CHIARELLO, Maurício Garcia. O Mal Na Trama da razão

8/19/2019 CHIARELLO, Maurício Garcia. O Mal Na Trama da razão.

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K R I T E R I O N

REVISTA DE FILOSOFIAFundada em 1947

REVISTA FINANCIADA COM RECURSOS DO

MCT

Programa de Apoio a Publicações Científicas

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K R I T E R I O N

REVISTA DE FILOSOFIA

Departamento de Filosofia da Faculdade de Filosofia eCiências Humanas da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

VOLUME XL

Nº 100 julho a dezembro/1999

KRITERION B.HORIZONTE V.XL Nº 100 P. 1-118 Jul/99 a Dez/99

Belo Horizonte Minas Gerais Brasil

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FICHA CATALOGRÁFICA

Kriterion, Revista de Filosofia, v. 1 - , 1947 - BeloHorizonte, Departamento de Filosofia da Faculdadede Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da UFMG

v. ilust. 23 cm. semestral

Título anterior: Kriterion, Revista da Faculdade deFilosofia da Universidade de Minas Gerais.

1. Filosofia - Periódicos

CDDCDU

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SUMÁRIO

APRESENTAÇÃO ................................................................................................................. 7

ARTIGOS............................................................................................................................... 9

Is Experience Still in Crisis?Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament .............................................. 9Martin Jay

Niilismo e autoconhecimento:Descartes em uma perspectiva benjaminiana ........................................ 26Olgária Matos

Observadores paradoxais, testemunhas imaginárias: Reflexõessobre uma teoria contemporânea da cultura de massa ......................... 44Gerhard Schweppenhäuser

O Mal na Trama da Razão: Breve apreciaçãoda obra de Max Horkheimer em seu conjunto ...................................... 57Maurício Garcia Chiarello

Expression as a philosophical attitude in Adorno ................................. 81Rodrigo Duarte

Arquitetura na Modernidade:reflexões a partir de Theodor Adorno ................................................... 98Silke Kapp

RESENHAS ....................................................................................................................... 111

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7

Desde o texto programático de 1937, de Max Horkheimer, “Teoria tradi-cional e teoria crítica” a questão da historicidade do conhecimento — já pre-sente em tantos autores da tradição filosófica — foi recolocada de um modobastante enfático, tendo em vista os eventos que marcaram a virada do século

dezenove para o vinte: a progressiva transformação do antigo capitalismoconcorrencial num modelo monopolista e os seus reflexos na geopolítica in-ternacional — com o advento da primeira guerra mundial, da Revolução Russa,etc. — e no plano cultural (as vanguardas artísticas, por um lado, e o surgimentoda indústria cultural, por outro).

O próprio projeto de se engendrar uma “teoria crítica” — com a enormeredundância que o termo comporta, pois, na verdade, em tempos menos som-brios, toda teoria seria naturalmente crítica — sempre esteve perpassado poruma grande consciência filosófica a respeito da especificidade do momentovivido por aqueles intelectuais de esquerda — em grande parte de origem

judaica — que, no momento mesmo em que inciavam sua fuga da persegui-ção nazista, transformavam o caráter marxista mais ortodoxo da primeiraversão do Institut für Sozialforschung, fundada ainda no início dos anos vin-te, e mudaram irreversivelmente também a fisionomia do cenário intelectualeuropeu e norte americano do entre-guerras e do período posterior.

Na situação extremamente complexa que precede uma nova virada deséculo — dessa vez também de milênio — , seria interessante pensar emrecolocar a questão da historicidade do conhecimento de um modo que nãoexcluísse a própria Teoria Crítica. Desse modo, poderíamos perguntar: elaresistiu aos acontecimentos que marcaram as últimas décadas, como o fim do

“socialismo real” e o conseqüente término da “guerra fria”, sem excluir tam-bém o vertiginoso desenvolvimento tecnológico engedrado pela informática?A meu ver, essa pergunta só pode ser respondida afirmativamente, pois, mes-mo num contexto que lhe é extremamente adverso — marcado pela políticaneoliberal e pelo crescente predomínio de filosofias despotencializadas, como

Apresentação

1 Esse texto foi apresentado no evento “The Actuality of Adorno”, promovido por Martin Jay em março de 1997, naUniversidade da Califórnia em Berkeley e até o presente permanecerá inédito.

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a filosofia analítica e o pragmatismo — , a Teoria Crítica continuou se desen-volvendo em todo o mundo e sua grande influência faz-se sentir também noBrasil — país em que cresce paulatina porém continuamente o interesse pela

chamada “Escola de Frankfurt”.Uma mostra do vigor da Teoria Crítica hoje é o conjunto de ensaios reu-

nidos nessa edição especial de Kritérion, que apresenta as reflexões de pes-quisadores brasileiros e estrangeiros que não apenas se especializaram emautores como Adorno, Horkheimer ou Benjamin, mas que se mostram tam-bém profundamente imbuídos do espírito da Teoria Crítica.

Dentre os estrangeiros, encontram-se o norte-americano Martin Jay —pioneiro no estudo sistemático da “Escola de Frankfurt” — e o alemão GerhardSchweppenhäuser — talentoso representante de uma tendência que, após orefluxo habermasiano, procura restabelecer o que há de melhor na TeoriaCrítica propriamente dita. O primeiro retoma, de modo em tudo brilhante, adiscussão de um dos temas mais importantes da crítica frankfurtiana: o con-ceito de experiência. Schweppenhäuser, num texto excelentemente traduzidodo alemão por Georg Otte, se contrapõe à acusação de que a Teoria Críticanão é suficientemente dialogal — que isolaria as mais importantes discussõesno âmbito de suas próprias fileiras — e exibe um possível e frutífero diálogoentre Adorno e Luhmann sobre a cultura de massa.

Entre os brasileiros, Olgária Matos apresenta o belo texto que nos ensinacomo ler Descartes a partir das indagações benjaminianas sobre o drama bar-

roco alemão, lançando nova luz sobre trechos, cujas conseqüências totais nãopoderiam ser atingidas pelas leituras tradicionais. Vemos também MaurícioChiarello indicar, com muito talento, a unidade da obra de Horkheimer aolongo de sua carreira — unidade que, como se sabe, é freqüentementeconstestada por influentes intérpretes. O meu próprio texto, escrito original-mente em Inglês1 procura pôr em relêvo o conceito de expressão não apenascomo termo-chave da filosofia madura de Adorno, mas como uma caracterís-tica de todo o pensamento filosófico — digno do nome — em geral. Umexcelente exemplo da aplicabilidade da estética derivada da Teoria Crítica édado por Silke Kapp ao apresentar seu texto sobre a Arquitetura moderna a

partir da filosofia de Theodor W. Adorno.Se essa coleção de ensaios contribuir para divulgar a Teoria Crítica, bem

como dar uma pequena mostra do seu vigor no âmbito de circulação de umarevista acadêmica como a Kritérion, considero que os seus objetivos terãosido plenamente atingidos.

