The new priority I talk about in this chapter has to do with our historical position “after the war,” by which I mean primarily the Second World War and its aftermath, although the roots of the Second World War were the First World War, and the roots of that were the breakdown—the complete meltdown—of Christian culture in Europe that had been slowly gathering pace during the nineteenth century. This meltdown is evident if we read the works of ideas; the philosophy of Hegel and Schopenhauer in the first half of the nineteenth century already assumes their era is post-Christian. It is the era of the Enlightenment, the era after Kant, who completely revolutionized philosophy; and this is not the era it was before. The meltdown of Christian culture in Europe in the nineteenth century within philosophy reaches its culmination, perhaps, in the work of Nietzsche, who wants, quite dramatically, to have done with it. He masqueraded himself in one of his last books, before he descended into madness, as the Anti-Christ, which is the book’s title. But other writers, such as Dostoevsky and Soloviov, were seeing and saying something similar while imagining a transformation of Christianity. If there is a transformation of Christianity in the twentieth century, particularly after the Jewish Holocaust, then it is on the terms given by the Enlightenment and the secular age, not by ages past.
I will only be sketching some of the main lines, as I see them, of this historical situation here. It is a large and immensely complex subject. We do not need to get embroiled in it for the purposes of appreciating the work of enchantment, but we do need to grasp one or two basic truths of a time such as ours. Perhaps the truth is that enchantment is difficult in a technological age, whereas it is easy for people to become adjuncts of technology. Machines, even those new devices which we do not regard any more as machines but almost as extensions of ourselves, because we love them so much and use them continually and hold them almost all day long, or at least “have them on,” even these machines, basically speaking, are just tools. Tools for communication, or pleasure perhaps. In an age of technology it is easy for these things to dominate our lives and we then become adjuncts of technology; we become the unwitting tools of our own tools. This is one of the matters we need to be aware of and that I will make some further deliberately sketchy (but not hasty) points about. Another basic truth of a time such as ours might be the difficulty of making good art, since everything is turned by business into a commodity or product. The point is that the complete domination of art by business, which is typical of our time and place in history, makes it hard for art to operate as a basis for the work of enchantment as it once did—even in the days of Proust, Rilke, and Goethe, who I will talk about later. Sketching out these basic truths just a little further is the substance of what follows in this chapter; again, I have tended to be suggestive, appealing to my reader’s “common sense,” rather than to theoretical and imposing, conclusive views that I hold. Obviously, everything I say is open to discussion on every side.
These words strike me as important for us who desire to appreciate the work of enchantment: “The inner life: one is almost ashamed to pronounce this pathetic expression in the face of so many realisms and objectivisms.”1—from 1966, the ironically intended words of Emmanuel Levinas, Jewish philosopher, Holocaust survivor. But then he said we must give new priority to the inner life. We need to give new priority to the inner life because of the realisms and objectivisms which hem us in on all sides, and indeed, which we internalize and which become our beliefs, dogmas, and ideologies. Before we enter into this conflict that Levinas suggests we are inextricably part of—the conflict between our inner life and the ostensible realisms and objectivisms that stand over and against it, blocking it, perhaps—I shall clarify a couple of proper names belonging to the inner life of these pages: “soul” and “enchantment.”
“Soul” is a word that refers to the unity, or more precisely, unison, of our inner sensibilities and sensitivities. Soul-working, therefore, refers to inner work or inner development, the kinds of activities we involve ourselves in or the attitude we take to those activities that will strengthen that unison and at the same time deepen that inner sensibility and sensitivity. Soul-working is characteristically reflective, and the kind of work that best suits soul-making is constitutive of those disciplines that used to be known, at least within the university, as “the humanities.” This is the work of reading, of listening and of gazing. It is a question today, in our “now” culture of instant gratifications and fixes, of how to do such work. I passed the literacy test, but can I really read in the true sense of the word? For instance, as we shall see in what follows, reading a newspaper does not count at all as reading in a way that is soul-making. Quite a lot of what passes for reading today fails this test, and is not really reading except in a trivial sense. Something similar may be said of the other two modes of soul-working: listening and gazing. Am I able really to listen? Am I able really to gaze at something properly? Culture requires that we be capable of reading, listening, and gazing. There is no real culture where these are absent; perhaps, instead, there is merely commerce or simply ignorance.
