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I Adore Adorno
Jun. 25th, 2001 08:48 amThis is excerpts from a Theodor Adorno essay "Notes on Human Science and Culture"
"Scientific discipline is an intellectual form of what Goethe as well as hegel called for under the name of 'externalization'. the devotion of spirit to something opposed and alien to it and through which alone spirit attains freedom
(the tattoo on my angle--aletheia)
. Anyone who has shirked this discipline through dilletantish, impolsive thinking and practiced gossip will
easily fall below the level of what had aroused his legitimate aversion: the method heteronomously imposed upon him. But this discipline and its corresponding conception of science has cquired a fatal preponderance to the detriment of its contrary aspect, a preponderance that cannot be revoked by fiat. Spontananeity, fimagination, freedom toward the subject matter, despite all explanations to the contrary, are so restricted by the omnipresent question "but is it science?" that even in its native regions spirit is threatened with being sipirited. The function of the concept of science has become inverted. The often invoked methodological neatness, universal confirmation, the consensus of competent scholars, the verfiability of all assertions, even the logical rigor of lines of reasoning is not spirit: the criterion of watertight validity always also works against the spirit. Where the conflict against the unregimented understanding is already decided, dialectic and culture, the internal process between subject and object...cannot arise. Organized human science is a stock-taking and a reflective form of spirit rather than its proper life; it wants to come to know spirit as something dissimilar from itself and elevates that dissimilarity into a maxim. But if human science tries to usurp spirit's place, then spirit vanishes, even in science itself. This happens as soon as science is considered the only instrument of culture and the organization of society sanctions no other. The more profoundly science senses that it does not provide what it promises, the more it tends to manifest an intolerance toward the spirit that is unlike it, and the more science insists on its own privilege. The disappointment of many students of the human sciences in the first semsesters
(me, carlos, francisco, julie crying, others...except their method of dealing (except julie) was a weird inbred nietzschean masochism of "truth hurts, therefore pain makes us warriors of the truth")
is due not only to their naivete but also to the fact that the human sciences have renounced that element of naivete, of the immediate relation to the object without which spirit cannot live; the human sciences' lack of self-reflection is no less naive. Even when their worldview opposes positivism, they have secretly fallen under the spell of the positivistic way of thinking, that of reified consciousness. Discipline, in accord with an overall tendency of society, becomes the taboo placed on anything that does not stubbornly reproduce what already exists: buit precisesly that would be the definition of spirit...What reified scientific consciousness desires in place of its subject matter is, however something societal: to be protected by the institutional branch of scoence that such consciousness invokes as its sole authority as soon as anyone dates to remind it of what it has forgotten. THIS IS THE IMPLICIT CONFORMISM OF HUMAN SCIENCE. WHEREAS IT PRETENDS TO CULTIVATE INTELLECTUAL-SPIRITUAL PEOPLE, IT IS RATHER PRECISELY THESE PEOPLE WHOM IT BREAKS.
(like me)
Between spirit and science a vacuum has develiped. Not only specialized education but culture itself no longer cultivates. Culture is polarized between the elements of the methodological and the informational. In the face of this the cultivated spirit would be a form of involuntary reaction as much as its own master. "
I feel like this essay speaks to the heart of why I left UCLA, and its ideological matrix that pretended to be objective, its absence of agency, its frequency-dependent morals. Nice to feel validated by one of the brightest minds of the 20th century.
"Scientific discipline is an intellectual form of what Goethe as well as hegel called for under the name of 'externalization'. the devotion of spirit to something opposed and alien to it and through which alone spirit attains freedom
(the tattoo on my angle--aletheia)
. Anyone who has shirked this discipline through dilletantish, impolsive thinking and practiced gossip will
easily fall below the level of what had aroused his legitimate aversion: the method heteronomously imposed upon him. But this discipline and its corresponding conception of science has cquired a fatal preponderance to the detriment of its contrary aspect, a preponderance that cannot be revoked by fiat. Spontananeity, fimagination, freedom toward the subject matter, despite all explanations to the contrary, are so restricted by the omnipresent question "but is it science?" that even in its native regions spirit is threatened with being sipirited. The function of the concept of science has become inverted. The often invoked methodological neatness, universal confirmation, the consensus of competent scholars, the verfiability of all assertions, even the logical rigor of lines of reasoning is not spirit: the criterion of watertight validity always also works against the spirit. Where the conflict against the unregimented understanding is already decided, dialectic and culture, the internal process between subject and object...cannot arise. Organized human science is a stock-taking and a reflective form of spirit rather than its proper life; it wants to come to know spirit as something dissimilar from itself and elevates that dissimilarity into a maxim. But if human science tries to usurp spirit's place, then spirit vanishes, even in science itself. This happens as soon as science is considered the only instrument of culture and the organization of society sanctions no other. The more profoundly science senses that it does not provide what it promises, the more it tends to manifest an intolerance toward the spirit that is unlike it, and the more science insists on its own privilege. The disappointment of many students of the human sciences in the first semsesters
(me, carlos, francisco, julie crying, others...except their method of dealing (except julie) was a weird inbred nietzschean masochism of "truth hurts, therefore pain makes us warriors of the truth")
is due not only to their naivete but also to the fact that the human sciences have renounced that element of naivete, of the immediate relation to the object without which spirit cannot live; the human sciences' lack of self-reflection is no less naive. Even when their worldview opposes positivism, they have secretly fallen under the spell of the positivistic way of thinking, that of reified consciousness. Discipline, in accord with an overall tendency of society, becomes the taboo placed on anything that does not stubbornly reproduce what already exists: buit precisesly that would be the definition of spirit...What reified scientific consciousness desires in place of its subject matter is, however something societal: to be protected by the institutional branch of scoence that such consciousness invokes as its sole authority as soon as anyone dates to remind it of what it has forgotten. THIS IS THE IMPLICIT CONFORMISM OF HUMAN SCIENCE. WHEREAS IT PRETENDS TO CULTIVATE INTELLECTUAL-SPIRITUAL PEOPLE, IT IS RATHER PRECISELY THESE PEOPLE WHOM IT BREAKS.
(like me)
Between spirit and science a vacuum has develiped. Not only specialized education but culture itself no longer cultivates. Culture is polarized between the elements of the methodological and the informational. In the face of this the cultivated spirit would be a form of involuntary reaction as much as its own master. "
I feel like this essay speaks to the heart of why I left UCLA, and its ideological matrix that pretended to be objective, its absence of agency, its frequency-dependent morals. Nice to feel validated by one of the brightest minds of the 20th century.
