Monday, April 11, 2022

 Ideas

Who's drawn to fascism? Postwar study of authoritarianism makes a comeback

The Authoritarian Personality was first published in 1950 and is widely studied now

Kristin Nelson · 
After the Second World War, Theodor Adorno (pictured) and a group of scholars wanted to understand why so many people were drawn to dictatorships. Their study, The Authoritarian Personality published in 1950, is widely referenced today to understand the shifting politics of our own time. (Goethe University Frankfurt/Harper & Brothers)
Ideas53:59The Authoritarian Personality

By most accounts, 2021 was a terrible year for democracy, from the attack on the U.S. Capitol to the rolling back of civil liberties in India. Liberal democracies are being challenged — from within and without — and many expect authoritarian rule to continue to metastasize in 2022. 

Some scholars believe that a book published over 70 years ago — The Authoritarian Personality — could help researchers, and many of us today, grapple with troubling political trends in our own era.

"We see so many variations of right-wing populism, of authoritarianism, of neo-fascism around the globe that a book like this has gained, unfortunately, new relevance," said Peter E. Gordon, professor of history at Harvard University, who wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Authoritarian Personality published on its 70th anniversary.

Whether something like fascism could persist or re-emerge was something that concerned them deeply.- Peter E. Gordon

The lead author of the study was Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher and leading member of the Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy. His three co-authors were: psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, who fled anti-Jewish persecution in both Poland and Austria in the 1930s; University of California psychology professor, R. Nevitt Sanford; and PhD student Daniel J. Levinson, researcher into the psychology of ethnocentrism.

"These four individuals brought to their study a very deep concern about the future of democracy in Europe and also in America," according to Gordon.

Harvard history professor Peter E. Gordon says lessons from The Authoritarian Personality study and of recent history 'is that democracy is an extraordinarily fragile political form.' (Submitted by Peter Gordon)

"The question as to whether something like fascism could persist or re-emerge was something that concerned them deeply." 

Adorno and Frankel-Brunswick were both directly affected by Nazi Germany's antisemitism. Adorno's father, for example, was brutalized by the Gestapo. Both scholars were living in exile in southern California in the 1940s, part of a community of German émigrés living in and around a tiny neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades, which one writer once dubbed "Weimar on the Pacific."

The F-scale

The four scholars surveyed 2,000 people living in southern California in 1945 and 1946. 

"They want to figure out how do otherwise fairly normal individuals get drawn into radical-right authoritarian movements," said Gordon, but he warned that The Authoritarian Personality is often misunderstood.

"It's not a study of what causes fascism… it's a study of what they call the potentially fascist individual, by which they mean they want to figure out: what is it that makes someone susceptible to fascist propaganda?"

Children looking at Nazi propaganda from the Second World War at the Imperial War Museum in London, U.K., 1974. The top poster is an election poster for Adolf Hitler with the slogan 'Only Hitler.' (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

To answer that question they came up with questionnaires to determine where participants fell along four different scales: the antisemitism scale; the ethnocentrism scale; the political-economic conservatism scale; and the best-known, F-scale, to test for fascism. 

The original F-scale questionnaire included 77 questions to test for a person's susceptibility to fascist propaganda. Participants were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements. For example: "obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn" and "the businessman and the manufacturer are much more important to society than the artist and the professor."

A subset of the study participants also underwent in-depth interviews, informed by Freudian psychoanalysis and the belief that relationships between children on the one hand, and parents and authority figures on the other were key to the shaping of a person's personality. 

"Each of the questions was designed to help the researchers determine how much the subjects of the study were influenced by a kind of deep bias toward a world that is unchangeable," said Kathy Kiloh, associate professor at OCAD University and the co-founder of The Association for Adorno Studies.

"Where the study is going here is the idea that we need to recognize that this reliance upon authority, it goes deep. It goes very deep."

Members of the Nazi German Women's Youth movement, 1935. (Keystone/Getty Images)

When the nearly 1,000-page study was published in 1950, it rocked the academic world. But it soon fell out of favour. Kiloh says The Authoritarian Personality was seen as "too dark," overly Freudian and simply not relevant for the times. 

During the post-war economic boom, democratic optimism ran high. "This book became one of merely historical interest because the scale was plotting something that people thought belonged purely to the past," said Gordon. 

Revival of the authoritarian personality

Donald Trump's entrance onto the political scene on June 16, 2015 was a turning point. That day he descended a golden escalator at Trump Towers in New York City and declared: "the American Dream is dead; I will bring it back" and announced he was running to be leader of the Republican party and president of the United States.

Matthew MacWilliams was shocked by what he saw.

"I watched Trump come down and then I listened to the speech and I said: that was an authoritarian speech," he said. "I've never heard anything like that in America."

MacWilliams wondered if Trump were "activating" authoritarians in his party. To find out, he conducted a poll of Republican primary voters and found that those with authoritarian leanings were much more likely to prefer Trump.  

"Even when you put in education and other big, big variables that should soak up all of the predictability of the variable," said MacWilliams, "and it didn't for any other candidate. Ted Cruz, nope. Marco Rubio, nope. It was Donald Trump."

'The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,' said Donald Trump during the announcement of his presidential candidacy on June 16, 2015. (Christopher Gregory/Getty Images)

MacWilliams wrote an op-ed arguing that Trump appealed to people with authoritarian tendencies in the party. The article went viral. It also triggered a backlash and MacWilliams received threats. 

"It sort of fits with that American exceptionalism that somehow we came across in our little boats and during that long voyage, we were washed of all authoritarianism. And the fact is, no, that didn't happen," said MacWilliams.

"The institutions and the politics aren't responding to the threat because they still think it can't happen here." 

The poll MacWilliams conducted — and the questions he asked to test for authoritarian leanings — drew on the intellectual history and tradition that infused The Authoritarian Personality. Although work on authoritarianism fell out of fashion in academic circles, a small group of scholars kept working to address the original study's methodological shortcomings and biases.

Testing for authoritarianism today

Rather than the long list in the original F-scale questionnaire, researchers today are asking four to eight simple questions, none of them directly about politics. They're parenting questions, designed to get a sense of a person's relationship with authority. The original F-scale questionnaire included several questions about parenting that are quite similar to the questions being asked by researchers today. 

These four questions have been asked around the world by MacWilliams and other scholars. 

F-scale used for parenting

People have different ideas about the ways that children should be raised. Here are four pairs of attributes that are considered:

  • Independence or Respect for Elders
  • Curiosity or Good Manners
  • Self-Reliance or Obedience
  • Being Considerate or Being Well-Behaved

"The thing about the questions [is] they have nothing to do with politics or political behaviour," said MacWilliams. "And that's what makes them so powerful. Because it isn't like I ask: do you think we need a strong leader to ignore the Constitution and Parliament? Yes, I do! Oh, you might be an authoritarian!... But we know it's out there. We can observe it. These questions are our filter for observing it. They aren't perfect, but they're really good at what they're doing." 

Of course, most parents value all eight attributes and encourage them in their children.

"What's interesting is what happens when you force people to make a choice to prioritize," said Jonathan Weiler, professor of global studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of Prius or Pick Up: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide.

