The ambitious
projects
of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn.
Adorno-Jargon-of-Authenticity
THE Jargon
OF Authenticity
THEODOR W. ADORNO
? ? THE Jargon OF
TRANSLATED BY
Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS Evanston 1973
? Copyright @. I973)by Northwestern University Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 72-96701 vISBN 0-8101-0407-5
Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved
The Jargon of Authenticity was originally published in German under the title Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie. (C) Suhrkamp Verlag, Frank- furt am Main, 1964
Knut Tarnowski is an instructor in comparative litera- ture at the University of Massachusetts.
Frederic Will is professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts.
? CONTENTS
vii Foreword, by Trent Schroyer xix Author's Note
The Jargon of Authenticity
3
FOREWORD
ONCE IS NOW MOMENT OF ITS REALIZATION HAS BEEN
MISSED.
Theodor W. Adorno
Existentialism has been de- scribed by Paul Tillich as "an over one hundred year old movement of rebellion against the dehumanization of man in industrial society. " 1 But this rebellion has been viewed as emerging because the solutions pro- posed by Hegel and Marx proved ineffective for over- coming the fact of alienation. 2 Thus Kierkegaard, in rejecting Hegel's immanentism ot Reason in history simply tried to restore the irreducibility of human sub- jectivity. For Kierkegaard the suffering of the individ-
ual is not justified in a panlogism of history.
The Jargon of Authenticity is Theodor W. Adorno's
1. Paul Tillich, "Existentialist Philosophy," The Journal of the History of Ideas, V (Jan. , I944), 44 70.
2. F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Pre- dicament (New York, I958), p. I 2 .
vi i
PHILOSOPHY WHICH SEEMED OUTMODED ALIVE BECAUSE THE
critique of the ideology of German existentialism. As a member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory,3 Adorno's critique is a Hegelian-Marxist response to the existentialist rejection of critical reason. Although this analysis focuses upon twentieth-century German ex- istentialism, especially its post-World War II diffusion, the basic concern is its notion of subjectivity. That is, Adorno's critique is itself an attempt to transcend and include in the perspective of critical reason the truth of the existentialist concern for the fundamentalness of human subjectivity. In this sense Adorno's analysis parallels that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who in the introduc- tion to the Critique of Dialectical Reason argues that, correctly understood, existentialism is a moment of dialectical, or critical, reason. 4
However, Adorno's intent goes beyond a counter- critique of existentialism and aspires to be a critique of the ideology inherent in its German formulations.
Adorno not only wants to salvage the notion of sub- jectivity from the idealistic tendency of existentialism, a concern he shares with Sartre, but he also wants to show that this theory has become a mystification of the actual processes of domination. In this way Adorno's critique is within the tradition of critical theory's cri- tique of ideology. The intent of critical theory is to re-
3. The Frankfurt school is best known by its leading mem bers, among whom are Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jiirgen Habermas. However, these are only the better-known members of a tradition of critical theory that has now spanned two generations. An excellent intellec tual history of this highly important and little understood com- munity of radical scholars has just been published by Martin Jay under the title of The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, I 973 ) .
4. Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York, I963 )?
? viii
construct the generation of historical forms of con- sciousness in order to demonstrate how they misrepre- sent actual social relations and thereby justify histori- cal forms of domination. In this way dialectical reason is actualized by critical theorists who, in their reflective critiques of the basic categories of historical con- sciousness, seek to reconcile men and women to the actuality of their historical possibilities. So conceived, critical theory is a theoretical moment of the "class struggle. "
However, the later Frankfurt school no longer as- sumed that the categories of Marx's critique of political economy were adequate for the critique of late in- dustrial society (Le. , both "capitalisms" and "social- isms"). It was precisely the failure of Marx's historical agent of change, the proletariat, to become a class-for- itself that stimulated the Frankfurt school's analyses of the ideol? gical reifications that blocked human lib- eration. Their concern for the growth of false con- sciousness generated by the "culture industry" and the increased integration, and yet atomization, of persons in the industrial order resulted in a series of critical analyses of mass culture and ideological traditions, e. g. , authoritarian social forms, the legacy of the En- lightenment's notion of Reason, etc. " In the absence of a decisive agent of social change, and in the midst of what Marcuse termed a "one-dimensional society," the basic interest of the Frankfurt school was to restore the actuality of critical rationality. Indeed, their refusal to affirm "mechanical Marxism" or utopian hopes for
5. Some of these studies are now available in English, such as M. Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of En- lightenment (New York, 1972); Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York, 1 972).
ix
liberation is perhaps evidence of their consistency in staying within the limits of negative critique. For them, only in the negation of pseudo-integrations and resolu- tions was emancipatory action clearly possible. Hence, the Frankfurt school became a tradition of revolution- ary theorists who, in the absence of the objective pos- sibilities for the transcendence of industrial domina- tion, attempted to uphold the ideals of critical reason that anticipated the emancipation of mankind from the unnecessary power constraints of nature and his-
tory. In this way their work is basically a critique of the reifications that conceal the truth of critical reason. Since "reification" is for them "a forgetting," 6 their work is essentially a remembrance, from the historical setting of the mid-twentieth century, of the notion of critical reason.
Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity continues the critique of existentialism that had always been an issue for Frankfurt theorists. 7 The continuity of this critique can be shown by Adorno's 1939 essay "On Kierke- gaard's Doctrine of Love," which anticipates and is assumed by this book. s Adorno shows that Kierke- gaard's notion of love transcended human differences, happiness, and even historical morality itself. The
6. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
7. Perhaps the earliest statement of this concern is Adorno's Habilitationsarbeit ( I 933), which was published as Kierke gaard: Konstruktion des Aesthetischen (Frankfurt, I965). But the essay by Herbert Marcuse, "Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Etre et le neant," Philosophy and Phe- nomonological Research VII, no. 3 (March, I948), is one of the most important critiques of existentialism in the Frank- furt tradition.
8. Zeitsc hnft fur Sozialforschung, VIII ( I939), 4I3 29. x
most remote neighbor was to be affirmed as much as the most intimate friend; "preference" was to be over- come, and love as agape was to be experienced in a radical inwardness that transcended the natural incli- nations of eros. Adorno argues that this love's extreme inwardness conceived of itself as its own ground. Hence, while Kierkegaard's doctrine of love aimed at overcoming the reifications of historical context, it actually became, Adorno claims, a reification that could not be actualized. In oppressing both natural drives and the right of the mind to question, radical in- wardness loses love's power of reconciling the antag- onism between natural instincts and socially formed selves. In abstract inward love, both historical need and happiness are effectively denied. The real object of this love's "desire" is redemption-which becomes the ultimate reality sought.
Adorno shows that this radical Christian inward- ness evades the actuality of secular injustice and in- equality. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard is more deeply aware of the transformation of the person in the bour- geois epoch than his contemporaries or his later Ger- man existentialist followers. That is, he recognized the mechanisms of industrialization that force men into alienated social patterns and reified communica- tions. But this insight only confirmed Kierkegaard's sense that the progress of civilization was the history of advancing decay and further inclined him to the hatred of "leveling" mechanisms and the rejection of the motives of the bourgeois epoch. Only in the radical inwardness of Christian love, in the leap of faith that suspends the ethical, is it possible to hope for eternality, for redemption.
But Adorno's central point is that Kierkegaard's xi
radical inwardness has lost the dialectical mediation of subject and object-which was the achievement of Hegel's critical philosophy. That is, the constitutive presuppositions of human subjectivity must themselves be dialectically related to the historical context in which determinate subjects are formed. Failure to so relate the subject and object of histOrically situated knowledge results in the fallacy 9? "ob; j
the reduction of subjectivIty to 'the in-it-selfness of facts (e. g. , positivism) or the innate principles of mind (the idealistic philosophy of the identity of reason and mind). Both forms of objectivism are the loss of criti- cal (dialectical) reason. Only the tradition of reflec- tive critique conceived of human subjectivity in a way that did not reduce it to the determinateness of natural facts or absorb it into the spiritual principles of abso- lute idealism. Kierkegaard's radical inwardness be- comes an idealistic objectivism by failing to compre- hend subjectivity as a historical category.