Belo Horizonte, dezembro de 1999

Rodrigo Duarte

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9

IS EXPERIENCE STILL IN CRISIS? REFLECTIONS ON A

FRANKFURT SCHOOL LAMENT

Martin Jay 1

RESUMO Levando em consideração as diferenças e semelhanças no pensamento de Adorno, Benjamin e, em certa medida, Heidegger, esse artigodiscute motivos associados à chamada “perda da experiência”. Com esseobjetivo, são abordadas as seguintes questões: quando a experiência entrouem crise; se isso foi um acontecimento ou processo propriamente históricocausado por um trauma como o estado de guerra mundial ou se está em

pauta algo mais ontológico; se há uma noção coerente e unificada de experi-ência, tal como ocorre no “lamento” frankfurtiano, ou se o termo funcionade diferentes modos em diferentes contextos e, pressupondo-se que acepçõesdiferentes devem ser discernidas, se se pode dizer que todas elas foramatrofiadas no mesmo grau ou mesmo se foram definitivamente atrofiadasdefinitivamente no momento atual.

ABSTRACT Taking into account the differences and similarities inthe thought of Adorno, Benjamin and, in some extent, Heidegger, this article

discusses the issues connected to the so-called “decay of experience”. For this purpose, the following questions are approached: when experience cameinto crisis; whether this constitutes an actual historical event of process, caused by a trauma such a global warfare, or whether there is something moreontological at issue; if there is a coherent and unified notion of experiencecan be assumed as concerns the Frankfurt School “lament”, or if the word

ARTIGOS


1 Professor at History Department - University of California at Berkeley.

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10 Martin Jay

functions in different ways in different contexts; and, provided that different acceptations are to be discerned, if we can say that all of them have withered to the same degree or even withered at all at the present time.

Let me begin with two quotations: I) “The identity of experience in theform of a life that is articulated and possesses internal continuity – and thatlife was the only thing that made the narrator’s stance possible – hasdisintegrated. One need only note how, impossible it would be for someonewho participated in the war to tell stories about it the way people used to tellstories about their adventures”2 . 2)The war is “as totally divorced fromexperience as is the functioning of a machine from the movement of the body,which only begins to resemble it in pathological states.... Life has changedinto a timeless succession of shocks, interspersed with empty, paralyzedintervals... The total obliteration of the war by information, propagandacommentaries, with cameramen in the first tanks and war reporters dyingheroic deaths, the mishmash of enlightened manipulation of’public opinionand oblivious activity; all this is another expression for the withering of experience, the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fatelies”3 .

For those conversant with the history of Critical Theory, the lamentexpressed in these two citations will immediately sound familiar. If asked toidentify their source, they would be likely to point to Walter Benjamin’scelebrated essay of 1936 “The Storyteller” in which the first World War isblamed for starting a process that has impoverished something calledexperience (Erfahrung, not, for reasons to be discussed shortly, Erlebnis). Itis here, after all that one finds the now familiar lines: “for never has experiencebeen contracted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare,economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare,moral experience by those in power”4 . Such an attribution would be logical,

but in fact, wrong, for the first citation is from an essay written in 1954 byAdorno, entitled “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary, Novel”

2 Theodor W. Adorno, “‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”.Notes to Literature , vol. II,trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New, York, 1992), p. 31.

3 Theodor W. Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life , trans. EF- N. Jephcott (London,1974), p. 54-55.

4 Waltcr Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations , ed. HannahArendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), p. 84.

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and reprinted in Notes to Literature; the second comes from the aphonsm“Out of the Firing Line” written in 1944 and published in Minima Moralia in1951. The war in question is thus not the first word war, but the second; the

argument, however, is exactly the same. What Adorno has done is simplyrecycle Benjamin’s claim that narrative continuity- and with it a certain notionof experience have heen shattered hy tit itriumatic shocks and generalunintelligibility of modern warfare.

I draw attention to this recycling not to undermine any claim to Adorno’soriginality, an issue of no great significance, but rather to pose the question:when exactly did something called experience come into crisis? Was it anactual historical event of process, caused by a trauma like global warfare, oris something more ontological at issue? Is there, moreover, a coherent andunified notion of experience assumed by the lament, or does the word functionin different ways in different contexts? And if different acceptations are to bediscerned, can we say that all of them have withered to the same degree oreven withered at all at the present time?

The assumption that something historical has indeed happened to undercutthe possibility of experience would seem to inform many of the FrankfurtSchool’s formulations of the problem. It is in the work of Adorno that theymost frequently appear. 5 Thus, for example, in Aesthetic Theory, he wouldwrite “The marrow of experience has bcen sucked out; there is none, not eventhat apparently, set at a remove from commerce, that has not been gnawed

away”.6

Likewise, in his 1960 essay “Presuppositions” he would claim thatin the modernist writing of Joyce and Proust one can see “the dying out of experience, something that ultimately goes back to the atemporal technifiedprocess of the production of material goods”7 . And in his essay of the previousyear, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture”, he would complain that experience, whichhe defined in almost Burkean terms as “the continuity of consciousness inwhich everything not present survives, in which practice and associationestablish tradition in the individual”has now been “replaced by the selective,disconnected, interchangeable and ephemeral state of being informed which,as one can already observe, will promptly be cancelled by other information”8 .

5 There is, in fact, a considerable discussion in German of Adorno’s concept of experience. See, for example;Hans-Hartmut Kappner, Die Bildungstheorie Adornos als Theorie der Erfahrung von Kultur und Kunst (Frankfurt, 1984); Peter Kalkowski, Adornos Erfahrung: zur Kritik der Kritischen Theorie ( Frankfurt, 1988);Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung: Zur Rationalität des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno (Frank-furt, 1989).

6 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minncapolis,1997), p. 31.

7 Adorno, “Presuppositions: On the Occasion of a Reading by Hans G. Helms.”Notes to Literature , vol. II, p.101.

8 Adorno. “Theory of Pseudo-culture.” Telos , 95 (spring, 1993), p. 33.

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Attempts to revive a robust variety of experience in the present, Adornowould moreover argue, are doomed to failure, especially when they seek torecover an alleged ur-experience that is somehow deeper than the mediations

of culture and society. In The Jargon of Authenticity, he would mock effortsby latter-day adepts of Lebensphilosophie to reenchant the world:

The contrast between primal experiences and cultural experiences, which [Fredrich]Gundolf invented ad hoc, for [Stefan] George, was ideology in the midst of superstructure, devised for the purpose of obscuring the contrast betweeninfrastructure and ideology....[Ernst] Bloch rightfully made fun of Gundolf for hisbelief in today’s primal experiences. These primal experiences were a warmed-overpiece of expressionism. They were later made into a permanent institution byHeidegger....In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primaryterms is culturally preformed9 .