"When people do prioritize, when they are forced to make a choice, the choices they make have an incredibly powerful relationship to their views about gay marriage, about race, about gender in society, about politics more broadly." 

Scholars like Jonathan Weiler and Matthew MacWilliams have found that about 25 per cent of the American population are on the non-authoritarian end of the spectrum, 35 per cent are somewhere in the middle and 30-35 per cent are on the authoritarian end of the scale.

Weiler says those numbers haven't changed much over the years. What has changed is the relationship between a person's worldview and their politics. Politics used to be about the role of the state and the size of government.

Now it's much more about feelings, according to Weiler.

'The era of rationality is over,' says Jonathan Weiler. ‘People, in general, are more motivated by their emotions and by social pressures … than most of us want to believe.' (Jonathan Weiler/Mariner Books)

A new, highly emotional partisan divide has opened up in this era of polarization and it's apparent in the evolution of how Americans answer the four parenting questions.

"When these questions were first being asked in 1992, there was a pretty even split among Democrats between those who answered these questions in an authoritarian direction and those who answered them in a non-authoritarian direction," he said.

But all of that had changed by 2020.

"People who identified as Democrat were far more likely to answer these parenting questions in a non-authoritarian way and people who identified as Republican were far more likely to answer these questions in an authoritarian way."

Frank Graves is president and founder of Ekos Research Associates and an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at Carleton University. He sees a similar pattern now playing out in Canadian politics. 

"What we're seeing is the centre is hollowed and what we're seeing is [an] increasingly more fragmented political landscape, where there is a place for you if you're a right-wing authoritarian," said Graves.

Graves has been asking the four parenting questions in polls in Canada and he is noticing that feelings on the authoritarian end of the scale have been morphing over the last two years of living during the pandemic.

Like the virus itself, "it seems that under a variety of pressures, this ordered populist outlook is also mutating," he said. Graves believes misinformation is playing a key role: "the individuals in this group exhibit almost zero trust for government, science, media."

"The space for thoughtful discussion is being hollowed out by social media forums that reward the loudest voice and the most extreme attitude," said Peter Gordon.

"All individuals have that potential to become stereotypical and to respond to the world in a stereotyped or rigid fashion and the ultimate warning of the book is that's what's going to destroy democracy." 

Guests in this episode:

Stuart Jeffries is a journalist and the author of Grand Hotel Abyss: the Lives of the Frankfurt School.  

Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University. He wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Authoritarian Personality, published in 2019, ahead of the study's 70th anniversary.

Kathy Kiloh is an associate professor at OCAD University in Toronto and co-founder of The Association for Adorno Studies.

Molly Worthen is associate professor in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Matthew MacWilliams is a scholar of American politics and political culture and the author of On Fascism: 12 Lessons From American History.

Jonathan Weiler is a professor of global studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the co-author of two books about political psychology and polarization in the United States, including Prius or Pick Up: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide. 

Frank Graves is the president and founder of Ekos Research Associates and an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at Carleton University.

*This episode was produced by Kristin Nelson. 

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THEODOR ADORNO STUDIES

ERIC EJ960330 
John Locke and the Myth of Race in America: Demythologizing the Paradoxes of the Enlightenment as Visited in the Present

The English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) is one of the most prominent figures in the development of liberal Anglo-American political thought. Locke's writings had a significant influence on the American Revolution and founding principles of the United States in fundamental ways. The author argues that Locke's influence is pervasive not only in American political ideology but also in the contradictions between stated ideals and institutions that have sustained inequality and oppression in a land that values equality and freedom. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno in their work on the Enlightenment note that every effort to rationalize the foundations of civil society also embedded those foundations in ideology and mythology. One of the myths that emerged out of the scientific revolution and effort to ground human progress in reason was the fiction of multiple races of humankind. This idea, while not uncommon in Anglo-European thought by the 19th century, became especially important in the United States in spite of the fact that it directly contradicts the ideology of equality stated in the founding documents. The author argues that this apparent contradiction reflects and is consistent with contradictions in Locke's attempt to logically ground the rationale for a civil society in self-evident laws of nature. The political thought of Locke is examined through his writings. Locke's personal life is also relevant as it set up the dialectic of his thought in relationship to the uneasy times in which he lived. Locke's political philosophy supported the rise of democratic institutions and basic principles of universal human rights and the character of just governments, while he was also a strong advocate for colonialism and early forms of entrepreneurial capitalism, including the formation of a colony based on slave labor. America had a special meaning for Locke as he worked through his arguments on the rationale for human advancement in economic and civic life. This study focuses on the inconsistencies in Locke's political thought and writings related to equality and inequality. The discussion begins with the impact of the Lockean tradition in relationship to the origin of Locke's ideas in his personal circumstances. As such, the analysis examines the intersection of liberalism with illiberalism, democracy, and concepts of race and racism. The conclusion cites historical examples of legal racial segregation and inequality in the United States with a call to better understand the logic of the past so that people can advance arguments for the ideals of liberal government in the future. (Contains 40 footnotes.)


EDUCATION AFTER AUSCHWITZ
THEODORE ADORNO






When Adorno had his appearances in the lecture hall or auditorium at Frankfurt
university in the 1960s not all of the students present found it a pleasure to
listen and taking notes mainly because they were teacher training students and
didn´t feel comfortable with two facts in the curriculum they were obliged to
follow: a) they weren´t allowed to merely concentrate on their core school
subjects (Fachstudium) and b) they had to pass an exam in philosophy and
could well meet Prof. Adorno in the exam room, being asked awkward question
about ontology, history or epistemology. To give us an impression of what was
usual at the time I quote from a text in this collection entitled “Philosophy
and Teachers”: “This test therefore should permit us to see whether those
candidates, who as teachers in secondary schools are burdened with a heavy
responsibility for the spiritual and material development of Germany, are
intellectuals, or, as Ibsen said more than eighty years ago, merely specialized
technicians (bloße Fachmenschen).” (21) To pass the Staatsexamen
was the conditio sine qua non in the teacher´s profession - the federal
state being - as a monopsonist - virtually the only source of employment on the
scondary level in the whole country, because for a German mind it was - and in
a major part still is - unquestionable that a teacher on the secondary level
not only has passed several university exams but also has to join the ranks and
files of the civil service (Beamte, Besoldungsgruppen). For
Adorno in particular and the subject of philosophy in general it was then quite
a privileged situation compared with today when as a lecturer in the subject of
philosophy you will hardly meet any student that has not signed up voluntarily
for your subject and for your class. This might explain why Suhrkamp Verlag,
Adorno´s main publisher, every now and then and on a regular basis threw new
paperback books written and compiled by Adorno on the market for an audience of
students that had manifestly a much larger catchment area than it would have
today. The book here in question was subsequently published by Columbia UP in
1998 comprising two different of such publications from the 1960s - Eingriffe.
Neun kritische Modelle, FfM 1963 (es 10) and Stichworte. Kritische Modelle
2, FfM 1969 (es 347) which together add up to some twenty essays by Adorno that
range from Television to Law Today and from Progress to the question ´What is
German?´. I cannot advice readers to take an overdose of Adorno by reading it
all and at once but to take their time and to pick and choose. I myself have
written the following text in German on chapter two (see under Reviews).


