Adorno’s father (Oscar
Wiesengrund) was of Jewish descent but had converted to Christianity. Though
assimilated to the Christian environment, he retained a Jewish sense of history
(with its notions of a non-mythological God, a chosen people, and the
traditional hermeneutic role of the Jewish outsider) that may have helped shape
his son’s eventual outlook. Adorno’s mother (Maria née Calvelli Adorno), an
accomplished musician, was Catholic. At her insistence, Adorno was baptized and
brought up a Catholic. He received a Catholic elementary education and
participated in many of the Church’s liturgical services. At about the age of
ten, however, he began taking instructions from a teacher (Reinhold Zickel) of
strong Protestant convictions, who not only introduced him to poetry and
literary criticism, but apparently also persuaded him to be confirmed and to
take religious instruction in Frankfurt’s Protestant Saint Catherine’s Church.
He would later be tempted to convert back to Catholicism, but after reading
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, gave up thinking that a medieval Catholic
theocracy might be the solution for a disjointed world.
After
finishing university studies in philosophy, literature, and music, Adorno wrote
a doctoral thesis criticizing Husserl’s phenomenology on grounds that it failed
to do what his Doktorvater (Hans Cornelius) felt was necessary, namely, the
freeing of science from all dogmatic preconditions. He was clearly moving away
from any positive religious philosophy that would posit meaning as given prior
to investigation. Under the direction of the Christian theologian, Paul
Tillich, he presented a Habilitationschrift on Kierkegaard, in which, while
praising the Danish theologian for his refusal to accommodate his religious
convictions to bourgeois society, he also strongly criticized his “monotheistic
disguise of myth” and his absurdist vindication of sacrifice (such as, in the
case of the crucified Christ, would magically reconcile civilization and
nature). It has been suggested that this was Adorno’s way of bidding farewell
to Christianity and distancing his own ideas from its beliefs. Even while
concentrating on his socio-political concerns of the Frankfurt Institute, he
would remain deeply interested in, and respectful of, religion. But for his
personal religion, he would increasingly look, as a “man of the mountains,” to
the realm of nature where, along with “all the unconscious things around him,”
he could best experience himself as a “heavy piece of fruit” on “the tree that
is God.”
Enlightenment
had aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.
But in the attempt to control nature, and make progress at any cost,
rationality was reduced to instrumental reason and the “whole enlightened
earth” became radiant with triumphant calamity, climaxing in the horror of
Auschwitz. Although Nazi anti–Semitism claimed to disregard religion on the
assumption that people no longer cared about eternal salvation, religious tradition
remained deeply embedded in the party’s racist ideology.
While
the moment of truth in religion had been debarred in the alliance between
enlightenment and power, its reified forms (e.g., unchanneled yearning and
zealotry) had been conserved and was eventually exploited by the fascists. It
is imperative upon religion also, therefore, to try to rearrange its thinking
and action so that nothing similar to Auschwitz will ever happen again. This
cannot be done by trying to exploit the crisis of reason through substituting
questions about the need of religion (e.g., obligations) for concern about its
truth. For the religious origin of anti–Semitism can be located precisely in
the bad conscience of those Christians who felt obliged to confirm
their eternal salvation by the worldly ruin of those (e.g., Jews) who refused
to make the murky sacrifice of reason required by the Christian attempt to
reconcile nature and the supernatural in the death of the God-man, Jesus. Nor
will it help to concoct demythologized, Existentialist or Romantic, versions of
fideism that reduce faith to an irrational feeling. Accepted for anything other
than its own truth content, religion undermines itself and evaporates into pure
symbolism. What religion needs is not less, but more reasoning — not to
rationalize irrational dogmas or to defend a turn toward transcendence as a
screen for societal hopelessness, but to think critically about what, in the
face of modern history and science, the existence of God, as that which is
absolutely other than what this world appears to be, can possibly mean.
What are your personal thoughts on the subject?
Sources
Adorno,
Theodor W. “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” In Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After
Auschwitz, edited by Rolf Tiedemann; translated by Rodney Livingstone and
others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 391–426.
_____. Kierkegaard: Construction of the
Aesthetic. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989.
_____.
Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2000.
_____.
“Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft.” In Frankfurter Hefte 13/6 ( June):
392–402; 484– 498. Adorno’s contribution to the first part of this discussion
was also published in Adorno, Theodor W., Stichworte, Kritische Modelle 2.
Frankfurt, 1969, and has been translated as “Reason and Revelation” and
published in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 135–42.
Jäger,
Lorenz. Adorno: A Political Biography. Translated by Stewart Spencer. New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
Küng,
Hans. Does God Exist? Translated by Edward Quinn. Garden City, NY: Doubleday
and Company, Inc., 1980. 323–39; 489–91.
Siebert,
Rudolf J. The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. Berlin, New
York, and Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers, 1985. See esp. 156–64.
Zuidervaart,
Lambert. “Theodor W. Adorno.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://plato. stanford.edu/. 1–20.
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