Dialecticaly conceived "subjectivity" is historically fonned and yet not reducible to historical determina- tions; historical subjectivity is reconstructed from the framework of reflective critique in that the limits of constitutive synthesis establish the range of possible experience. Only in such a reflective reconstruction of the genesis of subjectivity is it possible to distinguish between real possibilities and those modes of appear- ance that are but abstract i1Iusions, e. g. , existen- tialism's transcendence of historical domination. -So conceived, the dialectical notion of subjectivity is a fundamental category of critical reason. In reflective reconstructions of self-formation processes, it is pos- sible to show the p! ? eudo-necessity of socially unneces- sary motives and to thereby promote a reversal of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? xii
sciousness that can dissolve the causality of these objective illusions. 9
In The Jargon at Authenticity. Adorno applies the method of immanent criticism to contemporary Ger- man existentialists ? Buber, Jaspers, Heidegger, etc. ). His basic thesis is that after World War II this philosophical perspective became an ideological mysti- fication of human domination-while pretending to be a critique of alienation. Use of existentialistic terms became, Adorno argues , a j argon : a mode of magical expression which Walter Benjamin called an "aura. " In the aura of existentialism the historical need for meaning and liberation was expressed, but in a way that mystified the actual relation between language and its objective content. Adorno's critique focuses on the jargon's incapacity to express the relation between language and truth, in that it breaks the dialectic of language by making the intended object appear present by the idealization inherent in the word itself. The jargon, therefore, falls into an objectivism that con- ceals the difference between philosophical reflection and the in-itselfness of the object of reflection. Such objectivism loses the intent of reflection to maintain a
self-consciousness of the mediation of fact through the thinking subject. Consequently, in the jargon objective consciousness is compressed into self-experience, and an idealism results.
9. The methodological ideal of critical theory has been given a contemporary restatement in Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 197I), and Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973). The continuity of the tradition of critical theory has been argued by Trent Schroyer, The Criti- que of Domination (New York, 1973).
? xi i i
But the societal result of this idealistic tendency is that the jargon shares with modern advertising the ideological circularity of pretending to make present, in pure expressivity, an idealized form that is devoid of content; or, alternatively, just as the mass media can create a presence whose aura makes the spectator seem to experience a nonexistent actuality, so the jargon pre- sents a gesture of autonomy without content. Adorno's analysis here continues Marx's analysis of the fetish- ism of commodities, in that the symbolisms of the jargon do not represent actual social relations but rather symbolize only the relations between abstract concepts. Lost in the fetishisms of the jargon is the actuality of the historical development of human con- sciousness. That the subject itself is formed, and de- formed, by the objective configuration of institutions is forgotten, and thus reified, in the jargon's pathos of archaic primalness. Consequently, there is a loss of the objective context of human society and an idealistic compression of all historical consciousness into the sphere of self-experience. For example, Adorno cites Martin Buber's I and Thou and Paul Tillich's stress that religiosity is an end in itself, as instances of the shift to subjectivity as an in-it-selfness. In both cases the words are referred to the immediacy of life, to at- titudinal and qualitative aspects of self-experience. One needs only to be a believer; the objective content of belief has, been eclipsed in the subjectivization of objective content. To be a Christian seems to be a personal question-independent from the historical divinity of Christ. Without necessarily intending to do so, this extreme subjectivity transforms existentialistic language into a mystification of the objective con- straints that block the autonomy and spontaneity of the historical subject.
? ? ? xiv
Hegel proclaimed philosophy a "homecoming" that critically reconciled objective discord and subjective consciousness. His intent was to maintain a meaning- ful totality by the reflective mediations of critical rea- son. Reflection had as its aim the critique of abstrac- tions, or in Marxian terms, of reifications. In this way Marx's work attempted to demonstrate the nonequiva-
lence of exchange in the capitalist economy-thereby restoring to human consciousness a critical mediation of economic exploitation.
Adorno implies that contemporary German ex- istentialism began from a high? r level of capitalist development, in which the SOC1QGultural antagonisms ar? -. ! u_ c ihari e? conomic_? ? '. El9Jtation and? ? -
into Therefore, the haste with which the existentialists and their jargon attempt to achieve a reconciliation, irregardless of the objective processes of alienation which block meaning and autonomy, indicated only their awareness of the depth of the need. The resulting movement to a radical in- wardness and its expressions of authenticity, freedom, etc. , is an attempt to actualize these ideals outside of the objective social context: to fulfill heroic cultural models independent of the society. Behind these empty claims for freedom the socioeconomic processes of ad- vanced capitalist integration continue, intenSifying the dependence of all persons upon large organizational units for employment and welfare. The jargon's "bless-
ings" conceal this objective context of unfreedom, and in the name of critical reflection the jargon joins hands with modern advertising in celebrating the meaningful- ness of immediate experience.
Hence for Adorno, German existentialism and re- lated genres, such as neoromantic lyric poetry (e. g. , Rilke), come to a head in a mythic jargon that re-
? ? xv
duces the dialectical relationship of reflective critique to the objective content and context of subjectivity. The result is an ideology of the simple in which the primal sense of pure words is elevated in a futile at- tempt to overcome the "alienation" that remains linked to the political-economic framework of society.
Adorno's reconstruction of Heidegger's philosophy attempts to show that it becomes an ontology that re- treats behind, rather than overcomes, the tradition of transcendental philosophy. In the universalization of transcendental subjectivity into Dasein, the empirical is totally lost and, as Adorno claims, an essence-mythol- ogy of Being emerges. This is exemplified in the claim that the primacy of Dasein is a realm beyond fact and essence and yet one which maintains itself as an identity. Whereas critical reason was able to show that maintenance of identity of consciousness presup- posed a dialectic of subjective and objective reciprocity which was unified only in the constitutive activity of concrete subjectivity itself, Heidegger's notion of Dasein as both ontic and ontological stops the dialec- ticity of conscious existence in an idealistic elevation of the absolute subject. To quote Adorno :
whatever praises itself for reaching behind the con- cepts of reflection-subject and object-in order to grasp something substantial, does nothing but reify the irresolvability of the concepts of reflection. It reifies the impossibility of reducing one into the other; into the in-itself (italics added) . 10
Adorno's thesis is that Heidegger's notion of self- ness remains a reified tributary of Husserl's concept of
10. The mature statement of the notion of critical reason has been recently translated as Negative Dialectik (New York, 1973).
? xvi
subject. This concept of subject, in attempting to over- come the pure possibility of the ontic, claims to be it- self concrete. Hence, Heidegger dogmatically proclaims his concept of existence as something in opposition to identity-while at the same time he "continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. " Hence, Adorno examines the notions of "Dasein," "au- thenticity," "death," "care," etc. , and shows that their use evades the issue of historical determinateness by means of a primary and absolute creative subject- which is, by definition, supposedly untouched by reifi- cation.
Hence, the aura of authenticity in Heidegger is that it names "nothing" ; the "1" remains formal and yet pretends that the word contains content in-itself. For Adorno, Heidegger's existentialism is a new Platonism which implies that authenticity comes in the complete disposal of the person over himself-as if there were no determination emerging from the objectivity of his- tory .
TRENT SCHROYER
Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research
February, 1973
x vi i
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author conceive d the Jar- gon of Authenticity as part of the Negative Dialectic. However, he finally excluded that text from the latter work not only because its size grew disproportionate to the other parts, but also because the elements of lin- guistic physiognomy and sociology no longer fitted properly with the rest of the plan. The resistance against intellectual division of labor requires that this division of labor should be reflected on and not merely
ignored. Certainly in intention and in theme the Jar- gon is philosophical. As long as philosophy was in line with its own nature, it also had content. However, in retreating to the ideal of its pure nature, philosophy cancels itself out. This thought was only developed in the book which was then still unfinished, while
xix
the Jargon proceeds accord:ing to this insight without, however, grounding it fully. Thus it was published earlier, as a k:ind of propaedeutic.
Insofar as the author has paid homage to the di- vision of labor, he has at the same time all the more rudely challenged this division. He might be accused of philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic seduction without employing the traditional manner of keeping the categories separate-or maybe even of discussing
them distinct from each other. Yet he would have to answer that a demand of this kind projects onto ob-
jects the desire for order which marks a classifying science, and which then proclaims that it is elevated by objects. The author, however, feels more inclined to give himself over to objects than to schematize like a schoolmaster-for the sake of an external standard: a standard which, questionably, has been brought to bear on the subject matter from the outside. This atti- tude determines itself by precisely the fact that the subject-matter elements of philosophy are intertwined. The common methodological ideal would break up this intimate unity. By means of such a unity of the subject matter, the unity of the author's own attempts should become all the more visible-for example, the unity of the author's philosophical essays with the essay, "Criticism of the Musician" from the Disso- nances. What is aesthetically perceived :in the bad form of language, and interpreted sociologically, is deduced from the untruth of the content which is posited with it : its implicit philosophy.