Reviewed Work(s): 
The Origin of Negative Dialectics by Theodor W. Adorno; Walter Benjamin; Frankfurt Institute; Susan Buck-Morss 
The Frankfurt School. The Critical Theories of Max Horkeimer and Theodor W. Adorno by Zoltan Tar; Michael Landman
 Gillian Rose History and Theory, Vol. 18, No. 1. (Feb., 1979), pp. 126-135



29
Jun
10
By criticalkabbalist
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Frankfurt School, kabbalah, marxism, Theodor Adorno, Tiqqun, Walter Benjami

For the critical thoughtist, Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969) is a guiding light. A secular Jewish marxist of the Frankfurt School, he proposed a negative critique of exisiting social conditions that must avoid the affirmative illusions of the present. Interesting then that in one of his key works, ‘Minima moralia: reflections on a damaged life’ he concluded in a tone clearly influenced – like his late friend Walter Benjamin – by Jewish religious conceptions, possibly even the notion of Tiqqun as the redemption of the broken world associated with Lurianic Kabbalah:

‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from self contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible, but beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.’


Introduction The Frankfurt School's relationship to Judaism ...

https://bamidbar-journal.org › Introduction-prt
Mar 24, 2015 — Adorno and Horkheimer's essay “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of ... of the Kabbalah profanes the secular absolute of historicism, ...
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Conversation
Ghost in the Machine
Intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon discusses the role of theology and secularization in the work of the Frankfurt School philosophers.
Nathan Goldman
March 16, 2021

Felix Nussbaum, The Wandering Jew, 1939. Excerpt from the cover of Migrants in the Profane. Courtesy of Yale University Press.

In the last fragment of his 1951 book Minima Moralia, one of the foundational texts of critical theory, Theodor Adorno provocatively recasts his own philosophical project in seemingly religious terms. “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” he writes in E.F.N. Jephcott’s translation, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” Soon, the theological language grows even more explicit: “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” Adorno did not present himself as a religious thinker, yet theological concepts flash up in his work at key moments.

In the spring of 2017, intellectual historian Peter E. Gordon delivered a series of lectures at Yale examining the fraught role of theology and secularization in Adorno’s work, as well as that of his friends and colleagues Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. In his talks, Gordon argued that these thinkers—all major figures in the Frankfurt School, a cohort of influential anti-capitalist German social theorists that emerged in the interwar period—reckon with and transform theological ideas in a variety of compelling ways. Late last year, he released a book adapted from these lectures, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization.

In some ways, this book concerned with exile—from its titular image to its interest in the lives of these theorists, all of whom were displaced from Germany during the rise of the Third Reich—marks a homecoming for Gordon. As a graduate student, he studied under the intellectual historian Martin Jay, whose 1973 book The Dialectical Imagination ignited American interest in the Frankfurt School. (Migrants in the Profane is dedicated to Jay.) Gordon’s own scholarly career, however, has been centrally engaged with the ideas of the philosopher Martin Heidegger; his first two books considered Heidegger’s relationships with the Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig and the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, respectively. His 2016 book Adorno and Existence, on Adorno’s generative critique of phenomenology and existentialism, served as Gordon’s bridge back to the Frankfurt School after “many years in the Heideggerian wilderness,” as he writes in the acknowledgments to Migrants in the Profane.

Through close, creative readings of Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno, Gordon’s latest book pursues these thinkers’ relationship to religious concepts and secularization, along with broader questions about their epoch and ours. “Does secularization mean the disappearance of religion or its transformation?” he asks in the book’s introduction. “In the modern era can religious concepts survive or are they irrevocably lost? Can religious concepts retain both their relevance and their validity in a secular age, or is the dissolution of religion a philosophical and political necessity if we are to think of ourselves as truly modern?”

I spoke with Gordon about these thinkers’ varied attempts to reckon with religion and secularization and the relationship between theology and social critique. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Nathan Goldman: How did you become interested in secularization?

Peter E. Gordon: Some years ago, I wrote a long review of [the philosopher] Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age. I have enormous admiration for Taylor, but I quarreled with his book quite a bit—and it was partly due to my quarrels that I felt moved to start developing my own thoughts on secularization. The concept interests me in part because it unites philosophical themes and themes in social theory. And I found it especially intriguing that it figures prominently, and in very complex ways, in the writings of some members of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists—Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno.

In fact, Adorno suggests that in order to properly understand what’s happened in the modern philosophical tradition, we need to attend to the way theological concepts have been transformed and secularized. For instance, he thinks that Martin Heidegger’s thought represents a kind of pseudo-theology without God. In his little polemical book The Jargon of Authenticity, he talks about the way existential motifs in postwar Germany [influenced in part by Heidegger’s earlier work] bear witness to a gesture of sanctification without a sanctifying factor—which is to say, there’s this aura of the sacred even though there’s no source of the sacred.

I’ve found a great deal of instruction in the philosophy of [second-generation Frankfurt School theorist] Jürgen Habermas. He has long had an interest in the problem of secularization, but more recently he’s turned in a far more decisive way to the question of how secular societies might continue to draw moral and political instruction from religion without sacrificing their commitments to a secular framework for democratic life. It’s that question that I find most intriguing.

NG: In your chapter on Walter Benjamin, you draw on this perplexing claim from the philosopher’s unfinished opus, The Arcades Project: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” You argue that “Benjamin conceived of his work as the secularized trace of theological ideas.” How do you understand the role of theology in Benjamin’s thinking? Where do you see the problems with his use of religious concepts?

PEG: In one of Benjamin’s last works, his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—one of his attempts to develop some kind of syncretism of Marxism and religion—he invoked the curious image of the chess-playing mechanical Turk, which was a contraption presented at the Viennese court by an engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen. The machine was a sham; it turned out there was someone hidden inside. Benjamin reads the device as an allegory for [the Marxist concept of] historical materialism. Like the chess-playing Turk, historical materialism is supposed to win all the time—which is to say, it’s supposed to offer an adequate explanation for developments in history. But Benjamin says it can’t do that unless it draws upon the energies and concepts of theology, particularly the concept of historical rupture, or what he calls “messianic time.” So Benjamin says, quite cleverly, that the person hidden within the so-called automaton, the chess-playing Turk, is like theology concealed within the inanimate apparatus of historical materialism. In other words, historical materialism can only win—it can only explain history—if it draws upon the hidden powers of theology.

My argument would be that this formulation founders in a kind of paradox. Historical materialism, after all, has to explain that the movements of history are due to the immanent contradictions of history itself. Benjamin's argument, however, is that historical materialism must appeal to an extra-historical force that bursts into history, as if from the outside. That violates what would seem to be the central principle of historical materialism. And I therefore find [Benjamin’s argument] curious, fascinating, intriguing—but not philosophically defensible.

NG: For you, Adorno succeeds where Benjamin fails in reconciling the sacred and the profane (and perhaps where Horkheimer never really attempts to reconcile them). How do you see the relationship between these attempts, and why does Adorno’s method take him further?

