What Does the Interest that Auschwitz Should Never Happen Again Mean for Sociology - Essay Example

?'What Does the Interest that Auschwitz Should Never Happen Again Mean for Sociology?' Modern Thought Candi Number: 41840_LT Word count 969 King's College Contents Contents 1 Looking critically at the statement, “After Auschwitz (and in this respect Auschwitz is a prototype of something which has been repeated incessantly in the world since then) our interest is in ensuring that this should never happen again,” Adorno uses this phrase at the end of ‘Lecture II’ (1968) in “Introduction to Sociology” in order to avoid misunderstanding in students. The Critical Theory of Society is based in the philosophical position outlined by Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which is itself based on a reform of Marxism. The theory of the Frankfurt School and Adorno relates primarily to methodology in the practice of sociology. According to Jarvis (1998), the Frankfurt school asserts there is no real “thing” as society; rather it is an interpretation that is based on the subjectivity of one who approaches it as a discipline.1 Adorno opposes the totalizing aspects of theory when it claims to complete knowledge about the operation of social forces or historical evolution. He see this in Freud, Weber, Durkheim, and Marx, in their interpretive frameworks that discuss the operation of society from different perspectives, but share a totalitarianism of meaning which will limit interpretation to a range of values. Related to this is the preference for a phenomenological methodology that seeks to describe reality and social processes as they appear, rather than as they should be ideally. This represents a rejection of objectivism in knowledge by the Frankfurt School, but an acceptance of the categorical imperative of activism through morality.2 Adorno views the totalitarian aspects of knowledge systems as operating on the model of the modern State, both symmetrical in identity and structure, implementing imperial control of consciousness and society, flattening all diversity of meaning. From this, Adorno seeks to avoid building a theory of sociology that repeats the State model of control as an aspect of individual identity, for when this occurs, subjective interpretation, variance, objectivity, and fact all vanish into a monolithic machine that drives meaning to a single source, an illusory central point of vanishing into history. "If you asked me what sociology is, I would say that it must be insight into society, into the essential nature of society," Adorno says – it must be, but it is not. "Ladies and Gentleman, I would now ask you not to write down and take home what I have told you as a definition of sociology... it cannot be reduced to an 'axiom'."3 Adorno and the Frankfurt School are advocating a position of radical freedom from the State and the restrictions of theoretical interpretation through a radical re-thinking of fundamentals, universals, essences, and other aspects of bias that make claims to ultimate truth or reality in sociology. Knowledge systems inherently promote totalitarian universal values, the essential meaning of things that is fixed and unchanging, or knowledge of the inner-operation of society and the universe that inevitably falls short of the goal of accurately representing reality. As Adorno writes in “Negative Dialectics” (1970), “If one speaks in the newest aesthetic debates of anti-drama and anti-heroes, then Negative Dialectics, which holds itself distant from all aesthetic themes, could be called an anti-system.”4 If “Negative Dialectics” represents an anti-system, then Auschwitz on the other extreme represents the fully totalitarian aspects of a system in application. From the perspective of humanity, Auschwitz is a symbol of the most terrible aspects of modernism, the factory of anti-Semitism and death, the total mobilization of society to the ends of violent, fascist theory. Auschwitz motivates the moral awareness in humanity to resist, but Adorno recognizes that this requires freedom of thought and critical awareness as a basis for activism. The person confronted with the symbol of Auschwitz must respond because as Adorno states, “Hitler has imposed a new categorical imperative upon humanity.”5 If Auschwitz can be considered the apotheosis of evil in modernism, then the challenge exists in philosophy to go beyond modernism, to purge modernist thought of its fascist element and remake it in the model of one’s own moral awareness and critical understanding. “Auschwitz confirms the philosopheme of pure identity as death. The most provocative dictum from Beckett’s Endgame: that there would no longer be anything to really be afraid of, reacts to a praxis, which delivered its first test case in the camps and in whose once honorable concept already lurks teleologically the annihilation of the non-identical. Absolute negativity is in plain view, is no longer surprising.”6 In considering the great chaos of the Second World War, it is more applicable to see it as a great “ordering” of society, not only in the command structure which set millions of armies into motion, but in the way that the operation was planned “logically” through the greatest application of human reason to the technologies of war, the construction of weapons, and the production of death. Auschwitz becomes a symbol of life for Adorno rather than anti-Semitism and death, as he attempts to convert or transform its meaning to build the impetuous to resist the totalitarianism of the State, to resist fascism, racism, and violence. What this means practically for sociology is not posited by Adorno; it is an opening of the door of the discipline to re-think itself from fundamentals, for the researcher to build new methods, develop new approaches, and apply new interpretations that lead to a new understanding of a paradigm shift in knowledge. “The guilt of life, which as pure factum already robs another life of breath, according to a statistics, which