[lit-ideas] Re: Dis Traction of August
- From: Chris Bruce <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:07:17 +0200
On 20. Aug 2004, at 19:30, Michael Chase wrote:
>
> 1. Given that many people often feel that life is hard to take: is
> this inevitable or not? Do we *have* to feel this way, or is there an
> option?
>
> 2. If there *is* an option, shouldn't it be at least a major part of
> philosophy's job to try to find ways of changing this situation? If it
> refuses or fears to concern itself with such questions, doesn't
> philosophy forfeit all claims to be taken seriously?
>
Here are the opening words form Theodore Adorno's _Minima Moralia_
(trans. by E.F.N. Jephcott):
The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend
relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true
field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into
method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and
finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life. What the philosophers
once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of
mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of
material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. They who
wish to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its
estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual
existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the
immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their
marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make
people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they
still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended
on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology
which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.
But the relation between life and production, which in reality debases
the former to an ephemeral appearance of the latter, is totally absurd.
Means and end are inverted. A dim awareness of this perverse quid pro
quo has still not been quite eradicated from life. Reduced and degraded
essence tenaciously resists the transformation into a facade. The
change in the relations of production themselves depends largely on
what takes place in the 'sphere of consumption', the mere reflection of
production and the caricature of true life: in the consciousness and
unconsciousness of individuals. Only by virtue of opposition to
production, as still not wholly encompassed by this order, can humans
bring about another more worthy of human beings. Should the appearance
of life, which the sphere of consumption itself defends for such bad
reasons, be once entirely effaced, then the monstrosity of absolute
production will triumph.
[Commentary to follow]
Chris Bruce
Kiel, Germany
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