PEG: I think that Adorno proved somewhat more successful and that his position might hold greater promise. In a few places in his work, Adorno makes reference to the idea that theological concepts cannot persist in their original, robustly metaphysical form, and that they can only survive if they undergo what he calls “a migration into the secular,” or the profane. This is where I got the title of my book, capitalizing on Adorno’s metaphor and even applying it to the theorists themselves, describing them as “migrants in the profane.” Of course, that’s partly due to the fact that all three of them were touched by the history of fascism: Benjamin [fled Germany and ultimately] committed suicide, and Horkheimer and Adorno went into exile [in the United States], although they both returned to Germany after the war. But as I see it, the figure of migration is an important one not just for understanding their biographies, but also for understanding their thought. Adorno in particular takes up the theme of exile or what does not belong as a kind of philosopheme—a philosophical figure for what persists as the negative within any social whole.

To me, Adorno’s intriguing phrase about migration into the profane encapsulates his contribution to debates over secularization. It’s as if he means to say that any concept must pass through a trial of secularization. It can still remain, in some sense, philosophically effective, but it does undergo a kind of transformation. In my chapter on Adorno I explore that idea, and along the way I develop an almost fanciful comparison between Adorno’s negative dialectics and the philosophical gestures that we associate with negative theology [seeking knowledge of God subtractively, by means of what cannot be said about the divine]. I take Maimonides as my exemplar of the latter. Adorno and Maimonides both pursue the via negativa, prosecuting positive claims in order to arrive at a higher understanding. Maimonides negates predicates about God in order to arrive at a higher understanding of God. Adorno pursues the via negativa because the negative is a way of shattering the power of ideology—and therefore, negation becomes itself a path toward higher understanding. I explore that comparison as far as it goes—though in a crucial moment, the comparison breaks down: Adorno borrows the critical energies of negation from theology, but uses them without restraint, pursuing them even into the heart of the last remaining metaphysical concept—the concept of God—and dissolves that concept of its reality, too.

This, it seems to me, is the best way of understanding that famous phrase by Adorno at the very end of Minima Moralia, where he says that besides the demand that is placed upon thought, the reality or irreality of the concept of redemption hardly matters at all. He believes that the concept of redemption—which in his thinking doesn’t enjoy any robust, metaphysical status—serves purely negative or critical purposes.

NG: You’re careful to trouble attempts to categorize Adorno—who had a Jewish father and was affected by Nazi race laws, but didn’t consider himself Jewish—as a Jewish thinker. But you also draw out aspects of his relationship to Jewish thinking, including making a fascinating connection between Lurianic Kabbalah and the conclusion of Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics. How does that connection exhibit Adorno’s way of resolving the sacred into the profane?

PEG: Adorno was not deeply versed in Jewish mysticism, and I believe he absorbed what he knew of it almost exclusively through the instruction he received from Gershom Scholem [the scholar who founded the modern study of Kabbalah]. He and Scholem met in the 1920s, and regarded each other with some suspicion. Scholem seems to have really disliked Adorno—he even went so far as to suggest that Adorno’s first book on Kierkegaard had subtly plagiarized from Benjamin’s study of German baroque tragedy. They met again in New York, when Adorno had fled Europe and was living there, and once again, their relations were somewhat strained, but they kept up an intermittent correspondence and began to develop a kind of friendship, in part because they were both traumatized by Benjamin’s death. In the postwar years they became guardians of his flame and assumed an important role in collecting and publishing his letters from around the globe, and overseeing some of the earliest collected editions of his writings.

Now, Adorno and Scholem’s own correspondence is instructive because we can see both how different they are and how they came to share certain ideas, or pushed each other in interesting ways. Scholem often tried to encourage Adorno to recognize theological motifs in his own work. Adorno resisted these suggestions, but I think was prompted to take them seriously, and one can see how Scholem’s influence left its mark particularly in Adorno’s last great philosophical work, Negative Dialectics. In the conclusion to this book, Adorno describes the way mystical traditions in religion—he discusses both Judaism and Christianity—attend to this-worldly life: to immanence, not just transcendence. The mystical tradition has always understood that this-worldly existence must be the space in which we realize our hopes for redemption.

And this brings him to what I regard as the most pertinent argument concerning secularization. Adorno says the concept of God itself is, paradoxically, a concept of something that resists conceptualization. It’s the concept of something that doesn’t fit into immanent categories of understanding. And for Adorno, that concept of what does not fit—that concept of something that exceeds our rational grasp—needs to be mobilized and secularized into our own critical practice. He says that the concept of God has undergone a shift of terrain into the mundane realm, where it has become a postulate that we use in order to explode the false appearance of the world as a seamless whole. The world presents itself to us as if it is complete, rational, and justified, but we can use the theological concept of what does not fit as a postulate for our own critical practice in order to explode that false totality and expose the riffs or crevices within the world, the [marks] of negativity. So a theological concept, once it migrates into the profane, becomes an important guide for social criticism.

NG: I wonder whether we can learn anything from these thinkers about secular interest in religious practices in addition to concepts. Does Adorno’s absorption of religious concepts into the philosophical work of negation, or Benjamin’s attempt to produce what you call “the secularized trace of theological ideas,” teach us anything about what’s at play in religious rituals, when practiced despite the negation or abandonment of their transcendent content?

PEG: Judaism is rather distinctive in that it places such a great emphasis on religious practices, often to the exclusion of any great worry about belief commitments. If you go into any shul, the number of people there who will say they believe in God might be rather minimal, but they’re all there participating in observance. Interestingly, it seems any concern with halachic practice has now become secondary to one’s commitments to the State of Israel—today Spinoza might never have been expelled from the Jewish community for his identification of God with nature, but had he said one word against Zionism, the herem would have been pronounced again.

I do think Judaism raises a very intriguing question as to what can be learned philosophically from practices, or what they tell us about the contribution that religion might or might not be able to make to the wider world. Sociologists have long been interested in religious practices, and the ways communities use these practices to re-enact the character of the social bond itself, reconfirming what it is to be a member of the group. Emile Durkheim developed that theme in his study of Australian religious rites. Quite recently, Habermas has developed it as well: His view seems to be that there’s something very special about religious practices—that they nourish some understanding of values that transcend mundane life.

But I think we should be skeptical about the claim that religious communities sustain a privileged understanding of metaphysical categories. This relates to my disagreement with my colleague Martin Hägglund, who wrote a very interesting philosophical reflection on religion, the secular, and socialism called This Life. Hägglund insists that religion always directs our attention away from this world toward the afterlife, or eternal life. In my review of his book I pointed out that this doesn’t capture the way many religions think about this life. Judaism, again, seems to me a form of religious practice that can be detached from many metaphysical concerns—for example, whether there is an afterlife at all. I think most Jews today remain rather agnostic on that point. Even Maimonides said that the ultimate redemption of the world would involve the resurrection of the dead: One doesn’t go to heaven; the dead come back here.


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The Odd Couple

Vivian Liska







Vivian Liska is director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author most recently of German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife (Indiana University Press).

BOOKS

Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem Correspondence, 1939-1969
Edited by Asaf Angermann
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski and Paula Schwebel
Polity Press, 520 pages, $45

“A stellar hour of German-Jewish intellectual history.” This is how the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas describes the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, published in German in 2015, and now appearing for the first time in English.