“Soul” is not a thing I have. I do not “have” a soul. I am one. But I may not be if I do no soul-work—and let me say, lest this sound snobbish, or elitist, which it is not meant to be: everyone who listens to children is doing soul-work. Mothers are the outstanding representatives of what I am talking about. And grandparents. Above all, teachers. Fathers?—wherever they are present to their children. More generally, all people who care qualify, which really should be everyone. We are all of us souls as the essence of our human being. Soul is what I am: I am this inner unison of sensibility and sensitivity. When someone lacks this quality in their persona, we ordinarily call them “unimaginative.” If a person is chronically unimaginative we call them a “psychopath”; we actually consider them seriously sick. Soul, therefore, is still important. We still need to “save our souls,” which is really what I am calling soul-work or soul-making (I use the two terms interchangeably).
But although soul is quintessentially human, and what I am, we live more and more in a soulless world in which inner sensibility and sensitivity is sullied and stultified and dehumanized: consider the priority of money-making, to take one example, and the consequent exploitation of everything imaginable for commercial ends, especially sex, violence, vanity, and selfishness. What we call “globalization” is actually—even mainly—the globalization of these things. The globalization of human rights (our one and only check, and a poor one at that) follows in train to stem “abuses.” But for those with eyes to see, it is a pathetic and nearly neo-barbaric scenario. At a more “micro” level, to take another example, consider children glued to computer games. These are not really “games” in a proper sense: we have forgotten what a game really is. There are young adults who have no idea what I could possibly mean by referring to “what a game really is.” I know children who cannot play anymore unless plugged into these pre-set gadgets, which conceptually and intellectually are extremely primitive. Children cannot play because they have got no imagination. They find reading, listening, and gazing hard because they lack imagination. This is alarming, but no one is much alarmed. Our schools do a wonderful job at turning back the tide, and, to my mind, teachers are the heroes of our culture—what is left of it.
“Enchantment,” the second notion I wish to clarify, is what the soul wants: it is what feeds the soul—and our soul should be hungry. The thing is, with the soul, because it is the same as myself, I can lose it without noticing it. I mean I can lose that inner sensibility and sensitivity. It can vanish like ozone. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote in 1849: “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”2 Because soul refers to the unity of inner sensitivity and inner sensibility, if we lose this we have lost the capacity to notice the loss; and if we live among like-minded people, they would not notice it either. Life can disappear from our midst with no one noticing and no one taking it from us. This is the human condition. But this is where the humanities, which I mentioned before, come in. Our weapons against the psychopathic forces driving the de-souling of the world are reading, listening, and gazing. Science and technology cannot help; indeed, they are much too much part of the problem already. Reading, listening, and gazing, to our deafened ears, do not sound like much; they sound weak and possibly a waste of time. But, actually, by these alone can we save our souls. By these alone can we resurrect the traditional power of education, ethics, and politics. The solution to so many of our problems lie in these paltry activities. They disarm so many people I talk to because they are not theories. People believe in theories and are even desperate for them—and dogmatic about them when they get possessed by one they believe in. But reading, listening, and gazing are not theories any more than gardening or cooking or raising children are. However, so many people have lost a sense of reading, gazing, and listening as soul-making, whereas gardening, cooking, and raising children, because they are more obviously practical and seemingly more necessary, continue to attract attention and enthusiasm, and continue to be soul-making. Yet, for soul, the less practical pursuits provide the more powerful way.
Enchantment is what the soul needs and what this book is about. Enchantment is what reading, listening, and gazing ultimately reward us with. The enchantment which starts on the inside of us will be externalized over time, in the passage from past to future. The world we will build together will start within us. If our inner sensitivity and sensibility—our faculty of imagination principally, we might say—is enriched, then the world we build together will be the richer for it. Dullards and psychopaths, when they rule the world, will never create a just and livable order. We recreate on the outside what (psychologically speaking) is within; we cannot do otherwise. And what is within us will objectify itself over the generations; it cannot do otherwise. The inner work of enchantment, then, is essential to humanity in the best and fullest sense of that concept. If you want a title for my “theory” in the pages that follow, it is no theory and has no method: it is a philosophy of culture and art. Reading, listening, and gazing have to do with what we cultivate and how we cultivate it. Art has to do with the expression or “shape” we give to reading, listening, and gazing, which, while it always has to do with words and is wrapped up in them, is beyond them and not reducible to them.