This makes for bad blood. Passages from Jaspers and idea blocks from Heidegger are treated on the same levels, and with that same linguistic attitude, which schoolmasters would probably reject with indig- nation. The text of the Jargon, however, contains xx
enough evidence, from a truly inexhaustible wealth, to show that those men write in the same manner which they despise in their lesser followers as a justi- fication of their own superiority. Their philosophemes show on what the jargon feeds, as well as its indirect suggestive force. The ambitious projects of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn. This spirit re- mained what it was and thus speaks in the jargon even today. Only the criticism of these philosophical projects can objectively determine the mendacity which echoes in the vulgar jargon. The physiognomy of the vulgar jargon leads into what discloses itself in
Heidegger.
It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes
the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line. But the ideology of the sub- lime no longer acknowledges itself without being dis- regarded.
The ambitious projects of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn. This spirit re- mained what it was and thus speaks in the jargon even today. Only the criticism of these philosophical projects can objectively determine the mendacity which echoes in the vulgar jargon. The physiognomy of the vulgar jargon leads into what discloses itself in
Heidegger.
It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes
the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line. But the ideology of the sub- lime no longer acknowledges itself without being dis- regarded. To show this fact might help to prevent criticism from stagnating in a vague and noncom- mittal suspicion of ideology, a suspicion which has itself fallen into ideology. Contemporary German ideology is careful not to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones. Ideology has shifted into language. Social and anthropological changes have brought about this shift, though without breaking the veil. The fact that such language is actually ideol- ogy, i. e. , societally necessary Schein, "appearance," can be shown from within it. This becomes obvious in the contradiction between its "how" and its "what. " In its objective impossibility the jargon reacts toward the imminent impossibility of language. Language gives itself over either to the market, to balderdash, or to the predominating vulgarity. On the other hand lan-
? ? xxi
guage shoves its way toward the judge's bench, en- velopes itself in judicial garb, and in that way asserts its privilege. The jargon is the happy synthesis which makes it explode.
Showing this has practical consequences. As irre- sistible as the jargon appears in present-day Germany, it is actually weak and Sickly. The fact that the jargon has become an ideology unto itself destroys this ideol- ogy as soon as this fact is recognized. If the jargon were finally to become silent in Germany, part of that would have been accomplished for which skepticism, itself prejudiced, is praised-prematurely and without justification. The interested parties who use the jargon as a means of power, or depend on their public image for the jargon's social-psychological effect, will never wean themselves from it. There are others who will be embarrassed by the jargon. Even followers who believe in authority will shy away from ridiculousness, as soon as they feel the fragile nature of that authority to which they look for support. The jargon is the histori- cally appropriate form of untruth in the Germany of the last years. For this reason one can discover a truth in the determinate negation of the jargon, a truth which refuses to be formulated in positive terms. Parts of the first sections were originally published in the third issue of the Neue Rundschau in 1963, and have been incorporated into the text.
June, 1967
xxii
THE Jargon
OF Authenticity
In the early twenties a number of people active in philosophy, sociology, and theology, planned a gathering. Most of them had shifted from one creed to another. Their common ground was an emphasis on a newly acquired religion, and not the religion itself. All of them were unsatisfied with the idealism which at that time still dominated the univer- sities. Philosophy swayed them to choose, through free- dom and autonomy, a positive theology such as had already appeared in Kierkegaard. However, they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth con- tent of revelation, than in conviction. To his slight annoyance, a friend, who was at that time attracted by
this circle, was not invited. He was-they intimated- not authentic enough. For he hesitated before Kierke- gaard's leap. He suspected that religion which is con- jured up out of autonomous thinking would subordi-
3
nate itself to the latter, and would negate itself as the absolute which, after all, in terms of its own conceptual nature, it wants to be. Those united together were anti- intellectual intellectuals. They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another. What they fought for on a spiritual and in- tellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the
teachin g of higher ideals ; as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees. Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out on the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, having dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical
thought had no objective foundation but was a sub- jective deviation. People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves- in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections -as if they didn't completely believe in themselves. Today, as then, they sense the danger of losing again what they call the concrete-of losing it to that ab-
straction of which they are suspicious, an abstraction which cannot be eradicated from concepts. They con- sider concretion to be promised in sacrifice, and first of all in intellectual sacrifice. Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones. "
This was long before the publication of Sein und Zeit. Throughout this work Heidegger employed "au- thenticity," in the context of an existential ontology,
? 4
as a specifically philosophical term. Thus in philosophy he molded that which the authentics strive for less theoretically; and in that way he won over to his side all those who had some vague reaction to that philos- ophy. Through him, denominational demands became dispensable. His book acquired its aura by describing the directions of the dark drives of the intelligentsia before 1933-directions which he described as full of insight, and which he revealed to be solidly coercive.
Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminLshed tbeo1. ocical resgnance can be heard to this very day. The theological addictions of these years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves up as the elite. Nevertheless, the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where-for temporary lack of any other available authority-its language resembles the Christian. Prior to any con- sideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommo-
dates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy-although it was that-but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil ex- presses itself as though it were salvation.
In Germany a jargon of authenticity is spoken- even more so, written. Its language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once-
? ? ? ? ? 5
sub-language as superior language. The jargon extends from philosophy and theology-not only of Protestant academies-to pedagogy, evening schools, and youth organizations, even to the elevated diction of the rep- resentatives of business and administration. While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its mes- sage automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words which are received as promptly as
Signals. "Authenticity" itself is not the most prominent of them. It is more an illumination of the ether in which the jargon flourishes, and the way of thinking which latently feeds it. For a beginning, terms like "existential," "in the decision," "commission," "appeal," "encounter," "genuine dialogue," "statement," "con- cern," will do for examples. Not a few nontermino- logical terms of similar cast could be added to this list. Some, like "concern," a term still innocently used by Benjamin and verified in Grimm's dictionary, have only taken on such changed coloring since getting into this "field of tension"-a term that is also an appro- priate example.
Thus the important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function in the jargon. Certainly not all its words are noble nouns. At times it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner
6
which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements. Neo- romantic poets who drank theirfill of the precious, like George Hofmannsthal, by no means wrote their prose in the jargon. However, many of their intermediaries- like Gundolf-did so. The words become terms of the jargon only through the constellation that they negate, through each one's gesture of uniquene'ss. The magic that the singular word has lost is procured for it by manipulations-of whatever kind. The transcendence
of the single word is a secondary one, one that is de- livered ready from the factory, a transcendence which is a changeling said to be the lost original. Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigid- ity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred cere- monial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. The ether is me- chanically sprayed, and atomistic words are dressed up without having been changed. Thus they become more important than the jargon's so-called system. The jargon-objectively speaking, a system-uses disor-
ganization as its principle of organization, the break- down of language into words in themselves. Many of them, in another linguistic constellation, can be used without a glance at the jargon: "statement," where it is used in its fullest sense, in epistemology, to desig- nate the sense of predicative judgments; "authentic" -already to be used with caution-even in an adjec- tival sense, where the essential is distinguished from the accidental; "inauthentic," where something broken is implied, an expression which is not immediately appropriate to what is expressed; "radio broadcasts of
? ? ? ? 7
traditionM music, music conceived in the categories of live performance, are grounded by the feeling of as if, of the inauthentic. " 1 "Inauthentic" in that way be- comes a "critical" term, in definite negation of some- thing merely phenomenal. However, the jargon ex- tracts authenticity, or its opposite, from every such transparent context. Of course one would never criti- cize a firm for using the word Auftrag (commission), when it has been assigned a commission. But possi- bilities of that sort remain narrow and abstract. Who- ever overstrains them is paying tribute to a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history.
Yet history does intrude on every word and with- holds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down. What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individ- ual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite for- mal : it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt
and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used. It takes under its own control the preconceptual, mimetic element in language-for the sake of effect connotations. "State- ment" thus wants to make believe that the existence of the speaker has communicated itself simultaneously
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepitor (Frankfurt, 1963) p. 218.