In bringing a whole era to life, the epistolary dialogue continuously negotiates the proximity and distance of this “odd couple”: Adorno, a German philosopher of Jewish descent best known for his neo-Marxist, materialist aesthetic theory and social criticism, and Scholem, the German-born Israeli founder of the modern study of Kabbalah. After a jarring start, the more than two-hundred letters between them become more intimate, informed by an authentic respect of each other’s brilliance, a deepening interest in each other’s writing, and a finely tuned conversational style. Yet their relationship is punctuated by discord to the end.

The correspondence begins shortly after their first meeting in New York in 1938 and ends with Adorno’s death in 1969. It centers on their mutual friend Walter Benjamin, on the planning of a jointly edited volume of his letters and other writings, and on their achievements and failures in chasing Benjamin’s letters, dispersed to all corners of the world after his suicide in 1940 while fleeing Vichy France.

The correspondence also offers fresh insights into Adorno’s and Scholem’s shared ambivalence about other figures in their orbit like Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber. It includes occasionally outrageous comments, such as Adorno’s remarks about his “disdain” for Arendt, whom he calls “an old washer-woman.” Yet such cutting comments serve to enhance the mutual complicity between the two friends, and as a code to situate themselves within their shared intellectual landscape.







As their epistolary relationship unfolds, it becomes a fascinating testimony of an exchange of ideas between these two domineering and competitive personalities. Gradually, a common intellectual quest comes to light: an astute attention for what had been repressed by Enlightenment rationality gone awry. Writing after Auschwitz, Adorno and Scholem shared a sense that the Enlightenment—as well as the hopes and expectations attached to it—had proven to be a chimera: instead of bringing freedom and emancipation, it had relapsed into myth. For both, theology plays an important but not unambiguous role in their endeavor to counter this disastrous regression.

One senses just below the surface that the two correspondents’ core beliefs are at stake: the relationship between philosophy and religion, modernity and tradition, and the universal and the particular. Adorno suggests that metaphysical and theological truths can survive in the modern world only if they are secularized, only if they undergo what he calls “a migration into the profane.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that Adorno frequently expresses his admiration of Scholem’s studies into how the forces of Kabbalah intruded into secular history. In 1938, upon his first encounter with Scholem, Adorno reports to Benjamin that Scholem’s belief in the truth content of theology made him think of someone releasing a lifeboat, but then “swamping it with water and getting it to capsize” instead of saving “at least some of the freight: presumably transcendence.” Adorno adds that Scholem’s historical interpretations of the “‘explosions’ of Jewish mysticism” ignored the driving force of social processes. In his letters to Scholem, however, Adorno insists on the closeness of their standpoints. At times, he insists too much. Sentences starting with ingenious variations of “I’m sure you will agree…” become frequent.

Scholem’s idea that heretical mysticism prefigured and eventually transformed into the Enlightenment deeply resonated with Adorno’s premise of his own dialectical understanding of modernity. In one of the first letters of their correspondence, Adorno excitedly expresses the discovery of a common ground between his own philosophy and Scholem’s understanding of Jewish mysticism. It becomes increasingly clear that what Adorno hopes to find in Scholem’s thought is a Jewish version of what will become the core idea of his own theory developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer): that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth.”

“Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are true.”


At the same time, Scholem is reluctant to express his complicity with Adorno’s thinking, or even to fully disclose his own standpoint. In his answer to Adorno’s enthusiastic letter about the Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms, Scholem dismisses Adorno’s continuing request for additional explanations: “Now you want a commentary – what are you thinking? … I will guard myself against getting into hot water here. One credo that applies to my aphorisms is: every man for himself.”

Scholem, in keeping with the esotericism of his subject matter, hides behind witticisms and every so often keeps the answers to himself. Where Adorno recognizes an agreement at the core of their thought, Scholem more often than not feels the need to set himself apart.







In a lengthy letter responding to Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s magnum opus, Scholem remains too repelled by Adorno’s neo-Marxist terminology to submit to his flattering advances. The same reservations can be felt in Scholem’s response to Adorno’s request to have a look at his musical writings, which he regards as closely related to Scholem’s view of the relationship between mysticism, Enlightenment, and myth. Scholem shirks the issue and protests his ignorance in musical matters. When Adorno calls Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses and Aron “Jewish music,” Scholem replies that this very notion must be endowed with a perennial question mark. The form of Scholem’s rebuttals ranges from gentle jokes – often about the notorious obscurity of Adorno’s style – to pure provocation. “Who, may I ask,” Scholem writes in a letter from February 6, 1967, “is the author of the lovely line ‘Only thoughts which cannot understand themselves are true’? I presume I would approve if only I understood it.” The author of the line, as Adorno admits in his reply, is none other than himself.

Adorno once remarked to Benjamin that Scholem’s “very conception of mysticism … presents itself … as that same incursion into the profane with which he reproaches both of us.” Three decades later, when Adorno points to the convergence between his own dialectics and Scholem’s sympathies for redemptive transgression, Scholem mischievously borrows the weapons of the adversary to launch his dismissive reply: “It will appeal to your dialectical sensibility when I tell you that my sympathies extend not only to the heterodox but also to the orthodox… You know very well that I’m anything but an atheist.” In the same letter, Scholem rejects Adorno’s rapprochement of their ideas about the question of secularization: “While you are right to point out that I have said much about the secularization of mysticism – and what is more, of religion,” Scholem writes, “it should also be noted that I see secularization not as something definitive.” For Scholem, against Adorno, the Jewish tradition’s modern decline was far from final.

One of the most explicit passages in the correspondence wrestles with what Habermas called “the destiny of the sacred after the Enlightenment.” Adorno writes: “It would seem to me that in the present day, the only possibility of salvaging sacred art and its philosophical truth-content lies in its unflinching migration into the profane.” Adorno adds: “You must also be inclined to this view.” Scholem is not.

Why does Scholem so stubbornly ward off Adorno’s attempts to align their thinking? Scholem’s resistance to submit to Adorno’s embrace might be explained most directly by his rejection of the Frankfurt School’s Marxist leanings, and by his instinct to guard against too great a proximity to someone who in his view could not participate in the renewal of Judaism as a lived reality. One senses in Scholem’s repeated withdrawal from Adorno’s admiring grip a suspicion (spiced with pride and resentment) that his Jewishly particularistic work might be appropriated for Adorno’s larger cause.

Beyond the content of their conversation, however, what makes their correspondence truly enchanting, emerges from the style in which they deal with their affinities and differences. One cannot help admire their art of conversing—their irony and perceptible pleasure in delivering the finest amalgams of German Geist and Jewish wit. A splendid example is one of Scholem’s letters announcing his arrival in the spring of 1966 in Frankfurt, where he hopes to meet Adorno under a clear blue sky:




Please arrange with the dwellers of the Marxian heaven for the sun to shine on the 16th of March. That is, if you don’t maintain any diplomatic relations with the other heavenly inhabitants. I would rather rely on the old angels, especially since I recently looked back over Marx’s pages on the Jewish Question, which, once again, almost made me vomit. The Talmud states that the keys to making it rain were not even entrusted to (Kafka’s?) angels. However, the same Talmud also states that, on the Day of Atonement, as the high priest in Jerusalem entered the holiest of holies, he implored God with particular vigor not to heed the prayers of the tourists (who had asked for good weather) – a purely materialist consideration in the interest of the conditions of agricultural production. So one has a choice between these Talmudic utterances about the weather and its masters.