Now, coming back to that quotation we started with, as Emmanuel Levinas had said: “The inner life: one is almost ashamed to pronounce this pathetic expression in the face of so many realisms and objectivisms.” If this is so, then the stakes of this book are high. For a start, the very notion of “enchantment” has been co-opted by fairytales for children (although there is nothing wrong with that), fantasy, and, more dubiously, spiritualities—New Age, Jungian, Celtic, Mythic, Gnostic, Hermetic, Alternative, and so on. Enchantment has been lost from the humanities, where it really belongs. However, the humanities today have largely been put out of the university, where they were once the heart and soul, and have been replaced by science and training. Now, such theoretical and method-based disciplines certainly have a place around the humanities, but they should not replace them, as they have; rather, they should feed into them.
But the humanities have a further problem, and that is their historical nature. The humanities—whatever the term might mean today, and assuming it is still legitimate and meaningful to speak of them—are not the same now as before the catastrophic breakdown of European culture in the first half of the twentieth century. It has been since 1945, and especially since the late 1960s, with the rise of all sorts of nouveau sciences and pseudo-subject-areas, that the humanities have not found their feet, as it were; and this is understandable. If we are going to present enchantment as intrinsic to the existence of the humanities and of subsequent culture worthy of the name, then it is from our historical position that we do this; and it is neither, as we shall see, “reactionary” nor “conservative” to do so, it is not even essentially political. We can still speak of enchantment, I believe, because reading, listening, and gazing are pursuits which anyone can engage in, and because these pursuits belong not only to our experience as adults but also within educational settings at all levels. Further, my experience within educational settings encourages me in the belief that we can still speak of enchantment—that it is not “a thing of the past”—because almost invariably people (“the public” or students) are glad to discover a pathway (reading, listening, gazing) that will be enchanting, and that they would never thereafter give up, because it is beautiful and soul-enriching. But that is where the pathway leads, not where it starts.
The antithesis of believing enchantment to be possible or even desirable would seem to be made by Adorno’s well-worn statement of 1949: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”3 In his 1965 Lectures on Metaphysics, Adorno said that his statement that “after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry… gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate when I wrote those words.”4 He says he meant “to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that time—it could equally well be said, that one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in the Aesthetics, that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness.”5 (Paul Celan’s and Edmond Jabès’ poetry, for instance. Both wrote exemplary poetry after Auschwitz—even about it.) But Adorno’s own philosophy—these very lectures on metaphysics themselves—fit the criteria no less. They constitute or at least help to constitute “an objective form of that awareness.”
In speaking of “our time” (after Auschwitz) in his major late statement, Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno wrote: “The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed disinterest. They are non-conceptuality, individuality, and particularity—things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled as ‘lazy Existence’.”6 In other words, tradition was interested in conceptuality, ideas and generality (universals), and Platonism is concomitant with this tradition; but according to Adorno in the twentieth century, or coming to a head then, for good or evil, matters of true philosophical interest were turned on their head. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are mostly frequently cited as having much to do with this—and not, I think, unfairly.
When we reflect on our time, therefore, we do so in a manner different from Hegel and mainstream philosophy prior to him stretching back to Plato: for us, what is transitory and insignificant matters. I matter, for instance; so do you.7 Often, for Adorno, and for us, this individuality and particularity is given non-conceptually in art, or, more precisely, as art. This is why we will be turning to artists—writers—in thinking through enchantment, rather than, as we might, to philosophers. We will turn to Proust, Rilke, Lou Salomé, and Goethe, more or less great writers, as they are regarded, but we might have made the same points we are going to make in this book in another book via some painters or musicians. But obviously the written word lends itself more easily to talking about writing than about music or painting if we cannot together sample the music or the painting. With any art, though, the point is that it does not represent: it incarnates or embodies and therefore it has a being of its own and, we might say, it gives being, because we who experience it may be fortified by it—even, as we shall see, to the point of death and beyond.
The approach to enchantment through the experience of art does not reduce to easy remedies that might come under the banner of “re-enchantment.” The problem with re-enchantment, and why we will assiduously avoid its mention, is that it reduces too easily to ideology, to, in other words, a form of social coercion where enchantment is at the behest of the self-appointed “enchanters.” Such ideology may have enchantment on its tongue, but it is totalitarian at its heart: wanting to impose enchantment “from above” or inculcate it “from below.” It can never be proper enchantment. We shall not concern ourselves here with ideology like this. Practical freedom is the precondition of enchantment. Practical freedom includes artistic freedom. I cannot “re-enchant” you, my reader: I can only point you to reading, listening, and gazing and to the true meaning and ultimate value of these pursuits. Practical freedom consists in taking them up.
