Why Are Philosophers Hard to Understand? (Part III)
Last week, I asked why philosophers are hard to understand. Today, I’m going to take a short passage that’s difficult, and try to explain it. The meta-question is whether you think the point could have been made more simply or needs to be expressed opaquely/poetically. This will continue a series in which I paraphrase challenging paragraphs from difficult thinkers.
Here is Adorno:
“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light [...] But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or the unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.” (Minima Moralia, pp. 247).
Here’s my paraphrase:
Because the world is a messed up place worthy of despair, it is irresponsible for philosophy to be aloof, or to have an affect of happiness or rosy idealism that ignores or minimizes the reality of human destitution.
At the same time, if philosophy is to be worthwhile at all, it must attempt—imperfectly—to consider how the current reality will appear from a perfect standpoint when the world is “redeemed,” i.e., when social reality is aligned with what is true, rather than distorted.
Because the philosopher does not yet live in a redeemed world and is a byproduct of a world that is broken, the best s/he can do is draw attention to this fact. By making the world seem strange and displaced, the philosopher draws our attention, indirectly, to a higher point of view. From this view, we can see the world for the messed up place it is.
The philosopher should take up the method of making the world appear strange regardless of whether redemption will eventually come, regardless of whether the world can ever be perfected, and truth implemented in society. “Redemption” is what Kant calls a “regulative ideal”—a practical heuristic we need to structure our thought, regardless of whether it has any reality, and regardless of whether it can be proven. It’s like the imaginary number i in mathematics.
Given that Adorno emphasizes the need to displace and estrange, it seems like it would be irresponsible for him—by his own standards—to write more directly. But do you agree with his premise or its conclusion? Would his thought be worsened by laying out its arguments more prosaically, as I have I tried to do?
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