The urge to check the Frankfurt weather conditions in March 1966 is irresistible, but one looks for this information in vain in Asaf Angermann’s rich annotations. Instead, one finds there one of the many gems that adorn this superbly edited book: the passage from the Babylonian Talmud to which Scholem refers (Ta’anit 2a).

The elegantly translated English edition of this correspondence now allows a wider readership to witness a dazzling dialogue carried out on the peaks of the German-Jewish landscape.

This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021


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The Odd Couple
Through their editorial work on the writings of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem forged an unlikely friendship.

By Peter E. Gordon
THE NATION
JUNE 9, 2016

LONG READ



Walter Benjamin’s Paris address book (1930s). Gersom Scholem’s address is the last in the list. From Walter Benjamin’s Archive. (Verso Books)

In February 1966, the historian Gershom Scholem dashed off a few lines to alert his friend Theodor Adorno of his travel plans. “I’ll arrive Wednesday in Frankfurt, where I’ll touch down at the Park Hotel,” he wrote. “Please arrange with the Marxist heavens, just in case you don’t maintain diplomatic relations with the resident of the other heaven, for sunshine on March 16th. For myself I prefer to rely on the old angel.”

BOOKS IN REVIEW
BRIEFWECHSEL, 1939–1969: “DER LIEBE GOTT WOHNT IM DETAIL.”
By Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem; Asaf Angermann, ed.
$Suhrkamp Verlag. 548 pp. ¤39.95

The collected correspondence between Scholem and Adorno, recently issued by the prestigious German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, doesn’t record the meteorological conditions for the middle of March 1966. Nor do we know whose deity might have proved more responsive. Men of extraordinary erudition and critical acumen, Scholem and Adorno could never truly overcome their philosophical and political differences, though in retrospect it’s clear that both men epitomized a shared style of Central European intelligence, fusing irony with utopian conviction, that emerged in the years before the midcentury catastrophe.

Born in 1897, Gershom (originally Gerhard) Scholem was raised in a well-acculturated German-Jewish family in Berlin. Early in life, he committed himself to the Zionist cause, and by 1923 he’d immigrated to Palestine, where he assumed a post at the newly established Hebrew University of Jerusalem and forged an entirely new field of historical inquiry into the esoteric and half-forgotten texts of the Kabbalah. Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in 1903 (the “Adorno” is from his mother’s Catholic Corsican side) and was raised in Frankfurt, where he divided his time between philosophy and music. Eventually, he would join intellectuals like Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal to develop the subtle style of neo-Marxist social philosophy known as “critical theory.” The two wouldn’t meet in person until 1938, at the New York home of the socialist theologian Paul Tillich, who had once served as Adorno’s academic adviser

The correspondents disagreed about many things. Scholem, despite his famously large ears, had no gift for music and couldn’t appreciate Adorno’s writings on musicology. He had even less patience for the Marxist orientation of the so-called Frankfurt School. Although Scholem’s older brother Werner had been a communist—he was killed at Buchenwald—Scholem himself tended to see historical materialism as a kind of counterreligion, offering the paradoxical belief that belief can play no independent role in the explanation of world history. But perhaps it was this difference in intellectual temperament that most drew Adorno and Scholem into an endless debate even while they remained on separate continents.

After the war, Adorno returned from his exile in the United States to a newly established professorship in Frankfurt, where he lectured at the Goethe University on social theory and philosophy, and even spoke occasionally on the radio on themes like “Education After Auschwitz,” becoming a gadfly against social conformity and helping to awaken the conscience of a new generation. Scholem remained faithful to the cause of a Jewish homeland and, through his early membership with Brit Shalom, helped promote the cause of Arab-Jewish binationalism. From our own perspective, and after nearly 50 years of occupation, the cause of Zionism that Scholem once admired has grown bellicose and deeply unfamiliar; it can be hard to recall a time when it inspired intellectuals of his caliber.

Even in Jerusalem, however, Scholem retained the habits of a European academic. From 1925 to 1965, he worked as professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University. Unlike Adorno, Scholem found the memory of the Holocaust so painful that for many years he refused all scholarly invitations from Germany. It was only in 1956, thanks to the delicate intercessions of Adorno and Horkheimer, that he agreed to speak at the university in Frankfurt.

Unlikely as their friendship may seem, Scholem and Adorno had one thing in common: They had both been friends of the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, though at first this connection did little to awaken warm feelings between the two. Scholem had known Benjamin since their Berlin days in the Youth Movement during World War I, and he feared that Adorno would lead his friend astray—from Judaism and toward Marxism. He also had little patience for the elaborations of Adorno’s dialectic. On reading Adorno’s early study of Kierkegaard, Scholem wrote to Benjamin that it “combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah.”

Despite this initial chill, the mutual suspicion between the two men soon gave way to a shared concern for the fate of their friend. After the Nazi invasion of France, Scholem and Adorno exchanged details on Benjamin’s flight southward from Paris and eventually to Portbou, the town on the Spanish border where he committed suicide. The awful event is reported in a letter dated October 8, 1940, sent by Adorno (then in New York) to Scholem (in Jerusalem). It stands among the earliest letters in their correspondence. Whatever their ideological differences, the tragedy of Benjamin’s death would loom over their friendship for the next three decades, and the bond between them would be forged from the shared experience of mourning. As Asaf Angermann notes in his editor’s afterword, the publication of this volume closes the circuit of correspondence among three of the most esteemed European intellectuals of the 20th century. The letters between Scholem and Benjamin span the years 1932 to 1940; those between Benjamin and Adorno, 1928 to 1940. Those between Adorno and Scholem cover a full three decades, from 1939 to 1969, and are the most extensive of the three collections—a dialogue between survivors.

* * *

Adorno and Scholem immediately understood their unique burden as custodians of Benjamin’s legacy. His writings were scattered everywhere, in newspapers and archives across Europe, some in journals that, in the midst of the war, were extremely hard to find. Many of their exchanges concern the difficult business of assembling the dispersed essays and manuscripts in preparation for their publication after the war. Scholem and Adorno also undertook the no less formidable task of assembling Benjamin’s correspondence. This presented special challenges, because many of those who possessed copies of his letters had either been killed during the war or had dispersed to the furthest corners of the globe. Where was Benjamin’s estranged wife Dora? Where was their son Stefan? Who had survived and who had perished? Did the survivors have copies of this manuscript or that letter—and if so, on which continent could they be found? The details of this editorial work would preoccupy Adorno and Scholem throughout their three decades of correspondence, and in reading their exchanges one can only feel gratitude for the care they took in securing Benjamin’s work a posthumous readership.

The difficulty of the work was compounded by the unreliability of the international post, particularly in wartime but also during the uncertain years of postwar recovery. Some of their letters were perhaps lost or could take over a month to find their way from Palestine to Los Angeles, where Adorno and his wife spent much of the 1940s. With the war’s conclusion and Adorno’s return to Frankfurt, the project assumed a more regular rhythm. Adorno was especially keen to secure a contract with the esteemed publisher Peter Suhrkamp, the guardian angel of West Germany’s rising intelligentsia. Troubled in matters of finances, Suhrkamp briefly withdrew from the project, only to shift course and extend his full support—news that Adorno passed along to Scholem with great relief.