8
with his subject matter and has given the latter its dignity. The jargon makes it seem that without this surplus of the speaker the speech would already be in- authentic, that the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin. This formal element favors demagogic ends. Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes
over this task and devaluates thought. That the whole man should speak is authentic, comes from the core. Thus something occurs which the jargon itself stylizes as "to occur. " 2 Communication clicks and puts forth as truth what should instead be suspect by virtue of the prompt collective agreement. The tone of the jar- gon has something in it of the seriousness of the augurs, arbitrarily independent from their context or conceptual content, conspiring with whatever is sacred.
The fact that the words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean sug- gests the term "aura. " It is hardly an accident that Benjamin introduced the term at the same moment when, according to his own theory, what he under- stood by "aura" became impossible to experience. 3 As words that are sacred without sacred content, as frozen emanations, the terms of the jargon of authenticity
2. Later in the text Adorno refers to Heidegger's tenn Ereignis, which has been rendered as "event" in the standard translation of Being and Time. "To occur" our rendering of sioh ereignen, has been chosen for lack of an English verb corresponding to the noun "event. "
3. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Schriften I (Frankfurt, 1955), ''Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier- barkeit," p. 374. [English translation by Harry Zohn, in Il- luminations (New Y ork, 196 8 ) . ]
? 9
are products of the disintegration of the aura. The latter pairs itself with an attitude of not being bound and thus becomes available in the midst of the de- mythified world; or, as it might be put in paramilitary modern German, it becomes einsatzbereit, mobi- lized. The perpetual charge against reification, a charge which the jargon represents, is itself reified. It falls under Richard Wagner's definition of a theatrical effect as the result of an action without agent, a definition which was directed against bad art. Those who have run out of holy spirit speak with mechanical tongues. The secret which is suggested, and from the beginning is not there, is a public one. First one can subtract the misused Dostoevski from the expressionist formula "each man is selected," which can be found in a play by Paul Kornfeld-who was murdered by the Nazis. Then the formula is good only for the ideological self- satisfaction of a lower middle class which is threatened and humbled by societal development. The jargon de- rives its own bleSSing, that of primalness, from the fact that it has developed as little in actuality as in spirit. Nietzsche did not live long enough to grow sick at his stomach over the jargon of authenticity : in the
'twentieth century he is the German resentment phe- nomenon par excellence. Nietzsche's "something stinks" would find its first justification in the strange bathing ceremony of the hale life :
Sunday really begins on Saturday evening. When the tradesman straightens his shop, when the housewife has put the whole house into clean and shining condi- tion, and has even swept the street in front of the house and freed it from all the dirt which it has collected dur-
? 10
ing the week; when, finally, even the children are bathed; then the adults wash off the week's dust, scrub themselves thoroughly; and go to the fresh clothes which are lying ready for them : when all of that is ar- ranged, with rural lengthiness and care, then a deep warm feeling of resting settles down over the people:!
Expressions and situations, drawn from a no longer existent daily life, are forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some abso- lute which is kept silent out of reverence. While those who know better hesitate to appeal to revelation, they arrange, in their addiction to authority, for the ascen- sion of the word beyond the realm of the actual, con- ditioned, and contestable; while these same people, even in private, express the word as though a blessing from above were directly composed into that word. That supreme state which has to be thought, but which also refuses being thought, is mutilated by the jargon. The latter acts as if it had possessed this state "from the beginning of time," as it might run in the jargon. What philosophy aims at, the peculiar character of philosophy which makes representation essential to it, causes all its words to say more than each single one. This characteristic is exploited by the jargon. The transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of in- dividual words and propositional statements is attrib- uted to the words by the jargon, as their immutable possession, whereas this "more" is formed only by the mediation of the constellation. According to its ideal, philosophical language goes beyond what it says by
4 . Otto F rie d r ic h B ollnow, Neue Geborgenheit (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 205.
II
means of what it says in the development of a train of thought. Philosophical language transcends dialec- tically in that the contradiction between truth and thought becomes self-conscious and thus overcomes itself. The jargon takes over this transcendence de- structively and consigns it to its own chatter. What- ever more of meaning there is in the words than what they say has been secured for them once and for al as expression. The dialectic is broken off: the dialectic between word and thing as well as the dialectic, within language, between the individual words and their re- lations. Without judgment, without having been thought, the word is to leave its meaning behind. This is to institute the reality of the "more. " It is to scoff, without reason, at that mystical language speculation which the jargon, proud of its simplicity, is careful not to remember. The jargon obliterates the difference between this "more" for which language gropes, and the in-itself of this more. Hypocrisy thus becomes an a priori, and everyday language is spoken here and now as if it were the sacred one. A profane language
could only approach the sacred one by distancing itself from the sound of the holy, instead of by trying to imitate it. The jargon transgresses this rule blasphe- mously. When it dresses empirical words with aura, it exaggerates general concepts and ideas of philosophy
-as for instance the concept of being-so grossly that their conceptual essence, the mediation through the thinking subject, disappears completely under the var- nish. Then these terms lure us on as if they were the most concrete terms . Transcendence and concretion scintillate. Ambiguity is the medium of an attitude
? 12
toward language which is damned by its favorite phi- losophy. s
But the untruth indicts itself by becoming bom- bastic. After a long separation a certain person wrote that he was existentially secure; it took some reflection to realize that he meant he had been sufficiently taken care of in regard to his finances . A center intended for international discussions-whatever they may be good for-is called the House of Encounters; the visible house, "firmly grounded in the earth," is turned into a sacred house through those gatherings-which are meant to be superior to discussions because they occur
among existing and living individuals, although these individuals might just as well be engaged in discussion, for as long as they do not commit suicide they could hardly do anything other than exist. One's relation to his fellow man should be important prior to all con- tent; for that purpose the jargon is satisfied with the shabby group-ethos of the youth movement, an indica- tion that nothing is reaching either beyond the nose of the speaker, or beyond the capacity of the person who has only lately begun to be called his "partner. " The j argon channels engagement into firm institutions and, furthermore, strengthens the most subaltern speakers in their self-esteem; they are already something be- cause someone speaks from within them, even when
that someone is nothing at all. The resonant directive
5. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 3d ed. (Halle, 1 931 ) , pp. 2 17 ff. [English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (New York, 1 962 ) . Sub- sequent page references from Being and Time will be to this translation. ]
? 13
of the jargon, that its thought should not be too strenu- ous, because otherwise it would offend the community, also becomes for these people the guarantee of a higher confirmation. This suppresses the fact that the lan- guage itself-through its generality and objectivity already negates the whole man, the particular speak- ing individual subject: the first price exacted by lan- guage is the essence of the individual. But through the appearance that the whole man, and not thought, speaks, the jargon pretends that, as a close-at-hand manner of communication, it is invulnerable to de- humanized mass communication-which is precisely what recommends it to everyone's enthusiastic accept- ance. Whoever stands behind his words, in the way in which these words pretend, is safe from any suspicion about what he is at that very moment about to do: speak for others in order to palm something off on them.
The word "statement" finally secures its alibi when "true" is connected to it. By means of its prestige it wants to endow the "for others" with the solidity of the in-itself. For glorified man, who himself not too long ago invented the term "death and glory squad," is the ground of being for the jargon as well as the ad- dressee of the statement; and it has become impossible to distinguish between the two. The attribute "valid" often sticks to "statement. " The reason for this ob- viously lies in the fact that the emphatic experience, which the word claims insistently, is no longer experi-
enced by those who favor this word for the claim it makes. A loudspeaker becomes necessary? "Statement" wants to announce that something which was said has
? ? come from the depth of the speaking subject; it is removed from the curse of surface communication. But at the same time communicative disorder disguises itself in the statement. Someone speaks and, thanks to the elevated term "statement," what he says is to be the sign of truth-as if men could not become caught up in untruth, as if they could not suffer martyrdom for plain nonsense.
OF Authenticity
THEODOR W. ADORNO
? ? THE Jargon OF
TRANSLATED BY
Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS Evanston 1973
? Copyright @. I973)by Northwestern University Press Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 72-96701 vISBN 0-8101-0407-5
Printed in the United States of America All rights reserved
The Jargon of Authenticity was originally published in German under the title Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie. (C) Suhrkamp Verlag, Frank- furt am Main, 1964
Knut Tarnowski is an instructor in comparative litera- ture at the University of Massachusetts.
