/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11930596]

Only real Adorno / Hegel / dialectical heads in this thread.

I'm reading Adorno's lecture series on metaphysics. The kind of real juicy promise of the whole course is that he says he will go into how Auschwitz (as a symbol for all the unspeakable, meaningless atrocity of the modern social world) has fundamentally changed metaphysics. It has changed metaphysics by making the idea of an absolute, ideal meaning behind the mere material historical world— which implicitly justifies that world—an impossible or blasphemous position to hold.

But what's difficult for me is that Adorno insists that he's saying more than just that Auschwitz allowed people to *realise* the idea of metaphysical meaning is a lie. He seems to be saying that Auschwitz actually changed the things metaphysics deals with, which implies that metaphysics wasn't just "plausible" or "meaningful" for Aristotle etc. while all the time covering up the meaninglessness that Auschwitz eventually exposed, but was actually somehow true.

But if metaphysics is untrue now, doesn't that mean it was always untrue? Otherwise Adorno is just doing a kind of history-of-thought in which philosophy is one way of narrating one's historical moment. In which case, metaphysics was only ever an obfuscated way of representing the coherence of ancient Greek society as it appeared to its elite intellectual-workers.

I realise that I'm only finding this problematic because Adorno's ideas of the historicity and the dynamism of truth are very unintuitive and complex, and his whole point is that there are philosophical truths that don't deal with the immutable and extra-temporal, but could anyone with any experience of these ideas spell things out a bit more?

[Anonymous No.11930615]

why women and secular humanists have replaced the comma with their retarded slash?

[Anonymous No.11930616]

>>11930596
>Auschwitz (as a symbol for all the unspeakable, meaningless atrocity of the modern social world) has fundamentally changed metaphysics. It has changed metaphysics by making the idea of an absolute, ideal meaning behind the mere material historical world— which implicitly justifies that world
Isn't he confusing ethics with metaphysics here?

[Anonymous No.11930649]

>>11930596
>caring about what some neurotic and resentful Jew has to say about metaphysics

What you described is typical Jewish intellectual behavior, they see themselves as the anointed guardians and gatekeepers of intellectual thought and in doing what they imagine to be fulfilling that role they end up universalizing their own ideas and personal views/experiences as immutable truths applicable to all circumstances. There have been way worse atrocities than the holocaust throughout history, none of which have invalidated metaphysics; including ones that happened during the 20th century such as the tens of millions dead in the Soviet Union and China. The holocaust was not meaningless but was the result of a long history between the Germans and Jews where both of them were guilty of wrongdoing at times and a lot of insights about the nature of things like communities, the state, the willingness of people to obey and so on can be drawn from it. It's such a conceited idea that becuase allegedly 6 million of your people were killed that SUDDENLY metaphysics is dead, oh gevalt! Why wasn't it already invalidated by the Armenian genocide? Did the actions of the (largely Jewish) early Soviet Union and its commisars which led to the death of many millions of innocent Christian civilians also invalidate metaphysics? There are so many obvious holes in his idea I don't know where to begin.

Debord > Adorno btw

[Anonymous No.11930679]

>kike whining about holocaust
peak philosophy

[Anonymous No.11930700]

>>11930596

>Auschwitz (as a symbol for all the unspeakable, meaningless atrocity of the modern social world)
What is the point of this bullshit? Why does he need a "symbol" for modern atrocities? Why does he need to talk in terms of this symbol? Couldn't he just use a phase like "modern atrocities" and give a clear definition of this, rather than referring to one specific historical event? Is he just trying to obfuscate his argument to make it sound more complex? Is he doing it for stylistic reasons, so he can make edgy statements like "no poetry after Auschwitz"? Why would a philosopher bother trying to sound edgy? Is he trying to appeal to Jews?

Can anyone give me an honest explanation of why this symbolism is needed at all?

[Anonymous No.11930742]

>>11930596
>meaningless
Ah yes, the evil Hitler chose the good and petty semites because of their race and skin. I love HISTORY!

[Anonymous No.11930759]

>changed metaphysics by making the idea of an absolute, ideal meaning behind the mere material historical world— which implicitly justifies that world—an impossible or blasphemous position to hold.
but this is an absolute and meaning-laden metaphysical position as well

[Anonymous No.11930775]

>>11930759
Critical Theorists pretend the Peritrope never happened

[Anonymous No.11930959]

>>11930700
As I understand it there's two reasons:

1) He's German and talking to a German audience and one of his main polemical opponents are the disciples of Heidegger who think that there are still some kind of authentic, national values that it is the purpose of the good life to strive towards as a national community. By giving the experience of atrocity the name of Auschwitz he wants to show how direct and inescapable that experience and the guilt of surviving it is, that it's not something distant and abstract that you can philosophise away but something that has marked everything that is closest to you.

2) He doesn't want to treat Auschwitz as an exception, but as an extreme continuation of a mode of society and domination that is almost total, even, he says, in liberal democratic societies.

>>11930759
Yeah, my fault for over-simplifying it. He does pose the problem, but doesn't really resolve it, that extreme nominalism or realism also makes claims about the grounds of being, and in that sense could be considered metaphysical. He also says however that there is another kind of 'critical edge' to those anti-metaphysical philosophies, but he leaves the suggestion super ambiguous. Which he does a lot, it sucks.

But this is also his problem with existential philosophies that make meaningless, atomised life into a kind of narrative. This is why he likes Beckett, because they're these exhausted texts that refuse to allow themselves to really say anything.

[Anonymous No.11930991]

>>11930649
Hmm I guess your right dude, Adorno did indeed love the Soviet Union, and he's not known for studying 'the willingness of people to obey' at all. I guess his main crime is that he didn't really consider his theories from the viewpoint of endless cosmic race-war. So good points all round.

[Anonymous No.11931006]

Something that never happened (as a symbol for all the unspeakable, meaningless atrocity of the modern social world) has fundamentally changed metaphysics. It has changed metaphysics by making the idea of an absolute, ideal meaning behind the mere material historical world— which implicitly justifies that world—an impossible or blasphemous position to hold.