In their correspondence, the memory of Benjamin would persist like a mediating force between extremes. Even today, Benjamin’s intellectual legacy has become the subject of divergent interpretations. Among its most controversial features is an explosive combination of religious and revolutionary commitment. Blending the languages of messianism and historical materialism, early essays like “Critique of Violence” or the “Theological-Political Fragment” and late works like the famous “theses” on history remain poised in indecision as to which authority they mean to serve. Often it seems as though Benjamin wished to overcome the distinction itself as a mere artifact of bourgeois ideology, liberal or social-democratic. Some of Benjamin’s more credulous readers still embrace the combination, presumably because the prospect of a genuinely emancipatory revolution in the postindustrial West has come to seem so improbable that they can justify it only as an irrational faith. Scholem himself, however, found the combination not just unconvincing but also dangerous. Worried by his friend’s flirtations with Marxism, Scholem accused Benjamin of a “self-deception” that would end in catastrophe if Benjamin ever took the final step of joining the German Communist Party. “You would not be the last but perhaps the most incomprehensible victim of the confusion between religion and politics,” Scholem warned, “the true relationship of which you could have been expected to bring out more clearly than anyone else.”

Adorno, too, disliked the populist militancy of Benjamin’s Marxism, in which he detected the unsavory influence of Bertolt Brecht. Nor did he harbor any illusions about the authoritarian bureaucracies of the Soviet bloc. But he could not share Scholem’s dismissive attitude toward dialectical materialism. Schooled in the left-Hegelian tradition, Adorno had an intellectual temperament that welded together two principles that others saw as irreconcilable: an unapologetic devotion to high-modernist aesthetics and an uncompromising critique of capitalist society. His reputation in the canon of Western Marxism remains controversial. The horrors of the 20th century shattered Adorno’s confidence in the narratives of dialectical progress that had once inspired Hegel and Marx, leaving him to face the grim task of crafting a philosophy “after Auschwitz.”

In his writings, Adorno’s emphasis shifted almost entirely from social transformation to social critique: The idea of revolution survives only as a conceptual counterweight to present despair. It is this stance, uncompromising in its stringency, that best explains his allegiance to the “negative,” his steadfast refusal to affirm the world as it is. The urgent task was not class struggle but the mind’s own efforts to resist its absorption into the social whole. Adorno continued to believe in the emancipatory promise of rational criticism, even as he entertained the paradox that reason had lost its critical force and had devolved into a mere instrument of domination. Even mass genocide, he believed, was not an exception to rationalized civilization but rather its culmination. Yet he never allowed himself to disregard the concrete fact of human suffering, even as he grappled with the most difficult questions of literature, art, or metaphysics. Whether he fastened his attention on symphonies by Mahler or lamented the debased offerings of the “culture industry,” his style of analysis remained dialectical, shuttling without resolution between negativity and glimpses, however compromised, of utopia.

* * *

Despite such differences, Adorno’s admiration for Scholem remains palpable throughout their correspondence. Respectful of and even a bit intimidated by Scholem’s erudition, Adorno never hesitated to send along his latest publication, inquiring discreetly in his next letter if Scholem had found time to read what he’d sent. Scholem’s opinion mattered a great deal to Adorno, though one cannot say with confidence that Adorno’s mattered quite as much to Scholem, whose excavations into the subterranean strata of Kabbalistic thought Adorno could only admire from afar, since he lacked the historical and philological knowledge to grasp their importance. Scholem, meanwhile, was a generous reader of Adorno’s work but unsparing in his criticism. The differences between them often revived their older dispute over the religious themes in Benjamin’s work. Upon receiving Adorno’s 1951 collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, Scholem expressed his gratitude and declared it “a remarkable document of negative theology”—a characterization that Adorno found unobjectionable—before adding wryly that it was “just as esoteric as the topic itself.”

In addition to being an accomplished musicologist, Adorno was a composer of some talent and a student of the Second Viennese School. In one letter, he urged Scholem to recognize the affinities between Schoenberg’s music and Jewish mysticism, though, Adorno averred, it “differs from synagogue music as much as Kafka differs from the rabbis.” In 1963, Adorno sent the latest volume of his musicological criticism, Quasi una Fantasia, which contained an essay he’d dedicated to Scholem, on Schoenberg’s unfinished, biblically themed opera Moses und Aron.

In a characteristic gesture of paradox, Adorno speculated that Schoenberg’s failure to complete the opera was revealing: In its very content, the opera was a meditation on its own impossibility. Moses, the tragic hero of Schoenberg’s libretto, is incapable of song; in defending the new religion of an unrepresentable God, he restricts himself to Sprechstimme (a spoken-voice style that Schoenberg had used before in Pierrot Lunaire), lest the sensuous beauty of the human voice transgress the laws of antisensuous monotheism. But Moses fails to inspire his people, and his brother Aron intervenes with signs and wonders. It is not just Moses who has failed, Adorno reasons, but Schoenberg himself: Though the composer imagines himself the new “Moses” of modern composition, he also relies on the very techniques of sensual representation that Moses condemns. Moses und Aron thus raised the question as to whether its unfinished quality was a virtue, even a necessity, and if religious art was at all viable in a profane world: “Is cultic music possible without a cult?” To Adorno, the answer was clear: The opera was no less a masterpiece in its failure but, much like Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, it was a work alienated from its time, an example of what Adorno called “the a priori impossibility of sacred art today.”

Scholem was grateful to Adorno for the dedication but doubtful about the essay’s argument. “Whether you can really deny the possibility of such music, I do not know,” he wrote. “For indeed it cannot be foreseen, where and in what form in our world the tradition of the sacred can find expression. That it is a priori impossible,” Scholem concluded, was something “I would not care to admit.” This dispute runs through their correspondence, with Adorno playing Moses (apodictic, uncompromising) to Scholem’s Aron (moderate, adaptive). In his reply, Adorno momentarily retracted his earlier verdict, admitting that his actual opinion is “more careful than came out in that text.” “An a priori No,” he wrote, lay far from his intentions. But “to me it would seem, and I would have thought you must tend to agree, that the only possibility for the rescue of sacred art, just as for its philosophical truth-content, would lie today in a ruthless migration into the profane.” For Adorno, it was inconceivable that religious values could survive, innocent and unblemished, in a disenchanted world. What Adorno had once called, in a letter to Benjamin, an “inverse theology” wouldn’t allow for any positive affirmation of religion lest its truth give way to ideological complacency. In an unredeemed world, one could glimpse the messianic light only in its photographic negative.

