capitulation to Stalinism explains it all. And, Adorno himself developed his own criticisms of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others of the irrationalist stripe. Surely a comparison of the approaches of the two men to this subject matter is in order? Is it unreasonable to be curious as to what the scholarly community has made of this? I must confess a near total indifference to the question of psychoanalysis, except as regards the heinous treatment of Erich Fromm on the part of the leading Frankfurters, which reveals much about the abdication of their own reason under duress in the USA. I repeat, what interests me most in a comparative analysis of Lukacs and Adorno is the question of their approaches to ontological and epistemological issues, esp. in their treatments of the heritage of German idealist philosophy. As for the question of the philosophical orientation towards cultural and social phenomena, what is most important for my purposes is the contrast between Adorno's fixation on non-identity and heteronomy with respect to the repressive subsumption of particulars under universals, and Lukacs' more hidebound, apparently organic view of the relation of the individual to society. At 01:38 AM 04/24/2000 +0200, you wrote: >perhaps the meager results have something to do with your attitude >that everyone except Ralph Dumain is a bourgeois capitalist pig?
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005