Frederic Will is professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts.
? CONTENTS
vii Foreword, by Trent Schroyer xix Author's Note
The Jargon of Authenticity
3
FOREWORD
ONCE IS NOW MOMENT OF ITS REALIZATION HAS BEEN
MISSED.
Theodor W. Adorno
Existentialism has been de- scribed by Paul Tillich as "an over one hundred year old movement of rebellion against the dehumanization of man in industrial society. " 1 But this rebellion has been viewed as emerging because the solutions pro- posed by Hegel and Marx proved ineffective for over- coming the fact of alienation. 2 Thus Kierkegaard, in rejecting Hegel's immanentism ot Reason in history simply tried to restore the irreducibility of human sub- jectivity. For Kierkegaard the suffering of the individ-
ual is not justified in a panlogism of history.
The Jargon of Authenticity is Theodor W. Adorno's
1. Paul Tillich, "Existentialist Philosophy," The Journal of the History of Ideas, V (Jan. , I944), 44 70.
2. F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Pre- dicament (New York, I958), p. I 2 .
vi i
PHILOSOPHY WHICH SEEMED OUTMODED ALIVE BECAUSE THE
critique of the ideology of German existentialism. As a member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory,3 Adorno's critique is a Hegelian-Marxist response to the existentialist rejection of critical reason. Although this analysis focuses upon twentieth-century German ex- istentialism, especially its post-World War II diffusion, the basic concern is its notion of subjectivity. That is, Adorno's critique is itself an attempt to transcend and include in the perspective of critical reason the truth of the existentialist concern for the fundamentalness of human subjectivity. In this sense Adorno's analysis parallels that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who in the introduc- tion to the Critique of Dialectical Reason argues that, correctly understood, existentialism is a moment of dialectical, or critical, reason. 4
However, Adorno's intent goes beyond a counter- critique of existentialism and aspires to be a critique of the ideology inherent in its German formulations.
Adorno not only wants to salvage the notion of sub- jectivity from the idealistic tendency of existentialism, a concern he shares with Sartre, but he also wants to show that this theory has become a mystification of the actual processes of domination. In this way Adorno's critique is within the tradition of critical theory's cri- tique of ideology. The intent of critical theory is to re-
3. The Frankfurt school is best known by its leading mem bers, among whom are Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Jiirgen Habermas. However, these are only the better-known members of a tradition of critical theory that has now spanned two generations. An excellent intellec tual history of this highly important and little understood com- munity of radical scholars has just been published by Martin Jay under the title of The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, I 973 ) .
4. Jean Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York, I963 )?
? viii
construct the generation of historical forms of con- sciousness in order to demonstrate how they misrepre- sent actual social relations and thereby justify histori- cal forms of domination. In this way dialectical reason is actualized by critical theorists who, in their reflective critiques of the basic categories of historical con- sciousness, seek to reconcile men and women to the actuality of their historical possibilities. So conceived, critical theory is a theoretical moment of the "class struggle. "
However, the later Frankfurt school no longer as- sumed that the categories of Marx's critique of political economy were adequate for the critique of late in- dustrial society (Le. , both "capitalisms" and "social- isms"). It was precisely the failure of Marx's historical agent of change, the proletariat, to become a class-for- itself that stimulated the Frankfurt school's analyses of the ideol? gical reifications that blocked human lib- eration. Their concern for the growth of false con- sciousness generated by the "culture industry" and the increased integration, and yet atomization, of persons in the industrial order resulted in a series of critical analyses of mass culture and ideological traditions, e. g. , authoritarian social forms, the legacy of the En- lightenment's notion of Reason, etc. " In the absence of a decisive agent of social change, and in the midst of what Marcuse termed a "one-dimensional society," the basic interest of the Frankfurt school was to restore the actuality of critical rationality. Indeed, their refusal to affirm "mechanical Marxism" or utopian hopes for
5. Some of these studies are now available in English, such as M. Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of En- lightenment (New York, 1972); Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York, 1 972).
ix
liberation is perhaps evidence of their consistency in staying within the limits of negative critique. For them, only in the negation of pseudo-integrations and resolu- tions was emancipatory action clearly possible. Hence, the Frankfurt school became a tradition of revolution- ary theorists who, in the absence of the objective pos- sibilities for the transcendence of industrial domina- tion, attempted to uphold the ideals of critical reason that anticipated the emancipation of mankind from the unnecessary power constraints of nature and his-
tory. In this way their work is basically a critique of the reifications that conceal the truth of critical reason. Since "reification" is for them "a forgetting," 6 their work is essentially a remembrance, from the historical setting of the mid-twentieth century, of the notion of critical reason.
Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity continues the critique of existentialism that had always been an issue for Frankfurt theorists. 7 The continuity of this critique can be shown by Adorno's 1939 essay "On Kierke- gaard's Doctrine of Love," which anticipates and is assumed by this book. s Adorno shows that Kierke- gaard's notion of love transcended human differences, happiness, and even historical morality itself. The
6. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
7. Perhaps the earliest statement of this concern is Adorno's Habilitationsarbeit ( I 933), which was published as Kierke gaard: Konstruktion des Aesthetischen (Frankfurt, I965). But the essay by Herbert Marcuse, "Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Etre et le neant," Philosophy and Phe- nomonological Research VII, no. 3 (March, I948), is one of the most important critiques of existentialism in the Frank- furt tradition.
8. Zeitsc hnft fur Sozialforschung, VIII ( I939), 4I3 29. x
most remote neighbor was to be affirmed as much as the most intimate friend; "preference" was to be over- come, and love as agape was to be experienced in a radical inwardness that transcended the natural incli- nations of eros. Adorno argues that this love's extreme inwardness conceived of itself as its own ground. Hence, while Kierkegaard's doctrine of love aimed at overcoming the reifications of historical context, it actually became, Adorno claims, a reification that could not be actualized. In oppressing both natural drives and the right of the mind to question, radical in- wardness loses love's power of reconciling the antag- onism between natural instincts and socially formed selves. In abstract inward love, both historical need and happiness are effectively denied. The real object of this love's "desire" is redemption-which becomes the ultimate reality sought.
Adorno shows that this radical Christian inward- ness evades the actuality of secular injustice and in- equality. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard is more deeply aware of the transformation of the person in the bour- geois epoch than his contemporaries or his later Ger- man existentialist followers. That is, he recognized the mechanisms of industrialization that force men into alienated social patterns and reified communica- tions. But this insight only confirmed Kierkegaard's sense that the progress of civilization was the history of advancing decay and further inclined him to the hatred of "leveling" mechanisms and the rejection of the motives of the bourgeois epoch. Only in the radical inwardness of Christian love, in the leap of faith that suspends the ethical, is it possible to hope for eternality, for redemption.
But Adorno's central point is that Kierkegaard's xi
radical inwardness has lost the dialectical mediation of subject and object-which was the achievement of Hegel's critical philosophy. That is, the constitutive presuppositions of human subjectivity must themselves be dialectically related to the historical context in which determinate subjects are formed. Failure to so relate the subject and object of histOrically situated knowledge results in the fallacy 9? "ob; j
the reduction of subjectivIty to 'the in-it-selfness of facts (e. g. , positivism) or the innate principles of mind (the idealistic philosophy of the identity of reason and mind). Both forms of objectivism are the loss of criti- cal (dialectical) reason. Only the tradition of reflec- tive critique conceived of human subjectivity in a way that did not reduce it to the determinateness of natural facts or absorb it into the spiritual principles of abso- lute idealism. Kierkegaard's radical inwardness be- comes an idealistic objectivism by failing to compre- hend subjectivity as a historical category.