Here experience is understood more in terms of Erlebnis than Erfahrungas pre-reflective immediacy without narrative continuity, over time, but thepoint is the same: it is no longer available to us. As Adorno wrote in an essayof 1967 on the poetry of Rudolf Borchardt, “the poetic subject that did notwant to give itself over to something alien to it had become the victim of whatwas most alien of all, the conventions of the long exhausted Erlebnislyrik [poetry of experience]... The ideology of primal experience that Gundolf promulgated on George’s behalf is refuted by Borchardt’s poetic practice”10 .

There is, in short, an implied sense of loss of something that once existedand has been seriously damaged, if not entirely destroyed in the present.Variously attributed to the traumas of world war, modern technologies of information, and the “atemporal, technified process of the production of ma-terial goods” which seems another way to say capitalist industrialization, thedecay, of something called experience is for Adorno an index of the generalcrisis of modern life.

How far back the roots of the crisis may go will be clearer if we turnbriefly to the even more frequent bemoaning of the decay of experience inBenjamin, who provided, as we have seen, an inspiration for many of Adorno’sown ruminations on this theme. There is an enormous literature on the questionof experience in Benjamin, which has culminated, at least for the moment, inHowvard Caygill’s just published Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience.11

9 Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity , trans. Knut Tanowski and Frederic Will (London, 1973), p. 99. Whetheror not Adorno was accurate in characterizing Heidegger’s notion of experience in these terms is debatable.

10 “Adorno, “Charmed Language. On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt,” Notes to Literature , vol. II, p. 205.

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Drawing on the hitherto ignored fragments of Benjamin’s earliest writingson perception, visuality and color, Caygill has constructed a carefully nuancedaccount of his lifelong preoccupation with the possibility of reviving a lost

experience. Prior to the articulation of that project in linguistic terms, in suchessays as “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” of 1916 and “Onthe Program of the Coming Philosophy” of 1918, Benjamin, he shows,experimented with expressing it in visual terms12 . Reaching back behind Kant’srestriction of experience to merely what is filtered through the synthetic apriori function of the understanding, the young Benjamin sought a franklymetaphysical alternative in the more immediate perception of pre-reflectiveintuition. According to Caygill, “Benjamin’s speculative recasting of Kant’stranscendental account of experience involves the introduction of the absoluteor infinite into the structure of forms of intuition – space and time – and thelinguistic categories (logoi) of the understanding. Benjamin sought to avoidboth Kant’s scission of experience and the absolute and what he regarded asHegel’s ‘mysticism of brute force’ which for him reduced the absolute byexpressing it in terms of the categories of finite experience”13 .

Color as opposed to form was parlicularly important in this quest becauseof its infinite divisibility, which eludes the categorizing reifications of a merelyepistemological relation to the world, based on the rigid distinction of subjectand object. In a fragment written in 1914-1915, entitled “A Child’s View of Color”, Benjamin contended that “color is something spiritual, something

whose clarity is spiritual, so that when colors are mixed they produced nuancesof color, not a blur. The rainbow is a pure childlike image”14 . Benjamin’ssubsequent valorization of romantic aesthetic criticism, in particular the workof Schlegel and Novalis, is foreshadowed here in his celebration of childlikevision and the spiritual presence of infinity in co1or. When in his later work,he turned toward modern, urban experience, largely characterized in negativeterms as a fallen realm of shock-like, discontinuous Erlebnisse, he still soughttraces or prefigurations of the redeemed Erfahrung which he had glimpsed inhis earliest ruminations on visual intuition. Never abandoning his quest forwhat Caygill rightly calls “a non-Hegelian account of speculative

experience”15 , Benjamin believed that the absolute could somehow be revealed

11 Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London, l998). For references to earlierliterature on the question and my own attempt to make some sense of it, see “Experience without aSubject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel”. In: Martin Jay. Cultural Semantics: Keywords of the Age (Amherst.Mass., l998).

12 The relevant essays are now available in Benjamin, Selected Writings , vol. I, 1913-l926, ed. Marcus Bullockand Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

13 Caygill, Walter Benjamin , p. 23.14 Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color”, Selected Writings , p. 50.

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through an immanent critique of even the most mundane of phenomena. Thus,he avoided the paralysis of nostalgia based on a simple inversion of the modelof unidirectional progress he so tellingly criticized.

How successful Benjamin’s quest actually was is, of course, a matter of some dispute, as many of Benjamin’s redemptive readings, like his politicalcommitments, seem more like wishful thinking than anything else. So too theprecise chronology of the fall from grace with which he tacitly worked is notfully coherent. At times, it seems as if Benjamin was making a typical Romanticargument about the loss of childhood innocence that would have doneWordsworth proud, an argument that is inherently ahistorical. At other times,he seemed to be saying that the fall came when the world of mimeticsimilarities, in which nature was a legible text, was supplanted by a deadworld of deanimated objects to be scrutinized by the scientific gaze and givenphilosophical justification by Kant’s desiccated epistemology. Here hiscelebrated argument about the Baroque as a period of mourning for the lostwholeness represented in Greek tragedy, a period of allegorical rather thansymbolic representation, suggests that the absolute had already been drivenout of experience and the infinite abjected from the finite by the 17th century.The technological transformations of more recent years, leading to the loss of the ritual, cultic aura around earlier art, thus merely continued and intensifieda change that had begun much earlier. The unevenness of the process is shown,however, by his claim in “The Storyteller” essay that Nicolai Leskov, a writer

of the 19th

century, was still able to convey genuine Erfahrungen in his talesin a fashion no longer available in the modern novel. Perhaps Russia was stillthe site of a ritualized, communal life allowin the narrative transmission fromone generation to the next that was one expression of genuine Erfahrung. If so, Benjamin would not have been alone in finding an exception to the rule inRussian literature, another obvious example being the Dostoyevisky extolledby Lukács in his Theory of the Novel.

Be that as it may, Benjamin bequeathed to Adorno a strong belief in theimportance of experience, once freed from its empiricist arid Kantianlimitations, as a locus of possible redemption, a place in which something

called “the absolute” might make an appearance. His exaltation of color evenfound an occasional echo, as in the remark in Negative Dialectics that “theresistance to the fungible world of barter is the resistance of the eye that doesnot want the colors of the world to fade”16 . Benjamin also gave Adorno, aswe have seen, an unexamined assumption that at some indeterminant time in

15 Caygill, Walter Benjamin , p. 8.16 Theodor W. Adorno. Negative Dialectics , trans. E.B. Ashton (New. fork, 1973). p. 405.

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the past, actual lived experience came closer to this condition than it doestoday. Since that time a kind of fall from grace had occurred, causing experiencein this metaphysical sense to “decay” or “wither”. Such a fall needed, to be

sure, to be read dialectically in the hope that something of what was lostmight still be lurking in the debris, or even brought into the world anew withthe fresh vision of every child.

