
The Utopian Promise of Adorno’s ‘Open Thinking,’ Fifty Years On - kwindla
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/08/05/the-utopian-promise-of-adornos-open-thinking-fifty-years-on/
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voidhorse
I'm a big fan of Adorno's work. I think American/Anglo readers struggle with
it for two reasons:

1\. It's largely consumed in translation. Normally, this isn't so problematic,
but in addition to being incredibly philosophically dense, Adorno's work is
rhetorically and compositionally complex, rife with structures that are rather
difficult to translate, punning, particular sentence arrangements, etc.

2\. It's unashamedly steeped in tradition and assumes a _lot_ of knowledge of
the history of Western thought. Adorno's texts are rich with allusions that
require knowledge of philosophical and literary history, which can really
confound those engaged in a superficial or cursory reading--it's easy to miss
his point if you're not on your toes.

If you're curious, I recommend David Held's _Introduction to Critical Theory_
which does a great job of framing the work of the Frankfurt school. This
article also does quite a nice job of summarizing his work.

I also think Adorno's critique of Existentialism and Heideggerean philosophy
(mentioned in the article), (also contained in _Negative Dialectics_ )
actually serves as a great precis of key components of his thought.

~~~
pasabagi
Or, more cynically, people struggle with it because they have literally no
education in philosophy - so reading Adorno is sort of like reading Knuth
before you've written a single program.

~~~
voidhorse
I think this issue is also often coupled with another problem: a good portion
of people seem to harbor an assumption that one can simply comprehend any
philosophical work (or really, any work of the liberal arts, be it philosophy,
history, or literature) without perquisite knowledge.

Hand the average person a highly specialized work on mathematics, biology, or
computer science and they'll quickly explain to you that they lack the
prerequisite training or reading to understand it. Hand them a philosophical
tract or a novel of literary merit and they seem more likely to either attempt
to struggle through it, ignoring things they don't 'get' to come up with a
impoverished sense of the work, or they'll claim the language is too (and
unnecessarily) foreboding and dense, but not necessarily the subject matter--
there's no sense that the difficulty lies in lack of training, but rather in
something inherit in the work (conceived as a flaw or virtue). The onus is on
the work to be comprehensible, rather than on the reader to comprehend--yet
the obverse relation is oft upheld for texts in the sciences (in the rooms of
average opinion. Specialists, of course, feel quite differently).

There seems to be less general acknowledgement of the fact that dedication to
the tradition and assimilation of historical concepts is just as requisite in
the humanities as it is in the sciences.

It's odd how certain subjects are victim to the full fury of uninformed
opinion while others are immune. Ask anyone of his politics and he'll
(usually) soon explain his view and why its correct, all the while finding the
fact that he hasn't studied any political history, political science,
political economy, or political philosophy totally irrelevant. Ask the same
fellow his thoughts on a mathematical conjecture and he'll quickly scramble
his way out of the conversation. It probably comes back to the mild
religiosity our culture maintains about the sciences--its seems a profane
thing for mere laymen to opine on the word from on high. Meanwhile the things
of men are open to all cant and blasphemy.

~~~
pasabagi
Education systems are generally built around producing employable workers, so
they always have this tension between totally concrete, 'train them for the
job they'll have at the factory who founded the school', and totally abstract,
'maybe the job will change, so teach the foundations'.

The sad thing about this framework, is there's no obvious place for stuff
that's not only abstract, but perhaps orthogonal to the economic sphere. So
nobody gets taught philosophy. I think this lets everybody down, because with
stuff you learn at school, you generally either learn it's hard, or you learn
some things about it. With philosophy, you learn neither. So you think it's
easy, and you know nothing about it.

I guess there's also some compounding effects from the prestige that gets
attached to various subjects - I think philosophy is a weird case though,
since the better an academic or scientist is, the more likely they are to take
philosophy seriously.

The whole thing used to really bug me - but then, when people take philosophy
really seriously (which seems to me, the history of christianity - a lot of
people getting beaten to death over kind of dry philosophical trivia), it
generally leads to worse philosophy. So everybody making the subject a target
of shame and ridicule, making it out to be a ridiculous, worthless and
pretentious occupation - all this actually is to the benefit of good thinking,
in the end, since you won't get anybody philosophizing with ulterior motives.

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scottlocklin
"Quack's book has re-release." Adorno largely deserves to be forgotten.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality#Overall_criticism)

~~~
mlevental
hn loves to react this way to "continental" philosophy - latch on to one thing
that is intelligible to them and then extrapolate from that. eg I got into it
without someone about Marx earlier this week that had never read any Marx!

I mean nevermind that adorno is socially validated - ie his peers, those that
are actually qualified to assess the value of his work, respect him and his
arguments right? that doesn't matter because hackers are qualified for
anything right?

like let some metaphysics philosopher read a machine learning paper and
dismiss its claims because they're not ontologically sound (or something like
that) and you'll have all of hn rolling in tears at the sheer audacity of not
knowing calculus (or something), but do the inverse and you're a hero.

the truth is it takes a lot of effort to earnestly engage with both kinds of
material so lazy people in both groups use lazy heuristics. the way I see it
is you have two options if you want to be honest: either take up the mantle
and dig in (read adorno and around adorno) or shutup (quit pontificating just
to sound smart). both are completely tenable paths to being a responsible
intelligent person.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
A problem with that metaphor is that a machine learning paper refers to an
objective reality. If a philosopher came along and said 'I'm not sure how this
methodology works, but it is clearly optimized for the wrong metrics as
evidenced by your sales since you implemented it', the data scientist should
know to listen to the philosopher no matter how he came to that conclusion.

The equivalent in philosophy is, unfortunately, very different for someone
deeply engaged with philosophy and an educated layperson. To a layperson, the
measure of philosophy is something like the moral and mental well-being of the
philosopher. That is why the laity cares and most would say should care about
philosophy. Unfortunately, this is not the metric used by professional
philosophers. Social validation may be a more rigorous heuristic than moral
well-being, but that does not make it more relevant to what makes philosophy
itself relevant.

It seems likely to me that the reason laypeople so consistently criticize more
educated philosophers is that philosophy optimized for social validation is
not optimized for moral well-being. That is an alarm bell that should matter
to the intelligent philosopher, much as a 'but sales are down' warning should
matter to the intelligent data scientist.

~~~
goatlover
You could apply this criteria to mathematicians or historians, and it would be
just as unfair. Philosophy isn’t religion. How one should live is just one of
many areas a philosopher might be interested in. Are we to judge the work of
artists or writers by their well-being?