* * *

This paradoxical and rather oblique acknowledgment of religion’s critical promise allowed for moments of surprising agreement between the two men. In 1966, Adorno presented Scholem with a copy of Negative Dialectics, the newly published work he affectionately called his “fat child,” which contained the mature expression of his own philosophy. In response, Scholem confessed that he had nearly broken his head trying to read the book but would gamely offer an opinion. Never before, he said, had he encountered “a more chaste and guarded [verhaltene] defense of metaphysics.” He admired the attempt to wrest from Hegel’s dialectic a new species of “negative” criticism that did not lapse into “false affirmation.” But he couldn’t share Adorno’s continued faith in materialism, and he didn’t see how this materialism could be squared with the book’s closing appeal to metaphysics. He recognized that Adorno had abandoned the Marxist commitment to class struggle, but he still detected in Adorno’s work a materialist belief in the mediation of consciousness through social processes. To Scholem, this unshaken fragment of historical materialism played the role in Adorno’s philosophy of a deus ex machina. Adorno’s response betrays a startling readiness to surrender identifiably Marxist categories: “The salvation of metaphysics,” he wrote, “is in fact central to my intentions in Negative Dialectics.” But this didn’t preclude a commitment to materialism, which, Adorno insisted, was far from a worldview or a “fixed thing.” The path to materialism was “totally different from dogma” and did not prevent but actually guaranteed “an affinity with metaphysics, I might almost have said, theology.”

This counterintuitive suggestion—that materialism and theology might somehow converge—helps to explain why Adorno found a sympathetic reader in Scholem. In his studies of the Kabbalah, Scholem, too, joined the theological and secular categories in an unlikely union. It was the great conceit of his scholarship that messianism, the most volatile force in all of Jewish history, had never vanished but instead constantly reasserted itself in new and unfamiliar forms. Though it lay dormant in ancient visions of the divine chariot (or Merkabah), it gained increased theosophical definition in medieval writings like the Zohar; then, in the 16th-century texts of the Lurianic Kabbalah, it grew into a cosmic theory of redemption. Anarchic and unpredictable, it had inspired the 17th-century heresy of the false messiah, Sabbatai Sevi, and the 18th-century heretical movement of Jacob Frank, until the modernizing proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) and Jewish historical “science” (the Wissenschaft des Judentums) sought to suppress it once and for all.

But the assimilationists failed. The messianic impulse cloaked itself in secular garments only to burst out at pivotal moments of history, first in the antinomian violence of the French Revolution, and, much later, risked a political-theological explosion in secular Zionism itself. This was a boldly revisionist and rather romantic vision of the Jewish past; Scholem ignored the tradition of legal-rationalism that arguably lies at Judaism’s core. But it clearly held a philosophical and personal meaning for him that breached the rules of conventional historiography, as is evident in his “Ten Ahistorical Theses on the Kabbalah” (1958), in which he entertained the idea that his own historical research contributed to a hidden stream of “nihilistic messianism” coursing through Jewish history. In a confessional moment, he wrote to Adorno: “I am anything but an atheist.”

Alongside these bracing deliberations on philosophy and history, the correspondence also contains moments of humor. On December 22, 1963, Scholem sent Adorno news of an important discovery:


Dear Adorno,
As a Jewish Christmas-present, I can now, just in time, bestow upon you, as the result of my strenuous, protracted, and for the most part unsuccessful efforts, a truly authoritative recipe for the preparation of the world-renowned Jewish dish of Cholent [a thick stew, often made with beans, kept warm on the Sabbath]. I secured this through the mediation of a lady in the circles of the Israeli diplomatic service, who for her part inherited it from American-Jewish-Russian sources. I wish you bon appetit.
Yours,

G. Scholem


On January 22, 1964, Adorno wrote the following in response:

Dear Scholem,
Please accept my heartfelt, but, alas, belated thanks for your letter of 22 December and the Jewish Christmas present. Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to try it out, because my doctor, who is theologically uneducated, has slapped me with a diet which proscribes precisely this kind of delicacy. We can only hope that this taboo, which has indeed a venerable pre-history—one finds it already in Empedocles—will some day burst out of its mystical trappings into Enlightenment.

Most readers, I suspect, will not be familiar with “the venerable pre-history” of this dietary restriction. Happily, Asaf Angermann has annotated the correspondence with such care that he does not fail to explain even this detail. It alludes to a warning by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles: “Ah, you wretches, utter wretches! Keep your hands off the beans!”

* * *

Adorno and Scholem had the good humor to see through the pretensions of scholarly life. Yet even this exchange bears further scrutiny. The reference to a “Jewish Christmas-present” permits Scholem a playful rejoinder to a passage from Adorno’s 1955 essay on Benjamin, in which Adorno observed that the reader of Benjamin’s work was “bound to feel like the child who catches a glimpse of the lighted Christmas tree through a crack in the closed door.” Scholem, though well acquainted with Christmas trees from his own Berlin childhood, may have resented Adorno’s readiness to adopt a simile that robbed Benjamin’s work of its distinctively Jewish character. Adorno responded in kind: His allusion to Empedocles, citing Hellenism over Hebraism, suggests a reluctance to join Scholem in a homely ritual of Jewish cuisine.

The truth is that Adorno always bristled at communalism. Half-Jewish and half-Catholic by birth, he understood the poisonous consequences of anti-Semitic prejudice; but for that very reason, he couldn’t attach himself to any tribe narrower in circumference than all of humanity, and he extended his moral sympathies to nonhuman animals as well. Like so many refugee intellectuals of his generation who had personally experienced the sting of anti-Semitism, he sided instinctively with the State of Israel against its perceived enemies. In a letter written during the 1956 Suez crisis, he conveyed to Scholem his hopes for Israel’s safety. But it is perhaps no accident that he always found himself too tasked with academic responsibilities in Germany to accept Scholem’s invitations to Jerusalem. Whatever its historical longevity or political utility, ethnonationalism was for Adorno a surrender to the instincts of the horde, not a future ideal.

Scholem’s enduring passion for Zion distinguishes him from Adorno, who is celebrated by many today as the ideal cosmopolite, though others might say that his exacting aesthetic sensibility marks him as the consummate European provincial. Such differences in politics and artistic preference, however, did little to diminish their friendship, which glowed with increasing warmth as the years went by. They never made the transition from the Sie of formal German address to the more intimate du, but they confided to one another about family, gossiped about rivals, and served together as keepers of Benjamin’s flame. The publication of the Adorno-Scholem edition of Benjamin’s writings drew criticism from the far left and from East German Marxists, who accused the editors of intentionally obscuring the late author’s radicalism. Unusually sensitive to such attacks, Adorno wrote resentful letters to Scholem, asking for guidance about how they might respond. Scholem most often counseled restraint.

Such controversies show Adorno at his worst. In one letter, he refers to Hannah Arendt as an “old washer-woman.” (Arendt said no less terrible things about him.) In the late 1960s, Adorno found himself increasingly menaced by student radicals who viewed their aging professors as representatives of a hidebound tradition. He even feared that one revolutionary group was plotting to break into the Benjamin archive and abscond with his papers. To Adorno, these were signs not of revolution but of regression, a return to mythic violence. On April 29, 1969, he wrote to Scholem in despair, reporting on the most recent disruption: During his lecture just a few days earlier, three female students had bared their breasts, and he had fled the hall. In a moment of anguish, the philosopher described the scene to Scholem as Tohuwabohu—Hebrew for primordial chaos.


Peter E. Gordon  teaches philosophy and social theory at Harvard. His newest book is Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization.


SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html
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