Dialecticaly conceived "subjectivity" is historically fonned and yet not reducible to historical determina- tions; historical subjectivity is reconstructed from the framework of reflective critique in that the limits of constitutive synthesis establish the range of possible experience. Only in such a reflective reconstruction of the genesis of subjectivity is it possible to distinguish between real possibilities and those modes of appear- ance that are but abstract i1Iusions, e. g. , existen- tialism's transcendence of historical domination. -So conceived, the dialectical notion of subjectivity is a fundamental category of critical reason. In reflective reconstructions of self-formation processes, it is pos- sible to show the p! ? eudo-necessity of socially unneces- sary motives and to thereby promote a reversal of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? xii
sciousness that can dissolve the causality of these objective illusions. 9
In The Jargon at Authenticity. Adorno applies the method of immanent criticism to contemporary Ger- man existentialists ? Buber, Jaspers, Heidegger, etc. ). His basic thesis is that after World War II this philosophical perspective became an ideological mysti- fication of human domination-while pretending to be a critique of alienation. Use of existentialistic terms became, Adorno argues , a j argon : a mode of magical expression which Walter Benjamin called an "aura. " In the aura of existentialism the historical need for meaning and liberation was expressed, but in a way that mystified the actual relation between language and its objective content. Adorno's critique focuses on the jargon's incapacity to express the relation between language and truth, in that it breaks the dialectic of language by making the intended object appear present by the idealization inherent in the word itself. The jargon, therefore, falls into an objectivism that con- ceals the difference between philosophical reflection and the in-itselfness of the object of reflection. Such objectivism loses the intent of reflection to maintain a
self-consciousness of the mediation of fact through the thinking subject. Consequently, in the jargon objective consciousness is compressed into self-experience, and an idealism results.
9. The methodological ideal of critical theory has been given a contemporary restatement in Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 197I), and Theory and Practice (Boston, 1973). The continuity of the tradition of critical theory has been argued by Trent Schroyer, The Criti- que of Domination (New York, 1973).
? xi i i
But the societal result of this idealistic tendency is that the jargon shares with modern advertising the ideological circularity of pretending to make present, in pure expressivity, an idealized form that is devoid of content; or, alternatively, just as the mass media can create a presence whose aura makes the spectator seem to experience a nonexistent actuality, so the jargon pre- sents a gesture of autonomy without content. Adorno's analysis here continues Marx's analysis of the fetish- ism of commodities, in that the symbolisms of the jargon do not represent actual social relations but rather symbolize only the relations between abstract concepts. Lost in the fetishisms of the jargon is the actuality of the historical development of human con- sciousness. That the subject itself is formed, and de- formed, by the objective configuration of institutions is forgotten, and thus reified, in the jargon's pathos of archaic primalness. Consequently, there is a loss of the objective context of human society and an idealistic compression of all historical consciousness into the sphere of self-experience. For example, Adorno cites Martin Buber's I and Thou and Paul Tillich's stress that religiosity is an end in itself, as instances of the shift to subjectivity as an in-it-selfness. In both cases the words are referred to the immediacy of life, to at- titudinal and qualitative aspects of self-experience. One needs only to be a believer; the objective content of belief has, been eclipsed in the subjectivization of objective content. To be a Christian seems to be a personal question-independent from the historical divinity of Christ. Without necessarily intending to do so, this extreme subjectivity transforms existentialistic language into a mystification of the objective con- straints that block the autonomy and spontaneity of the historical subject.
? ? ? xiv
Hegel proclaimed philosophy a "homecoming" that critically reconciled objective discord and subjective consciousness. His intent was to maintain a meaning- ful totality by the reflective mediations of critical rea- son. Reflection had as its aim the critique of abstrac- tions, or in Marxian terms, of reifications. In this way Marx's work attempted to demonstrate the nonequiva-
lence of exchange in the capitalist economy-thereby restoring to human consciousness a critical mediation of economic exploitation.
Adorno implies that contemporary German ex- istentialism began from a high? r level of capitalist development, in which the SOC1QGultural antagonisms ar? -. ! u_ c ihari e? conomic_? ? '. El9Jtation and? ? -
into Therefore, the haste with which the existentialists and their jargon attempt to achieve a reconciliation, irregardless of the objective processes of alienation which block meaning and autonomy, indicated only their awareness of the depth of the need. The resulting movement to a radical in- wardness and its expressions of authenticity, freedom, etc. , is an attempt to actualize these ideals outside of the objective social context: to fulfill heroic cultural models independent of the society. Behind these empty claims for freedom the socioeconomic processes of ad- vanced capitalist integration continue, intenSifying the dependence of all persons upon large organizational units for employment and welfare. The jargon's "bless-
ings" conceal this objective context of unfreedom, and in the name of critical reflection the jargon joins hands with modern advertising in celebrating the meaningful- ness of immediate experience.
Hence for Adorno, German existentialism and re- lated genres, such as neoromantic lyric poetry (e. g. , Rilke), come to a head in a mythic jargon that re-
? ? xv
duces the dialectical relationship of reflective critique to the objective content and context of subjectivity. The result is an ideology of the simple in which the primal sense of pure words is elevated in a futile at- tempt to overcome the "alienation" that remains linked to the political-economic framework of society.
Adorno's reconstruction of Heidegger's philosophy attempts to show that it becomes an ontology that re- treats behind, rather than overcomes, the tradition of transcendental philosophy. In the universalization of transcendental subjectivity into Dasein, the empirical is totally lost and, as Adorno claims, an essence-mythol- ogy of Being emerges. This is exemplified in the claim that the primacy of Dasein is a realm beyond fact and essence and yet one which maintains itself as an identity. Whereas critical reason was able to show that maintenance of identity of consciousness presup- posed a dialectic of subjective and objective reciprocity which was unified only in the constitutive activity of concrete subjectivity itself, Heidegger's notion of Dasein as both ontic and ontological stops the dialec- ticity of conscious existence in an idealistic elevation of the absolute subject. To quote Adorno :
whatever praises itself for reaching behind the con- cepts of reflection-subject and object-in order to grasp something substantial, does nothing but reify the irresolvability of the concepts of reflection. It reifies the impossibility of reducing one into the other; into the in-itself (italics added) . 10
Adorno's thesis is that Heidegger's notion of self- ness remains a reified tributary of Husserl's concept of
10. The mature statement of the notion of critical reason has been recently translated as Negative Dialectik (New York, 1973).
? xvi
subject. This concept of subject, in attempting to over- come the pure possibility of the ontic, claims to be it- self concrete. Hence, Heidegger dogmatically proclaims his concept of existence as something in opposition to identity-while at the same time he "continues the tradition of the doctrine of identity with his implicit definition of the self through its own preservation. " Hence, Adorno examines the notions of "Dasein," "au- thenticity," "death," "care," etc. , and shows that their use evades the issue of historical determinateness by means of a primary and absolute creative subject- which is, by definition, supposedly untouched by reifi- cation.
Hence, the aura of authenticity in Heidegger is that it names "nothing" ; the "1" remains formal and yet pretends that the word contains content in-itself. For Adorno, Heidegger's existentialism is a new Platonism which implies that authenticity comes in the complete disposal of the person over himself-as if there were no determination emerging from the objectivity of his- tory .
TRENT SCHROYER
Graduate Faculty of the
New School for Social Research
February, 1973
x vi i
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The author conceive d the Jar- gon of Authenticity as part of the Negative Dialectic. However, he finally excluded that text from the latter work not only because its size grew disproportionate to the other parts, but also because the elements of lin- guistic physiognomy and sociology no longer fitted properly with the rest of the plan. The resistance against intellectual division of labor requires that this division of labor should be reflected on and not merely
ignored. Certainly in intention and in theme the Jar- gon is philosophical. As long as philosophy was in line with its own nature, it also had content. However, in retreating to the ideal of its pure nature, philosophy cancels itself out. This thought was only developed in the book which was then still unfinished, while
xix
the Jargon proceeds accord:ing to this insight without, however, grounding it fully. Thus it was published earlier, as a k:ind of propaedeutic.
Insofar as the author has paid homage to the di- vision of labor, he has at the same time all the more rudely challenged this division. He might be accused of philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic seduction without employing the traditional manner of keeping the categories separate-or maybe even of discussing
them distinct from each other. Yet he would have to answer that a demand of this kind projects onto ob-
jects the desire for order which marks a classifying science, and which then proclaims that it is elevated by objects. The author, however, feels more inclined to give himself over to objects than to schematize like a schoolmaster-for the sake of an external standard: a standard which, questionably, has been brought to bear on the subject matter from the outside. This atti- tude determines itself by precisely the fact that the subject-matter elements of philosophy are intertwined. The common methodological ideal would break up this intimate unity. By means of such a unity of the subject matter, the unity of the author's own attempts should become all the more visible-for example, the unity of the author's philosophical essays with the essay, "Criticism of the Musician" from the Disso- nances. What is aesthetically perceived :in the bad form of language, and interpreted sociologically, is deduced from the untruth of the content which is posited with it : its implicit philosophy.