Where Adorno, however, moved away from Benjamin was in his greatersympathy for Hegel’s conceptualization of experience, which demonstratedhis links with the other philosophers al the Frankfurt Institute. Perhaps thedifference is best shown in his defense of Hegel against the attack launchedby Martin Heideggcr in the latter’s Holzwege of l95017 . Without wanting toconflate Benjamin and Heidegger, who were in many respects very different,on the issue of experience they shared certain similar inclinations.18 Bothwere, for example, hostile to the privileging of immediate “lived experience”or Erlebnis in Lebensphilosophie; both were against the reduction of experienceto an epistemological category in the Kantian or empiricist sense; and bothwere anxious to transcend psychologistic subjectivism and restore a notion of experience prior to the split between subject and object. Heidegger, like Ben-

jamin, was determined to return to more fundamental levels of truth, whetherthey be called the metaphysical absolute or the ontological real, than thetradition of disenchanted, secular humanism had allowed.

In Holzwege, Heidegger juxtaposes passages from Hegel’s

Phenomenology of spirit with extended commentaries on their significance.He highlights the fact that Hegel had first called the work “Science of theExperience of Consciousness”, and argues that his version of phenomenologyis still deeply indebted to that project. Heidegger foregrounds Hegel’s non-commonsensical definition of experience, which reads as follows: “thisdialectical movement, which consciousness exercises on itself – on itsknowledge as well as its object – is, in so far as the new, true object emergesto consciousness as the result of it, precisely, that which is called experience”19 .

17 The relevant section is translated as Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (New York, l970).For a suggestive commentary, see Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1986), chapter 6.

18 All of Benjamin’s recorded reactions to Heidegger, were critical; Heidegger seems to have been unawareof Benjamin’s work. Nonelheless, similarities between Heidegger and Benjamin were first stressed byHannah Arendt in her controversial introduction to Benjamin Illuminations . For more recent attempts to seeparallels, as well as some distinctions, see Howard Caygill, “Benjamin, Heidegger and the Destruction ofTradition” and Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger Showing the Present”, in:Andrew Benjamin and Pete Osborne (eds.), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience (London, 1994). For discussions of the differences between the two, see Richard Wolin, Walter Beneamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption , 2nd ed. (Berkeley, l994), p. 102; and Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, 1998), p.2.

19 Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience , p. 112.


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Glossing this passage, Heidegger claims that Hegel means by “experience”the “Being of beings... Experience now is the word of Being, since Being isapprehended by way of beings qua beings”20 . Here he seems to be assimilating

Hegel’s position in his own.But then Heidegger adds that for Hegel, “Experience designates the

subject’s subjectness. Experience expresses what ‘being’ in the term “beingconscious” means – in such a way that only by this “being” does it becomeclear and binding what the word ‘conscious’ leaves still to thought21 . Thus,Hegel’s notion of experience remains hostage to that fateful privileging of thesubject that Heidegger found so distressing in modern metaphysics. This biasis revealed, Heidegger continues, because experience for Hegel involved thepresentation of an appearance for a consciousness, a manifestation of beingto a subject in the present. In fact, Hegel’s dialectical method is itself groundedin a still subjective view of experience: “Hegel does not conceive of experiencedialectically”, Heidegger writes, “He thinks of dialectic in terms of the natureof experience. Experience is the beingness of beings, whose determination,qua subjectum, is determined in terms of subjectness”22 . The ultimate subjectfor Hegel is, of course, the Absolute Spirit. Thus, Heidegger writes that forHegel, “experience is the subjectness of the absolute subject. Experience, thepresentation of the absolute representation, is the parousia of the Absolute.Experience is the absoluteness of the Absolute, its appearance in absolvingappearance to itself ”23 .

Heidegger concedes that Hegel understood that natural consciousnesslacks this more exalted, metaphysical notion of experience, because it igno-res the deeper question of Being. But the way in which the Hegelian Absoluteexteriorizes itself and re-collects itself at a higher level produces thequestionable claim that the experience of consciousness lends itself a postfacto scientific recapitulation. Significantly, Heidegger points out,“experience” occupies the middle position between “science” and“consciousness” in the title “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”,which indicates that for Hegel, “experience, as the being of consciousness, isin itself the inversion by which consciousness presents itself in its appearance.

That is to say: in making the presentation, experience is science” 24 .Heidegger concludes by speculating on the reasons Hegel dropped this

original title shortly before the book was published and substituted

20 Ibid, p. l14.21 Ibid.22 Ibid., p. l19.23 Ibid., p. l20-121.24 Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience , p. 139.

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“phenomenology of spirit” instead. Noting that for Kant, “experience” hadmerely meant “the only possible theoretical know-ledge of what is”, he hazardsthe guess that Hegel had found it too clarify to restore an earlier meaning: “a

reaching out and attaining, and attaining as the mode of being present, of einai, of Being.”25 Perhaps because this failure of nerve, Hegel had not quiteattained the level of insight into Being Heidegger ascribed to his own thought.His sympathetic interpreter Robert Bernasconi summarizes the essentialdifferences between the two thinkers in the following terms: “‘Experience’ inHeidegger does not have the sense of a progressive development as it has inHegel. For Heidegger, experience almost always takes place in the face of alack.... For the phenomenological thinking of Heidegger, a lack or defaultgives access to being.... The difference between Hegel’s concept of experienceand Heidegger’s is that the former is tied to the rule of presencing and thelatter commemorates it. Phenmmenology, for Hegel is a parousia, whereasfor Heidegger it is letting the nonapparent appear as nonapparent”26 .

Commemorating what has been lost – the oblivion of Being in Heidegger’scase – rather than celebrating presence as the cumulative realization of asuccessful (dialectical process is reminiscent of Benjamin’s critique of Hegelian memory as Er-innerung, a too harmonious re-membering in thepresent of what had been sundered in the past. A commonality betweenHeidegger and Benjamin might also be found in the recognition in both theirwork of the etymological link between Erfahrung and Gefahr , the danger that

must be encountered in the perilous journey that is experience (which has theLatin experiri in its root, giving us as well the English word “peril”.), a dangerthat in the modern period is perhaps best revealed in the context of technologywith its destructive as well as emancipatory potential. And both thinkers werearguably at one in their (dissatisfaction with Hegel’s contention that knowledgeor science (Wissenschaft ) can be perfectly reconciled with experience, anassumption that rests, as Hans Georg Gadamer was to claim in Truth and

Method , on the solipsistic nature of the Hegelian subject who ultimatelyabsorbs into himself the object and never really has an encounter with what istruly different and alien to him27 .

