The next passage is aswarm with allusion. Adorno’s polemic is fiercer than ever, but each blow comes gloved in an underexplained citation. Reading these sentences is a lot like watching a scholar throw books at his rivals from out of a high library window. The spectacle is entertaining enough, and it’s pretty clear that someone is about to get beaned, but it would be nice even so to know what has got the book-bombardier so exercised and why he’s chosen to lob these particular titles. The best thing I can do under these circumstances is to annotate Adorno’s missiles. Here’s the passage:
This [the aura] is accompanied by the assurance that it is non-binding, which makes it freely and flexibly available for many different uses, or to put it in the paramilitary lingo of the day: ready for action. The standing complaint that the jargon files against reification is itself reified. It, the jargon, falls under Richard Wagner’s definition of a “special effect,” which he associated with bad art: that it is an effect without a cause. The man deserted by the spirit speaks in mechanical tongues. The insinuated and nonexistent mystery is actually an open secret. The expressionist slogan “every man is chosen” comes from a play by Paul Kornfeld, who was murdered by the Nazis; but once you discount the counterfeit Dostoevsky, all it is good for is the ideological self-satisfaction of a petty bourgeoisie that has been threatened and humiliated by developments in society.
Now for some annotations. Let’s start with “the man deserted by the spirit.”
1) Jaspers and Marx: The first point to bear in mind is that some widespread versions of German existentialism had a strongly Protestant cast. Karl Jaspers, in particular, was a Protestant through and through — that’s biographically true, but it is also altogether obvious from his writing. It would be misleading, in fact, to say only that Jaspers set out to devise a Protestant existentialism. That formulation would understate the case. Let us say, rather, that Jaspers constructed Existenzphilosophie as a kind of secularized Protestantism — a philosophical program whose deepest insight is that the very structure of human experience is Protestant. Jaspers can to that extent do away with the really existing Protestant dominations — he never presses his readers to convert to Lutheranism, nor does he imply that he is writing for already Protestant readers — because his philosophy’s central finding is that there are no non-Protestant options. Existence itself is evangelical. You can thus tell whether you’d find it worth reading Jaspers by asking yourself first whether you’d be amused by his particular ingenuity — the inventiveness of a smart person arriving over and over again at Protestant positions via non-theological and non-scriptural means.
Jaspers, then, was yet another German intellectual writing in defense of spirit, Geist, though to be fair, he tended to sidestep the word — the word but not the idea. At the heart of Jaspers’s program is a familiar dualism. Science can tell us a lot about the material world, but it will never be able to account for our experience and especially for the open horizon against which we are compelled to make choices: what kind of person you’re going to be; what you’re going to care about; what to do with the rest of your day. That’s the domain of the spirit — the thing that science (or sociology or behaviorist psychology) can’t get at. Philosophy itself can’t tell you what to choose; its role is precisely to bring into view the freedom with which you elect your commitments. Jaspers stands near the end of a long line of German intellectuals who opposed Germany’s headlong industrialization in the late nineteenth century, including the reform of the that country’s educational system to introduce a lot more STEM. The older intellectuals — the ones who wanted to defend the old humanities education, often on something like liberal-arts grounds — tended to talk about Kultur and Bildung and Geist: culture and self-cultivation and spirit, and the easiest way to tell the difference between Jaspers and his sometime friend Heidegger is to realize that Jaspers’s Existenz has absorbed those three terms and Heidegger’s Sein really hasn’t.
The other thing to notice is that Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity has a subtitle, which the old English-language edition, however, omits: Zur deutschen Ideologie, “On the German Ideology.” That’s a reference back to Marx, obviously — an unusually bald one for Adorno — but why this is suddenly relevant will now require explaining in turn. The German Ideology was the second of two books that the young Marx wrote, with Engels help, attacking the Left Hegelians of the 1840s — attacking, in other words, his friends and allies and mentors. Now the Left Hegelian that Marx was closest to was Bruno Bauer, the Protestant theologian turned radical democrat under whom Marx had planned to write his Habilitation or second doctoral dissertation. (This is worth dwelling on: for a period, Marx was planning on getting an advanced degree in Protestant theology.) The positions for which Bauer became famous in the 1840s were twofold:
1) that Hegelianism properly understood committed a person to radical democracy or even to something rather like anarchism, the self-organization of the multitude beyond law or fixed political institutions; Hegelian Geist — spirit or mind — turns out to be a name for a network capable of reflecting on itself and setting its own ends, though once he had declared himself an atheist, Bauer came to prefer the word Bewusstsein, “consciousness,” presumably to avoid the Christian connotations of the word Geist (mind-spirit-ghost);
2) that radical Protestantism is the closest you can get to geistige democracy while still falling short of the real thing; that a Hegelian anarchism is the apotheosis of Protestantism, the next step beyond Quakerdom and Anabaptism and the hotter versions of Lutheranism; the point not to miss is that Bauer thought that anyone who wasn’t Protestant first was going to have trouble living in a radically democratic, self-governing society — that the path to revolution ran through Protestantism.
And it was on this point that Marx most obviously broke with Bauer. The very first sentence of The Holy Family — Marx’s first book against the Left Hegelians — says that “real humanism in Germany has no enemy more dangerous than that spiritualism which puts ‘Geist‘ or ‘self-consciousness’ in the place of the real, individual person.” The word Spiritualismus stands out in German and makes clear that what Marx (and Engels) had in mind were the more extreme Protestant sects, the ones who, in their efforts to strip away all the mediations standing in between them and God, began to downplay even Scripture. If what you want is a living relationship with God, then maybe the Bible itself is just another distraction, a verbal idol and icon. Maybe you don’t need to be a reader to get close to God. What Marx and Engels are saying, then, is that Bauer and his followers have turned radical democracy into a Pentecostal politics, a just barely secularized evangelicalism. The democracy that had told you it was for everyone turns out on closer inspection to be reserved for Methodists.