Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 10:35:08 -0400 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> Subject: Re: ADORNO VIZ. LUKACS? Sorry to be so mysterious, inadvertently. In my original query I mentioned certain works of Lukacs and Adorno illustrating the basis of my interest--the hard core of philosophical method, ontology and epistemology. In response, I was told about how Adorno and Lukacs have been compared in two areas I did not enquire about--aesthetics and psychoanalysis--but I've still not received any useful information that pertains to the focus of my query. Now it's true that I've been interested in the struggle of Adorno with Lukacs over literary modernism, though it is not the focus of my present inquiry. But I just have no interest in any detailed comparison of how Adorno and Lukacs differ with respect to Freud. As for any actual interest, say, in how Adorno appropriated Freud, well .... Freud passed into general intellectual culture so long ago that in some generic sense people all have at least a general sense of Freudianism and its releavnce as they vaguely know many other things that are now commonly accepted parts of a modern scientific world view, Newton and Einstein and others .... Freudianism doesn't seem to be the hot issue it once was. I don't feel an urgent need to rehash the specifics. The only thing that still interests me about the Frankfurt appropriation of Freud is how Freud appeals to the needs of certain intellectuals beyond its actual scientific merits and the degree of Freudian orthodoxy that is accepted by intellectuals who are not themselves professional psychoanalysts. In this regard the work of Neil Maclaughlin on Erich Fromm is very interesting, documenting the shabby way that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse treated Fromm, kowtowing to the most orthodox, reactionary establishment wing of the pyschoanalytic movement. So what in general do I think of Freud and his appeal to intellectual snobbery? I'd say my reaction is as contradictory and ambiguous as Freud's real ideological role itself. Freud is seen in his best light as an Enlightenment figure who wanted to make the irrational rational and the unconscious conscious. That is the party line. While it has partial validity, there is another side: that is the covert appeal of Freud to intellectuals who love to wallow in their own superiority over the hopelessly and groundlessly irrational mass of humanity, who have surrendered to the voluptuous pleasures of alienated, gratuitous cynicism and sadomasochistic, reductionistic pessimism concerning human nature. >From this point of view and only as far as it is applicable, Lukacs is certainly correct to identify Freud as part of the anti-proletarian, irrationalist heritage of lebensphilosophie. C.L.R. James also sussed out the narcissistic appeal of psychoanalysis to intellectuals and went on a rampage against its influence, in the USA, in the late 1940s. James's one misstep was his dogmatic blindness to the important truths revealed by Erich Fromm in ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM, which accomplished more in enlightening humanity than all the rest of the Frankfurt pisspots put together. At 09:29 AM 04/26/2000 -0400, Ken wrote: > >On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 01:41:13 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote: > >> I must confess a near total indifference to the question of psychoanalysis... > >Is there a non-obvious explanation as to why? I'm curious. The bulk of what >happens in the world makes little sense without some notion of the unconscious >as something that mixes it all up, to explain why we do what we do.
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