This makes for bad blood. Passages from Jaspers and idea blocks from Heidegger are treated on the same levels, and with that same linguistic attitude, which schoolmasters would probably reject with indig- nation. The text of the Jargon, however, contains xx
enough evidence, from a truly inexhaustible wealth, to show that those men write in the same manner which they despise in their lesser followers as a justi- fication of their own superiority. Their philosophemes show on what the jargon feeds, as well as its indirect suggestive force. The ambitious projects of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn. This spirit re- mained what it was and thus speaks in the jargon even today. Only the criticism of these philosophical projects can objectively determine the mendacity which echoes in the vulgar jargon. The physiognomy of the vulgar jargon leads into what discloses itself in
Heidegger.
It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes
the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line. But the ideology of the sub- lime no longer acknowledges itself without being dis- regarded.
The ambitious projects of German philosophy in the second half of the twenties concre- tized and articulated the direction into which the ob- jective spirit of the time was drawn. This spirit re- mained what it was and thus speaks in the jargon even today. Only the criticism of these philosophical projects can objectively determine the mendacity which echoes in the vulgar jargon. The physiognomy of the vulgar jargon leads into what discloses itself in
Heidegger.
It is nothing new to find that the sublime becomes
the cover for something low. That is how potential victims are kept in line. But the ideology of the sub- lime no longer acknowledges itself without being dis- regarded. To show this fact might help to prevent criticism from stagnating in a vague and noncom- mittal suspicion of ideology, a suspicion which has itself fallen into ideology. Contemporary German ideology is careful not to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones. Ideology has shifted into language. Social and anthropological changes have brought about this shift, though without breaking the veil. The fact that such language is actually ideol- ogy, i. e. , societally necessary Schein, "appearance," can be shown from within it. This becomes obvious in the contradiction between its "how" and its "what. " In its objective impossibility the jargon reacts toward the imminent impossibility of language. Language gives itself over either to the market, to balderdash, or to the predominating vulgarity. On the other hand lan-
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guage shoves its way toward the judge's bench, en- velopes itself in judicial garb, and in that way asserts its privilege. The jargon is the happy synthesis which makes it explode.
Showing this has practical consequences. As irre- sistible as the jargon appears in present-day Germany, it is actually weak and Sickly. The fact that the jargon has become an ideology unto itself destroys this ideol- ogy as soon as this fact is recognized. If the jargon were finally to become silent in Germany, part of that would have been accomplished for which skepticism, itself prejudiced, is praised-prematurely and without justification. The interested parties who use the jargon as a means of power, or depend on their public image for the jargon's social-psychological effect, will never wean themselves from it. There are others who will be embarrassed by the jargon. Even followers who believe in authority will shy away from ridiculousness, as soon as they feel the fragile nature of that authority to which they look for support. The jargon is the histori- cally appropriate form of untruth in the Germany of the last years. For this reason one can discover a truth in the determinate negation of the jargon, a truth which refuses to be formulated in positive terms. Parts of the first sections were originally published in the third issue of the Neue Rundschau in 1963, and have been incorporated into the text.
June, 1967
xxii
THE Jargon
OF Authenticity
In the early twenties a number of people active in philosophy, sociology, and theology, planned a gathering. Most of them had shifted from one creed to another. Their common ground was an emphasis on a newly acquired religion, and not the religion itself. All of them were unsatisfied with the idealism which at that time still dominated the univer- sities. Philosophy swayed them to choose, through free- dom and autonomy, a positive theology such as had already appeared in Kierkegaard. However, they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth con- tent of revelation, than in conviction. To his slight annoyance, a friend, who was at that time attracted by
this circle, was not invited. He was-they intimated- not authentic enough. For he hesitated before Kierke- gaard's leap. He suspected that religion which is con- jured up out of autonomous thinking would subordi-
3
nate itself to the latter, and would negate itself as the absolute which, after all, in terms of its own conceptual nature, it wants to be. Those united together were anti- intellectual intellectuals. They confirmed their mutual understanding on a higher level by excluding one who did not pronounce the same credo they repeated to one another. What they fought for on a spiritual and in- tellectual plane they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the
teachin g of higher ideals ; as if there were nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees. Even forty years later, a pensioned bishop walked out on the conference of a Protestant academy because a guest lecturer expressed doubt about the contemporary possibility of sacred music. He too had been warned against, and dispensed from, having dealings with people who do not toe the line; as though critical
thought had no objective foundation but was a sub- jective deviation. People of his nature combine the tendency that Borchardt called a putting-themselves- in-the-right with the fear of reflecting their reflections -as if they didn't completely believe in themselves. Today, as then, they sense the danger of losing again what they call the concrete-of losing it to that ab-
straction of which they are suspicious, an abstraction which cannot be eradicated from concepts. They con- sider concretion to be promised in sacrifice, and first of all in intellectual sacrifice. Heretics baptized this circle "The Authentic Ones. "
This was long before the publication of Sein und Zeit. Throughout this work Heidegger employed "au- thenticity," in the context of an existential ontology,
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as a specifically philosophical term. Thus in philosophy he molded that which the authentics strive for less theoretically; and in that way he won over to his side all those who had some vague reaction to that philos- ophy. Through him, denominational demands became dispensable. His book acquired its aura by describing the directions of the dark drives of the intelligentsia before 1933-directions which he described as full of insight, and which he revealed to be solidly coercive.
Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminLshed tbeo1. ocical resgnance can be heard to this very day. The theological addictions of these years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves up as the elite. Nevertheless, the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where-for temporary lack of any other available authority-its language resembles the Christian. Prior to any con- sideration of particular content, this language molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommo-
dates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy-although it was that-but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil ex- presses itself as though it were salvation.
In Germany a jargon of authenticity is spoken- even more so, written. Its language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once-
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sub-language as superior language. The jargon extends from philosophy and theology-not only of Protestant academies-to pedagogy, evening schools, and youth organizations, even to the elevated diction of the rep- resentatives of business and administration. While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its mes- sage automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words which are received as promptly as
Signals. "Authenticity" itself is not the most prominent of them. It is more an illumination of the ether in which the jargon flourishes, and the way of thinking which latently feeds it. For a beginning, terms like "existential," "in the decision," "commission," "appeal," "encounter," "genuine dialogue," "statement," "con- cern," will do for examples. Not a few nontermino- logical terms of similar cast could be added to this list. Some, like "concern," a term still innocently used by Benjamin and verified in Grimm's dictionary, have only taken on such changed coloring since getting into this "field of tension"-a term that is also an appro- priate example.
Thus the important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function in the jargon. Certainly not all its words are noble nouns. At times it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner
6
which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements. Neo- romantic poets who drank theirfill of the precious, like George Hofmannsthal, by no means wrote their prose in the jargon. However, many of their intermediaries- like Gundolf-did so. The words become terms of the jargon only through the constellation that they negate, through each one's gesture of uniquene'ss. The magic that the singular word has lost is procured for it by manipulations-of whatever kind. The transcendence
of the single word is a secondary one, one that is de- livered ready from the factory, a transcendence which is a changeling said to be the lost original. Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigid- ity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred cere- monial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence. The ether is me- chanically sprayed, and atomistic words are dressed up without having been changed. Thus they become more important than the jargon's so-called system. The jargon-objectively speaking, a system-uses disor-
ganization as its principle of organization, the break- down of language into words in themselves. Many of them, in another linguistic constellation, can be used without a glance at the jargon: "statement," where it is used in its fullest sense, in epistemology, to desig- nate the sense of predicative judgments; "authentic" -already to be used with caution-even in an adjec- tival sense, where the essential is distinguished from the accidental; "inauthentic," where something broken is implied, an expression which is not immediately appropriate to what is expressed; "radio broadcasts of
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traditionM music, music conceived in the categories of live performance, are grounded by the feeling of as if, of the inauthentic. " 1 "Inauthentic" in that way be- comes a "critical" term, in definite negation of some- thing merely phenomenal. However, the jargon ex- tracts authenticity, or its opposite, from every such transparent context. Of course one would never criti- cize a firm for using the word Auftrag (commission), when it has been assigned a commission. But possi- bilities of that sort remain narrow and abstract. Who- ever overstrains them is paying tribute to a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history.