Such an encounter was, of course, also the earmark of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which sought to avoid Idealism’s coercive sublation of differenceand to preserve the non-identity of subject and object. His own interpretation of Hegel’s notion of experience was designed, however, to resist the ontological

25 Ibid., p. 143.26 Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History’ of Being , p. 83-85.27 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, l986), p. 318-3l9,


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interpretation of Heidegger’s Holzwege and brush Hegel against the grain, findingin him what both Heidegger and Benjamin had claimed he denied. Adornodeliberately began the essay entitled “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s

Philosophy”, first published in 1959 and included in the 1963 collection Hegel:Three Studies, by distancing himself from Heidegger’s reading:

The concept [of experience] is not intended to capture phenomenological ‘ur-experience’; nor, like the interpretation of Hegel in Heidegger’s Holzwege, is itintended to get at something ontological....His thought would never have ratifiedHeidegger’s claim that ‘The new object that arises for consciousness in the courseof its formation’ is ‘not just any-thing that is true, or any particular being, but is thetruth of what is true; the Being of Beings, the appearance of appearance.’ Hegelwould have never called that experience; instead for Hegel, what experience isconcemed with at any particular moment is the animating contradiction of suchabsolute truth.28

If experience for Hegel is more than the presubjective “event” or“appropriation” (Ereignis in Heidegger’s special lexicon) of Being, it is alsonot the unmediated sense perception assumed by empiricists like Hume.Experience is not for Hegel something undergone by the isolated individual,but entails the interdependency of subjects with each other and with the world.Nor, and this is even more important, is it equivalent to the science of knowledge, the Wissenschaft that was its tombstone: “by no means does theexperiential content of idealism simply coincide with its epistemological and

metaphysical positions”29

. Tacitly respecting the limits on knowledge placedby his predecessor Kant, even as he ultimately hoped to overcome them, Hegelidentified experience precisely with the obstacles to full transparency presentedby the contradictions in reality, not merely, in thought. According to Adorno,Nietzsche’s claim that “there is nothing in reality that would correspond strictlywith logic”30 captures Hegel’s notion of experience better than attempts, suchas those of orthodox Dialectical Materialists, to impose dialectical reasononto the world without remainder. in fact, it is the recognition of contradictionin society, the idea of antagonistic totality, that allows Hegel to move beyondabsolute idealism.

Hegel, to be sure, had wrongly thought his philosophy, could encompassthe wholc and reveal its truth. But, Adorno argued, “even where Hegel fliesin the lace of experience, including the experience that motivates his ownphilosophy, experience speaks from him... the idea of a positivity that can

28 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies ; trans. Shierry Weber- Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 53.29 Ibid., p. 61.30 Cited in Ibid., p. 76.

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master everything that opposes it through the superior power of acomprehending spirit is the minor image in the experience of the superiorcoercive force inherent in everything that exists by virtue of its consolidation

under domination. This is the truth in Hegel’s untruth”31 . Another unintendedtruth, one with a veery different implication, is revealed, Adorno continued ina later essay on Hegel’s opaque style32 , in the tension between his desire towork entirely with concepts adequate to their objects and the linguistic mediumthrough which he necessarily expressed them. That is, “in Hegel the expressiveelement represents experience; that which actually wants to come out into theopen, but cannot, if it wants to attain necessity, appear except in the mediumof concepts, which is fundamentally its opposite... The whole of Hegel’sphilosophy is an effort to translate intellectual experience into concepts”33 .But the medium of its expression inevitably interferes with this goal, for“thought, which necessarily moves awav from the text, from what is said, hasto return to it and become condensed within it. John Dewey, a contemporarythinker who for all his positivism is closer to Hegel than their two allegedstandpoints are to one another, called his philosophy ‘experimentalism’.Something in this stance is appropriate for the reader of Hegel”34 .

Adorno’s surprising reference to Dewey, whose pragmatism the Frank-furt School often disparaged, suggests a certain counter-current in Adorno’sthought to the lament about the virtually complete withering of experience,for Dewey was cautiously optimistic about the possibilities of genuine

experience at the present time. Adorno, to be sure, resisted Dewey’sidentification of experiment with its scientific variety, preferring instead theliterary essay, which “invests experience with as much substance as traditionaltheory does mere categories”35 . But that substance, he clamed, involves anopening to what is new, rather than a ratification of what has been. “WhatKant saw, in terms of content as the goal of reason, the creation of humankind,utopia, is hindered by the form of his thought, epistemology. It does not permitreason to go beyond the realm of experience which, in the mechanism of mere material and invariant categories, shrinks to what has aways alreadyexisted. The essay’s object, however, is the new in its newness, not as

something that can be translated back into the old existing forms” 36 .

31 Ibid., p. 87.32 Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel”, in Hegel: Three Studies .33 Ibid., p. 138.34 Ibid., p. 144.35 Adorno, “The Essay as Form”, Notes to Literature , vol. I, p. l0.36 Ibid., p.21. In this passage, Adorno seems to forget the redemptive notion of experience he inherited from

Benjamin and uses the term instead to refer only to the epistemological synthetic a priori judgments ofKant’s first Critique .


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If Adorno shared with Dewey a belief that some sort of experimentationpointing toward the renewal of experience was possible even in the totalizingsystem of domination that he saw as the sinister reversal of Hegel’s dictum

that the “whole was the true” he also agreed that aesthetic experience in par-ticular was its privileged laboratory. In such works as Art and Experience of 1934, “the unique and truly free John Dewey” as Adorno once called him,had ruminated on the significance of aesthetic experience as a model for amore general mode of unalienated existence37 . Although it has sometimesbeen argued, most notably’ by Hans Robert Jauss38 , that Adorno’s ownunderstanding of aesthetic experience was too negatively ascetic and lackingan appreciation of the communicative function of art even in the present“administered world”, it is clear that he shared with Dewey an appreciationof the utopian moment in that experience.

This is not the place to attempt a full-fledged analysis of what Adornomeant by aesthetic experience, but several points warrant emohasis39 .” Firstof all, it should be understood that contrary to the image of him as a mandarinelitist, Adorno never considered aesthetic experience, even that engenderedby the most advanced modernist art, as if it were an entirely protected spherein which the horrors of modern life were somehow successfully kept at bay.As he once wrote in an essay on the great 19th-century realist novel Lost

Illusions, “Balzac knows that artistic experience is not pure, official aestheticsto the contrary; that it can hardly be pure if it is to be experience”40 . Aesthetic

experience at least in this usage, which we might call descriptive rather thannormative, is necessarily impure, because it is damaged by the changes outsideart to which we have already alluded: modern warfare. the replacement of narrative by information, alienating technology and capitalist industrialization.By itself it cannot bring back the world of Benjamin’s story-teller. its truthcontent, Adorno always emphasized, thus had to be brought out by anaccompanying philosophical cum social theoretical analysis that providedthe critical discursive tools that art inevitably lacked.

37 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis,1997). p.335; John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934).