In the Negative Dialectics, Adorno calls enchantment, most appropriately, “metaphysical experience.”8 It sounds almost religious—but is it?
Adorno was a friend of Samuel Beckett, the famous Paris-based Irish poet and dramatist who wrote Waiting for Godot (during 1948 and 1949). They shared a common attitude, hardly religious, but the kind of “irreverent reverence” that probably is suitable in an age where religious pietism and sanctimony are no longer sustainable. Beckett was not religious, but he was not not religious. It depends what you mean by religious. If we mean by “religious” experience, or “metaphysical experience,” to use Adorno’s term, a science of experience which is true and in which our inner sensibility and sensitivity (our soul) corresponds with outer reality (the world as it appears to be), then we will speak of “religious” experience, although this is probably to redefine the term, perhaps radically so for some readers. However, this is an old idea in philosophy, going back to Kant at the end of the eighteenth century. We might ask on the basis of this definition: what kind of religion is it that would eschew a science of experience such as just described? Not one worthy of belief, I would think. But in this sense “true religion” is yet to come, for we do not yet have a correspondence between our inner life and the world around us, which will vary from place to place and over time in any case. We do not yet have this correspondence and perhaps we never will, and yet the activity which works for it is the activity of true religion and true art. Having said this, suggestively, not dogmatically; dialogically, not authoritatively, we are in deep water. But both Adorno and Beckett had precisely this sensibility that I have just described “after Kant.”
I heard somewhere, for example, that Beckett was strolling along a Parisian boulevard one fine spring day with a friend, a visitor to the city, and the friend, looking up at the clear blue sky, took a long breath and said, “This is such a perfect day! It makes you feel glad to be alive!” Beckett responded: “I wouldn’t go that far!” Irish humor. It was irreverent reverence, such as that which fills Waiting for Godot.
There is an exchange between the two characters Clov and Hamm in Endgame (1957), a play by Beckett which Adorno analyzed in a famous essay. These two characters live in dustbins after the world has ended and all life has been destroyed, at least as far as they can tell—not that they really go anywhere: both are invalids: Hamm cannot stand up, and Clov cannot sit down.
CLOV: |
Do you believe in the life to come? |
HAMM: |
Mine was always that. |
[Exit CLOV] |
Adorno said, “He lets a twisted secular metaphysics shine through, with a Brechtian commentary.”9 I think this is the answer to our question above. Is “metaphysical experience,” or enchantment, religious? At least, is it so in a time such as ours, in a culture such as ours, when religious dogmatism, pietism, and sanctimony are no longer sustainable? We will not pretend to be religious in our work of enchantment, but we will hold half-humorously to a Beckettian “twisted secular metaphysics” as good enough for us, for the time being.
A twisted secular metaphysics is as good a starting place as any in a time such as ours. Perhaps it is the only honest starting place. Certainly, to carry on with religious “business as usual” as if nothing “ultimate”—at least for us in western culture—has happened is either brainless or shallow. But “Auschwitz” is no neat marker either, as Levinas reminds us: “Since the end of the war, bloodshed has not ceased. Racism, imperialism, and exploitation remain ruthless. Nations and individuals expose one another to hatred and contempt, fearing destitution and destruction.”10 And therefore I would extend Adorno’s fateful words on poetry and Auschwitz. Auschwitz (as the name which by convention in the survivor’s literature stands for itself and for all the names of the death camps) shows among other things that rationality may well serve barbarism and the ends of pitiless mass murderers. This event—at least consciousness of it—terminates the dream of the Enlightenment project that would see reason lead us to a better world. Certainly we cannot do without reason. But reason does not (in and of itself) naturally incline to the good as had been expected. Reason needs criteria, as the greatest thinkers, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Kant realized. But in extending Adorno I would point to the other side of the world, and the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These names show the dream of technology as advancing humanity is no less catastrophic than the dream of reason. Certainly we are much better off with technology. But I want to note the huge difference between the two catastrophes, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. While the Jewish Holocaust, was rationalistic, planned, and bureaucratically organized, and the Nazis did name searches, going right back into the records, systematically digging for Jewish names, in order to identify them and flush them out, at Hiroshima the names of people were irrelevant and did not factor. The evil was done clinically, from a distance, in the blink of an eye. While the Jewish Holocaust required a North European work ethic, with all the implied industriousness, the Japanese Holocaust was “a technological achievement,” as instant as flicking a light switch, as spectacular as a Hollywood disaster movie. Though only a few years separate Auschwitz from Hiroshima, they are epochally different from each other in their meaning for us today; although as Marguerite Duras has powerfully shown, the catastrophes can hardly be understood apart from each other.11 Hiroshima belongs to the computer age, the age to come. Auschwitz came out of the past, out of the peculiarity of Christian hatred of Jews, out of the Middle Ages. Auschwitz belongs to the European age, Hiroshima to the American. And by “European” and “American” I do not mean those places or their peoples as such, but I mean the spirit of those places and peoples that also reaches right around the world and touches every place and almost every person.
