BHA: Delivered up to the world

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Reading Simon Jarvis on *Adorno*, I had occasion to re-read the 'Finale'
of Adorno's masterpiece, *Minima Moralia*, on 'the standpoint of
redemption', written in 1947, and was struck by how pertinent this psalm
to philosophy seems to Bhaskar's religious turn in our own dark times.
(Adorno is Bhaskar's favourite marxist thinker). I think Bhaskar has
pretty well marched to its tune right up to the point where 'thought
denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional', i.e. the
absolute, and so is 'delivered up to the world' (in his case, bluntly
stated, the dominant political and religious outlooks of the day -
liberalism and New Age.) But what a marvellously reconciliatory last
sentence for us critical realists at this time!

Here is the text of the 'Finale', broken up into 'verses', and with
'poor' substituted for 'indigent' in the translation by Jephcott.

*****
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of
despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present
themselves 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 poor and distorted as
it will appear one day in the messianic light.

To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from
felt contact with its objects - this alone is the task of thought.

It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls
imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity,
once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its oppositve.

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 poverty which
it seeks to escape.

The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of
the unconditional, the more unsconsciously, 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.

****

So: get on with it!!

Mervyn

--
Mervyn Hartwig
13 Spenser Road
Herne Hill
London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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