38 Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis,1982), p.13-22.

39 For helpful recent discussions, see Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Exact Imagination. Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.. 1997), and Thomas Kuhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance of Suhiectivity: Essays on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.. 1997).

40 Adorno. “On an Imaginary Feuilleton”, Notes to Literature , vol. II, p.33. In Aesthetic Theory , he makes asimilar point: “no particular aesthetic experience occurs in isolation, independently of the continuity ofexperiencing consciousness....The continuity of aesthetic experience is colored by all other experienceand all knowledge. Though, of course, it is only confirmed and corrected in the actual confrontation with thephenonmenon (p. 268-269).

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But it is also the case that for Adorno, aesthetic experience, howevermaimed, can preserve a certain trace of what existed before, which somehowhas not been completely obliterated. Here he employed “experience” in an

explicitly normative sense. Proust, Adorno claimed, was able to provide analmost Hegelian model of that preservation. For in his work, “undamagedexperience is produced only in memory, far beyond immediacy, and throughmemory aging and death seem to be overcome in the aesthetic image. But thishappiness achieved through the rescue of experience, a happiness that willnot let anything be taken from it, represents an unconditional renunciation of consolation” 41 .

Genuine experience, experience worth rescuing from the damaged varietyof modern life, is thus closely tied to the memory of happiness, whose faintpromise to return is what art is able to offer, as Stendhal, Nietzsche and Marcusehad argued. Significantly, when Adorno answered his own question “What ismetaphysical experience?” in Negative Dialectics, he fell back on Benjamin’sargument about an Adamic, prelapsarian language of mimesis before the fallinto arbitrary language:

If we disdain projecting it upon allegedly primal religious experiences, we are mostlikely to visualize it as Proust did, in the happiness, for instance, that is promised byvillage names like Applebachsville, Wind Gap, or Lords Valley. One thinks thatgoing there would bring the fulfillment, as if there were such a thing....To the childit is self-evident that what delights him in his favorite village is found only there,there alone and nowhere else. He is mistaken; but his mistake creates the model of experience, of a concept that will end up as the concept of the thing itself, not as apoor projection from things42 .

Alhough necessarily a semblance of such a mimetic paradise and not thereal thing – indeed precisely because it is such a semblance Mid knows itself as such – art gestures toward the happiness of genuine metaphysical experience.which is precisely what the current wkorld denies and which the merelyepistemological concept cannot even envisage. It does so paradoxically throughits mimesis of the other, which resists reduction to subjective constitution43 .Experience, as many commentators have used the term, comes only with anencounter with otherness in which the self no longer remains the same. Ador-no would add that to be undamaged that experience must treat the other in anon-dominating, non-subsumptive, non-homogenizing manner.

41 Adorno, “On Proust” Notes to Literature, vol. II, p.317.42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p.373.43 I have attempted to explore some of the implications of mimesis in his work, In: “Mimesis and Mimetology:

Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe”, in Huhn and Zuidevaart, eds., The Semblance of Subjectivity .


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Can such an encounter, however, be with what Benjamin called “theabsolute” in his earliest writings on colors? Certainly, some of the pathos of that claim clings to many of Adorno’s statements about experience and its

decay. which are written from what the famous last aphorism in Minima Moralia called “the standpoint of redemption”44 . We have already noted theclaim in Negative Dialectics that resistance to the world of exchange “is theresistance of the eye that does not want the colors of the world to fade”. As aresult, some commentators have ignored Adorno’s attempts to distance himself from “allegedly primal religious experiences”, and decried what they see asthe “mystical” underpinnings of his concept of experience45 .

But what perhaps indicates the inadequacy of such a reading, and byextension suggests that Adorno was not entirely happy with Benjamin’sformulation of the problem, is his unwillingness to go all the wav towardwhat can be called “experience without a subject” that moment of equiprimordiality prior to the split between self and other. Giorgio Agambenhas noted in his essays on the destruction of experience, Infancy and History,that “in Proust there is no longer really any subject... Here the expropriatedsubject of experience emerges to validate what, from the point of view of science, can appear only as the most radical negation of experience: anexperience with neither subject nor object, absolute46 . Adorno, as we haveseen, may have approvingly invoked Proust’s preservation of childhoodhappiness through memory, but he did not, want to argue, embrace this notion

of absolute experience in which neither subject nor object was preserved. Ashis disdain for Heidegger’s appropriation of Hegel’s “science of the experienceof consciousness” for his own project of the recollection of Being illustrates,Adorno was loath to short-circuit a negative dialectic that preserved somedistinction between the two. The unsublatable dialectic of art and philosophy,like those between mimesis and construction or concept and object, suggestthat even the most metaphysical of experiences for Adorno could not bereduced to perttct reconciliation or the restoration of equiprimordiality. Thus,even the Benjaminian rhetoric of a child’s perception of color is inadequate tohis position, for color is precisely that aspect of visual experience that resides

in the subjective response to objects, not in material objects in themselves.Despite his occasional mobilizing of the rhetoric of Adamic names, as in thepassage cited from Negative Dialectics above. Adorno never relied on mimesis

44 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247.45 Kalkowski, Adorno’s Erfahrung , p. 110-111.46 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience , trans. Liz Heron (London,

1993), p.42.

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alone to provide the model of realized utopia.But such an acknowledgment still does answer the question we posed at

the beginning of this paper: is there a crisis of experience that can be understood

in historical terms, involving a loss of something that once actually existed?Ruminating on the work of Benjamin more than Adorno. Agamben presentsa challenge to the implied assumption that such a condition has ever reallyobtained in some prior Golden ‘Age. He notes that a robust notion of experience. which puts us in touch with the absolute and is prior to thealienations of damaged life, ultimately derives from a fantasy of recoveredinfancy, which he defines as the period of human existence before languageand before history. “In this sense,” he writes,

to experience necessarily means to re-accede to infancy as history’s transcendental

place of origin. The enigma which infancy ushered in for man can be dissolved onlyin history, just as experience, being infancy and human place of origin, is somethinghe is always in the act of falling from, into language and into speech47 .

That fall is the source of the split between subject and object, becauseonly grammar produces a strong sense of the autonomy of the first personsingular, the “I” who is apart from the world. If this is true, then authenticexperience, at least as a metaphysical possibility, was not destroyed by thedepredations of war or the reitications of capitalism, but was always alreadyundone by the fall into language. the primal alienation that defines us as human.

The alleged “memory” that we have of a lost happiness is thus of a conditionthat can never be regained short of the death that reunites us with a muteworld prior to our insertion into language. Even as sympathetic a reader of the Frankfurt School tradition as Albrecht Wellmer could extend this skepticalconclusion beyond Benjamin, claiming that Adorno too, “like Schopenhauerconceives aesthetic experience in ecstatic terms rather than as a real utopia;the happiness that it promises is not of this world”48 .

