But Hitler did build highways! I hear this more and more often lately. It is difficult to go on talking at this point, because a certain argument that I find very important is quite complex and is rejected by people who want to relativize fascism and the Holocaust. The argument, prompted by Adorno, is: after Auschwitz, no more poems can be written. In rough outline, it goes like this:
- The scale of the horror of the Holocaust is so great that we, as individuals and as a society, must ask ourselves what made this scale possible.
- Unfortunately, atrocities have occurred again and again in history, almost everywhere. Is there something that makes the Holocaust appear singular in its horror?
- One thesis is that the technical precision of the extermination camps was born of the spirit of rationality. It is not mass murder out of anger, revenge, lust for power, hatred, and so on… but a ‘technical operation’ in which responsibilities were divided and most people wanted to believe that they were simply doing their jobs.
- The question that arises from this is whether rationality itself is morally blind and cruel.
- If rationality can turn against humanity, then it must be questioned fundamentally and thoroughly, and until this questioning is complete, we cannot go on as the project of modernity suggests.
- We must question everything, including poetry (and highways).
A project proposed by the Frankfurt School in the 1960s was critical theory, and within it negative dialectics. In response to Kant’s strict tables of categories, Hegel had proposed a dialectical philosophy that saw spirit as bound not to a fixed framework of principles and categories of pure thought, but as a force that continually develops itself from within itself. It is the human being, he held, who can manifest and express this movement of spirit. The transition from Kant to Hegel is an important break in the history of Western philosophy. Questioning this step with new methods is the project of negative dialectics. Instead of synthesizing knowledge and enriching its complexity, negative dialectics attempts to preserve the complexity while reversing synthesis into a constant questioning: a critical theory. In this respect, critical theory is not so far removed from deconstructionism, although the methods are very different: critical theory proceeds systematically, while deconstructionism often works associatively, traces the unconscious, seeks structural parallels—much like poststructuralism.
It becomes clear that this project matters when we look at other ‘achievements,’ such as the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb or the development of AI. The argument can be applied to the central question of the philosophy of science: the question of science’s ethical responsibility. Karl Popper carried this project forward.
Beyond Rationality
The thinking of modernity, from Kant to the Frankfurt School, is marked by skepticism toward speculative, intuitive, spiritual, and mystical forms of insight. Rationality is the sword with which everything that does not submit to its logic is beheaded. Yet, as with a Hydra, this only produces new faces, other ‘irrationalities.’ There is, for example, a difference between gullibility and spiritual thinking. There is a difference between intuition and a gut feeling.
The Western way of thinking has relied too heavily on the rational mind. The dimensions of life, consciousness, and spirituality are subordinated to it as projects ‘still to be elucidated.’ By now it is becoming clear to me that the project of negative dialectics must lead considerably further. It must open the doors to our other ways of existing. I do, however, find it questionable whether negative dialectics is the appropriate means here, since in Adorno it retreats into an aesthetic theory. It can accompany thinking for part of the journey, but the path will soon branch.
Yet it is one of the paths that led me to the wisdom of ancient scriptures. This thinking of ‘premodernity’ is richer and more complex. It draws different boundaries. At its center is not logic but consciousness, God, soul, nature, community, and so on… These are concepts anchored on other planes of our existence. Often they are interwoven. In the Vedas there are seven: matter, breath, mind, ideal knowledge, blessedness, consciousness, and pure existence. When will we learn again that our humanity cannot be reduced to algorithms? Must we really first enter into a battle with AI for that to happen?
Sometimes I wonder whether there is a parallel between the idea of the Big Bang and the coming into appearance of the human spirit. For just as the Big Bang appeared not out of matter but out of vibration, that is, consciousness, so the human spirit appeared embedded in cosmic thinking, worlds of gods, reverence for life. The cave paintings of Chauvet bear witness to this. And just as the material cosmos moves toward cold death, the human spirit differentiates into individual disciplines that forget what it means to be human.
One possible answer to this fundamental crisis of spirit is Sri Aurobindo’s integral philosophy: the synthesis of the yogas.
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