complements an overwhelming number of murdered with a minimal number of rescued, as if this were foreshadowed in the calculation of probability, is no longer to be reconciled with life. That guilt reproduces itself unceasingly, because it cannot be completely present to the consciousness at any moment. This, nothing else, compels one to philosophy.”7 Guilt in this aspect of its conception relates directly to the individual’s moral sense, and in this manner Adorno and the Frankfurt School are required to address the centrality of Kant in European philosophy. “Had Kant, in his words, freed himself from the scholastic concept of philosophy into its world-concept, then this has regressed under compulsion to its scholastic concept. Where it confuses this latter with the world-concept, its pretensions degenerate into sheer ludicrousness.”8 The subtle nature of this interpretation bears further development, because it is directly related to the question of sociology after Auschwitz in Adorno’s theory. Kant in this regard centered the individual consciousness and its processing of experience as the means through which the moral awareness was created, and in doing so establishes the need for freedom of thought and interpretation. If what is communicated as “morality” in society becomes scholastic, then it is learned and repeated as rote, it is pre-established and given, there is no need for interpretation or free-thought, simple human programming will suffice to create a moral-machine that operates on the accepted principles of common morality, and there is only a binary decision making process permitted: this is right and that is wrong, here the good, there the evil. The understanding of this leads to the development of the anti-system of thought in Negative Dialectics, and this methodology can be further implemented within each of these disciplines and others to de-program the theory from fascist elements that represent totalitarianism in thought. How this is to be done cannot be said by Adorno, it cannot be “written down” and “taken home” from his lecture but relates to a critical approach to methodology that questions all of the foundations and operations of the theory in the practice of sociology. "Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [Widervernunft] … Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth."9 Sociology posits a study of society through the application of reason. The student or practitioner of sociology must avoid the creation of a totalitarian theory of interpretation that operates as an Auschwitz in the mind, systematically destroying all opposition in meaning. The sociologist must further avoid projecting the conditioned aspects of the subjective bias into universals, essences, or fundamental forces that explain reality in a totalitarian manner while simultaneously believing them to be ultimately true, for the experience of theory, science, and knowledge suggests that such beliefs are inevitably limited and represent only an illusion of truth when contrasted with the phenomenology of the real. “Philosophical content is to be grasped solely where philosophy does not mandate it. The illusion that it could captivate the essence in the finitude of its determinations must be given up.” 10 Thus, in the same manner, Adorno counsels the student to look for and practice sociology by creating it anew, searching for its evidence and proof in the areas of human society that sociology itself has ignored historically, and to develop new methods for its interpretation. As Zuidervaart (2007) writes, “Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging (philosophical) theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative praxis would require. Having missed the moment of its realization (via the proletarian revolution, according to early Marx), philosophy today must criticize itself: its societal naivete, its intellectual antiquation, its inability to grasp the power at work in industrial late capitalism.”11 From this, sociology must also have a moral awareness that determines its interpretation, as well as challenging fascism and anti-Semitism as it exists in the application of systems of thought in history, or risk repeating Auschwitz again. Methodology, morality, activism, and the need for subjective interpretation can be considered some of the most important aspects of sociology as posited by Adorno. As Jarvis states, a Critical Theory of Society seeks to “proceed through the criticism of sociological concepts and of the social experience embedded in them. The aim of a critical social theory is to allow the entanglement of fact with value to become visible”.12 Sources Cited: Adorno, T (1978) ‘Commitment’, in A Arato & E Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, pp. 300-318 Adorno, T (2000 [1951]) ‘Cultural criticism and society’ in B O’Connor (ed) The Adorno Reader, pp. 195-210 Adorno, T. Introduction to Sociology. Stanford University Press, 2002. Web. 30 April 2011. Adorno, T. Negative Dialectics. Trans. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1970. Web. 30 April 2011. Adorno, T (1998 [1969]) ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, pp. 127-34. Adorno, T (1969 [1966]). ‘Society’, in Salmagundi, 10-11, pp. 144-53. Adorno, T et al (eds) (1976) ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’ in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 66-86 Adorno, T (1967) ‘Sociology and psychology’, New Left Review, 46 (4-5), pp. 67-80 (Part One) 47, pp. 79-96 (Part Two). Adorno, T (1961) ‘”Static” and “Dynamic” as Sociological Categories’, Diogenes, 33, pp. 28-49. Adorno, Theodor W. & Tiedemann, Rolf. Can one live after Auschwitz?: a philosophical reader. Stanford University Press, 2003. Web. 30 April 2011. Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: a critical introduction. Routledge, 1998. Web. 2 May 2011. Zuidervaart, Lambert (2007). Theodor W. Adorno. Marxism.com, First published Mon May 5, 2003; substantive revision Fri Aug 3, 2007. Web. 30 April 2011. Read More