What, however, may allow us to salvage a less impotent reading of Adorno’s lament about the loss of experience is the recognition of his subtlemovement away from the more intransigently absolutist position of Benja-

min and the Heidegger of Holzwege. For Agamben’s rebuke only draws bloodif we understand his description of absolute experience, prior to the fall intolanguage, anterior to the split between subject and object, as, in fact, convergingwith what is normally understood as experience”s most charged antonym:

47 Ibid, p.53.48 Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism , trans.

David Midgely (Cambridge,. Mass., 1993). p.12.


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total innocence. Although Adorno does have positive things to say aboutchildhood and the memory of happiness, he shows little real nostalgia for anyhistorical time of alleged prelapsarian grace. Witness the following passage

from Negative Dialectics:

The meaningful times for whose return the early Lukács yearned were as much dueto reification, to inhuman institutions, as he would later attest it only to the bourgeoisage. Contemporary representations of medieval towns usually look as if an executionwere just taking place to cheer the populace. If any harmony of subject and objectshould have prevailed in those days, it was a harmony like the most recent one:pressure-born and brittle. The transfiguration of past conditions serves the purposeof a late, superfluous denial that is experienced as a no-exit situation; only as lostconditions do they become glamorous. Their cult of pre-subjective phases, arose inhorror, in the age of individual disintegration and collective regression49 .

In his studies of Hegel, it will be recalled, the experience he claims shinesthrough the Phenomenology is that of the inability of life to be subsumedentirely under concepts and the extent of the present order’s totalizing powerto compel a social equivalent of that outcome. It is the tension between thesetwo insights, which Adorno called Hegel’s depiction of the antagonistic totality,that is forgotten in idealism and Lebensphilosophie. Despite his borrowing of Benjamin’s rhetoric of loss and decay in the passages cited at the beginningof this paper, Adorno understood, as he put it in Negative Dialectics, that “theconcept of metaphysical experience is antinomical, not only as taught by

Kantian transcendental dialectics, but in other ways. A metaphysics proclaimedwithout recourse to subjective experience, without the immediate presence of the subject, is helpless before the autonomous subject’s refusal to have imposedupon it what it cannot understand. And yet, whatever is direetly evident to thesubject suffers from fallibility and relativity”50 .

In short, redeemed experience, undamaged experience, authenticexperience, if indeed such a condition can ever be attained, would not mean arestoration of innocence before the fall into language or a harmoniousreconciliation in a utopian future, but rather a non-dominating relationshipbetween subject and object. It would paradoxically retain at least some of the

distinctions felt as alienated diremptions by what Hegel had called “theunhappy consciousness”, but now, in such a way that they no longer frustratethe subject’s desire to master the world through conceptual and practicalactivity. Instead, the experiential happiness that is promised by works of artrestores one of the fundamental senses of “experience” itself: a passive

49 Adorno, Negative Dialectics , p. 191.50 Ibid., p. 374. Translation emended.

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suffering or undergoing through an encounter with the new and the other,which moves us beyond where we, as subjects, were before the experiencebegan. It is for this reason, as J.N. Bernstein has noted, that “the image of life

without experience is finallv the image of life without history, as if the meaningof life were in its eternal cessation: death. There cannot be historical lifewithout experience; only lives articulated through experience can be fullvand self-consciously historical”51 . Here precisely the opposite conclusion isreached from Agamben, who identifles history with the fall out of the pureexperience that is pre-linguistic infancy or post-linguistic death.

Adorno himself, we have to admit in conclusion, never fully sorted outthe welter of denotations and connotations that cling to the numinous word“experience”. At times, he expresses an apparent nostalgia for a lostundamaged experience; at others, he mocks romanticizations of an allegedstate of prelapsarian bliss, while invoking the rhetoric of a progressive loss,he only vaguely hints at the existence of an actual historical time before thedecay. Accepting Benjamin’s critique of empiricist or Kantian notions of experience, he nonetheless resists accepting the maximalist notion of absoluteexperience that also infuses, as we have seen, Heidegger’s reading of Hegelin Holzwege. Looking for traces or prefigurations of undamaged experiencein aesthetic experience, he clearly knows that semblance is not reality andthat a gap looms large between works of art and redeemed life, which maynever be as close to the absolute as Benjamin in his more metaphysical moods

had hoped. In short, the experience of reading Adorno on experience is itself one of non-identical refusals of easy’ consistencies, producing the realizationthat experience is an openness to the unexpected with its dangers and obstacles,not a safe haven from history, but a reminder of the encounters with othernessand the new that await those who, despite everything, are willing and able toembark on the voyage. In this sense, it may be premature to write the epitaphof experience as such, for it will only be paradoxically when the crisis itself ends and a deadly calm settles over the world that the perilous journey that isexperience will no longer be a human possibility.

51 Bernstein. “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics”, in: Huhn andZuidevaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity , p. 203.


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NIILISMO E AUTOCONHECIMENTO: DESCARTES EM UMA PERSPECTIVA

BENJAMINIANA

Olgária Matos1

RESUMO O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a auto-representação doséculo XVII — racionalista e científico — , valendo-se das categorias doDrama Barroco Alemão , de Walter Benjamin. O barroco é a consciência doincontornável e o homem um “conjunto de contradições”. Nos dramas bar-rocos e em Descartes, o século assiste ao advento de uma solidão de tiponovo, solidão “pós-religiosa”, na dimensão epistemológica, ética e política.

ABSTRACT The intention of this article is to analyse the rationalisticand scientific self-representation of the VXIIth century, using the categoriesof Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Baroque is theconscience of the unavoidable and man is an “ensemble of contradictions”.

In German drama and in Descartes the century sees the arisal of a new formof solitude, a post-religious solitude, in an epistemological, ethical and

political dimension.

Organon da história, a literatura é a maneira benjaminiana de tornar atu-al o sentido de uma época. No drama barroco do século XVII, o filósoforeconhece notáveis analogias com a sensibilidade moderna. Paradoxo inici-al: no século XVII entrecruzam-se o pensamento da “filosofia clássica”deordenamento da natureza e do pensamento, e “o pessimismo oficial” da his-tória do Trauerspiel, palavra de duplo sentido, pois aplicava-se tanto às obras


1 Departamento de filosofia da USP.

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dramáticas quanto aos acontecimentos históricos. O palco do século XVII é aMonarquia Absolutista e as guerras de religião, em particular a dos TrintaAnos, cenário de ruínas e devastações, das quais Descartes quer se afastar e

proteger pelo solipsismo filosófico, ao pé da lareira (cf. Discurso do Método,2a parte, ed. Abril Cultural, 1973). As viagens são, também, experiência eaprendizado, pois Descartes reconhece o contingente e mesmo o arbitrário naHistória, aquilo que, por não poder, em grande parte ser controlado por nós,devemos aceitar “mudando, de preferência, nossos desejos do que a ordemdo mundo”; contingência, ainda, de usos, crenças e tradições — , que facil-mente se transformam em dogmas, “costumes adquiridos” pelo hábito e nãopelo exercício da razão: “aqueles que se acreditam devotos, quando não pas-sam de supersticiosos”, escreve Descartes,

vangloriando-se do quão assiduamente vão à igreja e oram, enaltecendo-se do fatode terem os cabelos curtos e jejuarem, se acreditam tão absolutamente perfeitos eimaginam ser tão amigos de Deus que jamais poderiam praticar qualquer ato que odesagradasse, e que tudo que a paixão dita é justo zelo, mesmo se tantas vezes ditaos mais graves delitos que possam ser cometidos pelos homens, como trair umacidade, matar príncipes, exterminar povos inteiros apenas porque não seguem suasopiniões2 .

