Discipline: Philosophy
This paper attempts to present a comprehensive review of Theodor Adorno’s critique of German existentialism through the notion of jargon. Through the treatise on the jargon, Adorno exposes the cardinal sins of philosophy, supposedly the discipline that trains the natural faculties for abstraction and reflection, actually cooperates with ideology and instrumental reason in the business of exploiting the human. Adorno’s jargon provided the foundation for what is now popularly termed as “ideology”, and defines modes of critique that later philosophers like Habermas and Foucault used.
In the introduction, Adorno borrows Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura which is the contemplative relationship between an art object and spectator. Adorno sees that Enlightenment transformed aura into jargon, from the spectator held captive by the enchantment of art towards being hostage of modern ideology. The jargon operates in three ways.
The first way is to feed on philosophical controversies, pretending to be critical against fundamentalist modes of thinking but actually repeats the hegemony from which it rebelled. Here, Adorno cites three philosophers. Kierkegaard’s inwardness rebels against the Church’s fundamentalist doctrines that subjugates the individual conscience to a system but ends up in the principle of a kind of an “autistic” subjectivity that cannot be questioned by external agents. Heidegger rebels against the tradition of western metaphysics which is a forgetfulness of Being, but his idea of Being- in-the-world inculcates an attitude of passivity in the thinker that accepts social evils such as that of capitalism and war. Hegel’s dialectics claims an elevation of consciousness from medieval themes of superstition towards the enlightenment of science but science itself creates its own “technological demons”.
The second way that the jargon operates is to hide its agenda in metaphysical language. Adorno analyzes the Duino elegies of Rilke, a reputedly philosophical poet, and identifies certain lyrical words that reinforced the German value of commitment that supported a cultural attraction towards the principles of Nazism. Heidegger himself employed a highly metaphysically technical language which disables his scholars from questioning his principles from the sociological viewpoint. In contrast to metaphysical and lyrical language, Adorno praises the nonsensical language of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame as a play of absurdity that reveals the brokenness of the modern world, instead of engaging in a denial of it, as what philosophy did.
The third way that the jargon operates is to enmesh itself in the culture industry so that it can maintain and propagate its agencies. Ideology makes use of mass media for more comprehensive but personalized shepherding. Pop culture rebels against sublime forms of art but glorifies the culture of the idiot. Modern society blows up the value of identity but these are “identities” created by the capitalistic corporations.
In conclusion, Adorno refuses to align philosophy with the metaphysical or ontological, seeing the fatalities of metaphysics, but instead defines a new form of philosophical thinking that is by way of negative dialectics. Negative dialectics is a “differential thinking”, that is iconoclastic in intent, not about understanding the origins of thought but about revealing the agenda of instrumental reason that hides in academic discourses, the play of language, and in the culture industry. Negative dialectics is critical in intent and does not aim at a utopic vision. It subscribes heavily to the other disciplines such as history, science and sociology to check on the “ego” of a form of rationality in question, but it does not identify with any discipline because philosophy should always be on a neutral ground.
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