(no subject)
from my email: sorry to disrupt your post-Adorno leisure time, but could you say something about Adorno's critique of Spinoza? I know it may be a poorly posed question, but, to put it simply, if Hegel succeeded in showing that the particular is nothing without the universal, what would Adorno say about Spinoza's position? I ask this because I find his arguments against affirmation (i.e., against saying "this is all there is") very compelling and also because I am very interested in Adi Ophir's book The Order of Evils (all thanks to [...]) and there he says that it is impossible to think suffering as superfluity on Spinoza's terms. Ophir writes, for instance (and I couldn't type up the whole page): "This is the case in Spinoza, for instance. Evil, which is perceived from the point of view of the totality that is causa sui, disappears, for within this totality all is both necessary and justified, nothing is superfluous. The individual who understand this necessity in full-that is, in its totality-and who views himself from the point of view of the necessity, of the whole, has no reason to lament or feel sorrow. For him, from now on, good and evil will be affections of attraction to and repulsion at what is useful for, or harmful to, his subsistence and persistence as a distinct entity. Evils are the result of an individual’s aberrant attitude to an object that lessens his strength and causes him to aspire to (or generate) that which will harm him. The suffering involved in his revulsion will of course remain; only its superfluity will disappear. It will reappear only when the individual, at a weak moment, is tempted to compare the world as it is with the world as it seemingly should have been. But speaking of what should have been the case, in opposition to what is, means rejecting the totality o what is as it exists, and this is an idle attempt, for totality is necessary." later on, he writes: "For Spinoza and Nietzsche, the sufferer’s negation appears to be an inferior or external or false and meaningless attitude of this sufferer to his condition; it is no more than a particular, limited case of the existence of a being that fails to understand the meaning of its own limited existence."
so, in the end of the day, I'm just curious why Spinoza is not more of a problem for Adorno when it comes to the question of damage, as you presented it at some point, and the refusal of affirmation. (end of email)
Adorno:
We have to ask what has to be or has not to be affirmed, instead of elevating the word ‘Yes’ to a value in itself, as was unfortunately done by Nietzsche with the entire pathos of saying yes to life.
The idea that we can say of the world as a whole in all seriousness that it has meaning now that we have experienced Auschwitz, and witnessed a world in which that was possible and that threatens to repeat itself in another guise or a similar one-I remind you of Vietnam-to assert such an idea would seem to me to be a piece of cynical frivolity that is simply indefensible to what we might call the pre-philosophical mind. A philosophy that blinds itself to this fact and that in its overweening arrogance fails to absorb this reality and continues to insist that there is a meaning despite everything--this seems to me more than we can reasonably expect anyone who has not been made stupid by philosophy to tolerate (since as a matter of fact, alongside its other functions, philosophy is capable of making people stupid).
Philosophy is the power of resistance: I believe that a definition of philosophy other than as the intellectual power of resistance simply does not exist.
it is deeply dubious to transfer an aesthetic term such as the tragic to the reality and the communal life of human beings and the ethical relationship they have to one another. According to this way of thinking, all thought that takes happiness seriously is deemed shallow, whereas thought is said to be deep it treats denial and negativity as something positive that gives it meaning. […] I believe that the position I am trying to explain to you could not be expressed more clearly than by pointing out that it is not prepared to endorse an idea of tragedy according to which everything that exists deserves even to perish because it is finite, and that this perishing is at the same time the guarantee of its infinite nature-I can tell you that there is little in traditional thought to which I feel so steadfastly opposed as this. What I’m saying, then, is that this concept of depth, which amounts to a theodicy of suffering, is itself shallow. […] It is shallow, furthermore, because it reinforces the idea that failure, death and oppression are the inevitable essence of things-whereas important though all these elements are and, connected as they are to the essence of things, they are avoidable and criticizable, or at any rate the precise opposite of what thinking should actually identify with.
so, in the end of the day, I'm just curious why Spinoza is not more of a problem for Adorno when it comes to the question of damage, as you presented it at some point, and the refusal of affirmation. (end of email)
Adorno:
We have to ask what has to be or has not to be affirmed, instead of elevating the word ‘Yes’ to a value in itself, as was unfortunately done by Nietzsche with the entire pathos of saying yes to life.
The idea that we can say of the world as a whole in all seriousness that it has meaning now that we have experienced Auschwitz, and witnessed a world in which that was possible and that threatens to repeat itself in another guise or a similar one-I remind you of Vietnam-to assert such an idea would seem to me to be a piece of cynical frivolity that is simply indefensible to what we might call the pre-philosophical mind. A philosophy that blinds itself to this fact and that in its overweening arrogance fails to absorb this reality and continues to insist that there is a meaning despite everything--this seems to me more than we can reasonably expect anyone who has not been made stupid by philosophy to tolerate (since as a matter of fact, alongside its other functions, philosophy is capable of making people stupid).
Philosophy is the power of resistance: I believe that a definition of philosophy other than as the intellectual power of resistance simply does not exist.
it is deeply dubious to transfer an aesthetic term such as the tragic to the reality and the communal life of human beings and the ethical relationship they have to one another. According to this way of thinking, all thought that takes happiness seriously is deemed shallow, whereas thought is said to be deep it treats denial and negativity as something positive that gives it meaning. […] I believe that the position I am trying to explain to you could not be expressed more clearly than by pointing out that it is not prepared to endorse an idea of tragedy according to which everything that exists deserves even to perish because it is finite, and that this perishing is at the same time the guarantee of its infinite nature-I can tell you that there is little in traditional thought to which I feel so steadfastly opposed as this. What I’m saying, then, is that this concept of depth, which amounts to a theodicy of suffering, is itself shallow. […] It is shallow, furthermore, because it reinforces the idea that failure, death and oppression are the inevitable essence of things-whereas important though all these elements are and, connected as they are to the essence of things, they are avoidable and criticizable, or at any rate the precise opposite of what thinking should actually identify with.