All this must be backdrop for any talk of enchantment today. Again, Levinas: “At no other time has historical experience weighed so heavily upon ideas; or, at least, never before have the members of one generation been more aware of that weight.”12
Levinas goes on to say that this brings with it a new more-or-less conscious sense of anxiety. Of course, anxiety is antithetical to enchantment. The more anxiety abroad and in our hearts and heads, the less the possibility of enchantment; conversely, the more enchantment in society and within us, the less there is to be needlessly anxious about. The work of enchantment in a time such as ours is a work against anxiety, which is such a governing mood, self-sustaining, and undermining. Also Levinas goes on to say that this anxiety brings with it an increased awareness of responsibility; this is not just the “global responsibility” we hear so much about today from those parading on the “world stage,” but a personal responsibility which is down to each of us and not merely “up to the politicians” or those seemingly in power.
No doubt there are things we need to be anxious about, particularly where we fail in responsibility to one another. But to be dominated by anxiety about the end of the world, as many people are, is frankly absurd and self-indulgent. To have a “doomsday” mentality, as many people do, is to be dominated by an unhealthy imagination; it can only bring on those things, if they are even possible, rather than avert them.
Our milieu, in which we must consider enchantment, or the possibility of metaphysical experience, is certainly one that is post-modern, in the sense that the great certainties of modernity are gone, destroyed by our own hand. The great guiding myth of Progress, for example, is dubious. The great progress of the nineteenth century led to the disasters of the twentieth. The Great Leap Forward in China led to untold millions starving to death. The splitting of the atom enabled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so on. We know progress is as destructive as it is progressive, and so we are skeptical, but it is a healthy skepticism. We do not want “a brave new world” or a “great leap forward”—if we have any sense. And so, sometimes our anxiety is telling us something we need to take cognizance of. Our post-modernity has moved from a modernity governed by big ideology to an age of interpretation, which is, of its nature, a pluralistic age, as interpretation brings multiple perspectives to bear. This is a good thing though. It enjoins us to dialogue with one another and to proceed on that basis, rather than, as in “the good old days,” to enforce a “solution” from on high.
It is in terms of this dialogical situation of an age of interpretation that we now approach the work of enchantment.
Notes
1. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1996), 122.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1989), 62–3.
3. The original quote is in Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1981), 34. The short sentence I have quoted is actually a misquote, in as much as it only approximates a phrase from a longer sentence which itself is not usually quoted in full. The complete sentence is: “The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” Adorno came back to this topic on three different occasions: in the Negative Dialektik, in Ohne Leitbild, and in Noten zur Literatur IV. Page references are to the Gesammelte Schriften, where more details can be found: Prismen, vol. 10a, p. 30 (1955); Negative Dialektik, vol. 06, pp. 355–6; Ohne Leitbild, vol. 10a, pp. 452–3; Noten zur Literatur IV, vol. 11, p. 603. (My thanks to Dr. Frederik van Gelder, Institut fuer Sozialforschung, Frankfurt University for this note.)
4. Adorno, Metaphysics:Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2001), 434. (Henceforth: Metaphysics)
5. Ibid., 435.
6. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1990), 8.
7. Adorno’s “negative dialectics”—even from the name we can see—turns Hegel not just upside down, like Marx claimed, but inside out as well.
8. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 373.
9. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2003), 293. Brechtian, perhaps because both self-effacing and reconstructive. Or Brechtian, more possibly, because of the level of uncertainty carried by characters; a bit like Keats’ “negative capability”—the capacity we ought to have, especially if we are religious, to live with questions and, indeed, to live off them. Any religion worth its salt, any metaphysics too, must do that, and Adorno surely means as much by “metaphysical experience.”
10. Levinas, Proper Names, 119.
11. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961).
12. Levinas, Proper Names, 4.