Yet history does intrude on every word and with- holds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down. What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individ- ual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite for- mal : it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt
and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used. It takes under its own control the preconceptual, mimetic element in language-for the sake of effect connotations. "State- ment" thus wants to make believe that the existence of the speaker has communicated itself simultaneously
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepitor (Frankfurt, 1963) p. 218.
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with his subject matter and has given the latter its dignity. The jargon makes it seem that without this surplus of the speaker the speech would already be in- authentic, that the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin. This formal element favors demagogic ends. Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes
over this task and devaluates thought. That the whole man should speak is authentic, comes from the core. Thus something occurs which the jargon itself stylizes as "to occur. " 2 Communication clicks and puts forth as truth what should instead be suspect by virtue of the prompt collective agreement. The tone of the jar- gon has something in it of the seriousness of the augurs, arbitrarily independent from their context or conceptual content, conspiring with whatever is sacred.
The fact that the words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean sug- gests the term "aura. " It is hardly an accident that Benjamin introduced the term at the same moment when, according to his own theory, what he under- stood by "aura" became impossible to experience. 3 As words that are sacred without sacred content, as frozen emanations, the terms of the jargon of authenticity
2. Later in the text Adorno refers to Heidegger's tenn Ereignis, which has been rendered as "event" in the standard translation of Being and Time. "To occur" our rendering of sioh ereignen, has been chosen for lack of an English verb corresponding to the noun "event. "
3. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Schriften I (Frankfurt, 1955), ''Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier- barkeit," p. 374. [English translation by Harry Zohn, in Il- luminations (New Y ork, 196 8 ) . ]
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are products of the disintegration of the aura. The latter pairs itself with an attitude of not being bound and thus becomes available in the midst of the de- mythified world; or, as it might be put in paramilitary modern German, it becomes einsatzbereit, mobi- lized. The perpetual charge against reification, a charge which the jargon represents, is itself reified. It falls under Richard Wagner's definition of a theatrical effect as the result of an action without agent, a definition which was directed against bad art. Those who have run out of holy spirit speak with mechanical tongues. The secret which is suggested, and from the beginning is not there, is a public one. First one can subtract the misused Dostoevski from the expressionist formula "each man is selected," which can be found in a play by Paul Kornfeld-who was murdered by the Nazis. Then the formula is good only for the ideological self- satisfaction of a lower middle class which is threatened and humbled by societal development. The jargon de- rives its own bleSSing, that of primalness, from the fact that it has developed as little in actuality as in spirit. Nietzsche did not live long enough to grow sick at his stomach over the jargon of authenticity : in the
'twentieth century he is the German resentment phe- nomenon par excellence. Nietzsche's "something stinks" would find its first justification in the strange bathing ceremony of the hale life :
Sunday really begins on Saturday evening. When the tradesman straightens his shop, when the housewife has put the whole house into clean and shining condi- tion, and has even swept the street in front of the house and freed it from all the dirt which it has collected dur-
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ing the week; when, finally, even the children are bathed; then the adults wash off the week's dust, scrub themselves thoroughly; and go to the fresh clothes which are lying ready for them : when all of that is ar- ranged, with rural lengthiness and care, then a deep warm feeling of resting settles down over the people:!
Expressions and situations, drawn from a no longer existent daily life, are forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some abso- lute which is kept silent out of reverence. While those who know better hesitate to appeal to revelation, they arrange, in their addiction to authority, for the ascen- sion of the word beyond the realm of the actual, con- ditioned, and contestable; while these same people, even in private, express the word as though a blessing from above were directly composed into that word. That supreme state which has to be thought, but which also refuses being thought, is mutilated by the jargon. The latter acts as if it had possessed this state "from the beginning of time," as it might run in the jargon. What philosophy aims at, the peculiar character of philosophy which makes representation essential to it, causes all its words to say more than each single one. This characteristic is exploited by the jargon. The transcendence of truth beyond the meanings of in- dividual words and propositional statements is attrib- uted to the words by the jargon, as their immutable possession, whereas this "more" is formed only by the mediation of the constellation. According to its ideal, philosophical language goes beyond what it says by
4 . Otto F rie d r ic h B ollnow, Neue Geborgenheit (Stuttgart, 1956), p. 205.
II
means of what it says in the development of a train of thought. Philosophical language transcends dialec- tically in that the contradiction between truth and thought becomes self-conscious and thus overcomes itself. The jargon takes over this transcendence de- structively and consigns it to its own chatter. What- ever more of meaning there is in the words than what they say has been secured for them once and for al as expression. The dialectic is broken off: the dialectic between word and thing as well as the dialectic, within language, between the individual words and their re- lations. Without judgment, without having been thought, the word is to leave its meaning behind. This is to institute the reality of the "more. " It is to scoff, without reason, at that mystical language speculation which the jargon, proud of its simplicity, is careful not to remember. The jargon obliterates the difference between this "more" for which language gropes, and the in-itself of this more. Hypocrisy thus becomes an a priori, and everyday language is spoken here and now as if it were the sacred one. A profane language
could only approach the sacred one by distancing itself from the sound of the holy, instead of by trying to imitate it. The jargon transgresses this rule blasphe- mously. When it dresses empirical words with aura, it exaggerates general concepts and ideas of philosophy
-as for instance the concept of being-so grossly that their conceptual essence, the mediation through the thinking subject, disappears completely under the var- nish. Then these terms lure us on as if they were the most concrete terms . Transcendence and concretion scintillate. Ambiguity is the medium of an attitude
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toward language which is damned by its favorite phi- losophy. s
But the untruth indicts itself by becoming bom- bastic. After a long separation a certain person wrote that he was existentially secure; it took some reflection to realize that he meant he had been sufficiently taken care of in regard to his finances . A center intended for international discussions-whatever they may be good for-is called the House of Encounters; the visible house, "firmly grounded in the earth," is turned into a sacred house through those gatherings-which are meant to be superior to discussions because they occur
among existing and living individuals, although these individuals might just as well be engaged in discussion, for as long as they do not commit suicide they could hardly do anything other than exist. One's relation to his fellow man should be important prior to all con- tent; for that purpose the jargon is satisfied with the shabby group-ethos of the youth movement, an indica- tion that nothing is reaching either beyond the nose of the speaker, or beyond the capacity of the person who has only lately begun to be called his "partner. " The j argon channels engagement into firm institutions and, furthermore, strengthens the most subaltern speakers in their self-esteem; they are already something be- cause someone speaks from within them, even when
that someone is nothing at all. The resonant directive
5. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 3d ed. (Halle, 1 931 ) , pp. 2 17 ff. [English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Being and Time (New York, 1 962 ) . Sub- sequent page references from Being and Time will be to this translation. ]
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of the jargon, that its thought should not be too strenu- ous, because otherwise it would offend the community, also becomes for these people the guarantee of a higher confirmation. This suppresses the fact that the lan- guage itself-through its generality and objectivity already negates the whole man, the particular speak- ing individual subject: the first price exacted by lan- guage is the essence of the individual. But through the appearance that the whole man, and not thought, speaks, the jargon pretends that, as a close-at-hand manner of communication, it is invulnerable to de- humanized mass communication-which is precisely what recommends it to everyone's enthusiastic accept- ance. Whoever stands behind his words, in the way in which these words pretend, is safe from any suspicion about what he is at that very moment about to do: speak for others in order to palm something off on them.
The word "statement" finally secures its alibi when "true" is connected to it. By means of its prestige it wants to endow the "for others" with the solidity of the in-itself. For glorified man, who himself not too long ago invented the term "death and glory squad," is the ground of being for the jargon as well as the ad- dressee of the statement; and it has become impossible to distinguish between the two. The attribute "valid" often sticks to "statement. " The reason for this ob- viously lies in the fact that the emphatic experience, which the word claims insistently, is no longer experi-
enced by those who favor this word for the claim it makes. A loudspeaker becomes necessary? "Statement" wants to announce that something which was said has
? ? come from the depth of the speaking subject; it is removed from the curse of surface communication. But at the same time communicative disorder disguises itself in the statement. Someone speaks and, thanks to the elevated term "statement," what he says is to be the sign of truth-as if men could not become caught up in untruth, as if they could not suffer martyrdom for plain nonsense.