O homem cartesiano procura afastar-se das guerras de religião. A dosTrinta Anos inicia-se em 1618 e só termina em 1648 com a Paz de Westfalia.Século de lutas entre católicos e protestantes, é também o de Griphyus, con-

temporâneo de Descartes, que não encontra refúgio seguro, o que atestamseus dramas teatrais3 . A cidade onde se passa o drama alemão é, para Benja-min, o palco do século XVII — século de incertezas e medo. Em 1622, Glogaué ocupada por tropas mercenárias; em 1628, tomada por soldados imperiais,tendo início a reconquista católica e a expulsão dos protestantes. Em 1631,destruída por um incêndio, vê a peste alastrar-se para a Silésia, dizimandomais da metade da população. Em 1635 a Paz de Praga restabelece a sobera-nia dos Habsburgo na Silésia, garantindo-se a reconquista católica. Em 1638Griphyus muda-se para a Holanda por razões semelhantes às de Descartes —

o apogeu econômico e cultural garante, até certo ponto, liberdade de pensa-mento e paz duradoura.Vivendo algum tempo em Leyde, como Descartes,inscreve-se na Universidade, onde, no ano seguinte, passa a lecionar metafísicae geografia, trigonometria, lógica e fisiognomia. Lógica e fisiognonomia as-sociam-se no desejo classificatório do século. No XVII, o pintor Charles Le

2 “Paixões da Alma” ,in Os Pensadores, ed. Abril Cultural,1973,artigo 190,,op.cit. p297.3 Cf Griphyus,A. Le Légiste Magnanime ou La Mort d’Émilien Paul Papinien , ed. Aubier, Paris, 1993

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Brun retratava animais e seus caracteres diferenciadores, assemelhando e as-similando-os ao rosto humano. Desenhava os traços comuns, retratando to-das as fases intermediárias das metamorfoses de um no outro. Tema impor-

tante no século XVII pois, através de marcas exteriores das faces procura-seclassificar os homens segundo seus vícios ou virtudes. Olhares leoninos ouesperteza da raposa o atestam. Fisiognomista tanto do século XVII quanto denosso tempo, Benjamin reconhece nisto o início de um espírito “classificatório”e ordenador de todos os seres da natureza, onde o estudo das fisiognomiasvalem como “justificação” científica4 . Uma vez que o exterior do homemcorresponde a seu interior, se adequação há entre as marcas de um rosto etraços psicológicos, o pintor estará retratando também um caráter, já que oindivíduo traz exposto no rosto seu tipo: o invisível é visível, não há maisdiferença entre o que se mostra e o que se esconde. Inclinação do século, amathesis universalis — ciência da ordem e da medida, vincula-se a umavisiblidade panóptica; tal uma evidência, os traços não mentem. Recorrendoà fisiognomia, não só o privado se comunica com o público, como um éportador do outro, sendo rosto e compleição física sua inscrição visível.Ordernar, medir, classificar pertencem a um mesmo campo semântico e cien-tífico. Homens e coisas dispõem-se à classificação, como elementos de umasérie; se por demais díspares para uma catalogação, passam a compor os sa-lões de “curiosidades”. À ânsia classificatória de seres da natureza e idealidadesde pensamento, corresponde um pendor para a coleção de objetos: “os coleci-

onadores”, escreve Benjamin, “são os fisionomistas do mundo das coisas”5

.O século XVII é clássico e barroco, à desordem do mundo deve corresponderordem no pensamento.

Professor universitário em Leyde, Griphyus leciona astronomia, históriae poética, como também se dedica à matemática e à filosofia. Em aulas com-para a filosofia aristotélica e a estóica — em particular no que diz respeito aoethos (caráter) e ao éthos (caráter adquirido que se converte em hábito). Se,para o primeiro, nós nos tornamos virtuosos praticando ações virtuosas, paraos estóicos a virtude se encontra na aceitação do destino e na quietude queproscreve as paixões. O escritor leciona, ainda, quiromancia e anatomia.

Este conjunto de questões habitam o pensamento seiscentista abrigandoo conflito entre a proposta de um espaço homogêneo e mensurável, por umlado, e a finalidade moral do homem, de outro. Esta época pretende divorciarmito, magia e religião do conhecimento científico; no entanto e “de umamaneira contraditória”, escreve Desanti, “faz-se um uso ‘sagrado’ da ciência.

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4 Cf.PassagenWerk, Suhrkamp, 1978.5 Cf.“Paris do século XIX”,in Illuminationen, ed.Suhrkamp, 1981.

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Galileu, condenado pela Igreja por sua concepção do mundo, elaborada porele de uma maneira coerente com as leis objetivas do movimento que contri-buiu a descobrir; esse mesmo Galileu ‘funda’ a verdade da física sobre o

conceito do entendimento infinito de um Deus matemático. Uso sagrado daciência, visto que, em suma, a essência da religião subsiste em sua abstraçãoe que os conceitos científicos vêm, por assim dizer, dar-lhe conteúdo e confe-rir-lhe autoridade própia. Mas, no mesmo ato e, de maneira contraditória,esse uso sagrado da ciência é um uso profano da religião”6 . De maneira aná-loga, a separação entre Igreja e Estado, a partir da Reforma, não dissolveu oantigo Estado teológico-político7 . O sagrado migrou para o poder de Estado eo profano ingressa na Religião. Deus fica encarregado de garantir os desdo-bramentos Razão.

Em Griphyus, como em Descartes, Benjamin reconhece a presença dasecularização. Tema de seus dramas: “a vontade dos reis, assassinatos, deses-pero, infanticídio, parricídio, incesto, guerras e insurreições; lamentações,gemidos e outros semelhantes”8 . Benjamin — por quem foi redescoberto ereabilitado o drama alemão, assim designa o abandono de uma visãoescatológica do Tempo. Foi o primeiro a estabelecer que o objeto das peçasnão é mais o mito — de essência religiosa — mas a História: “não existeescatologia barroca: por isso mesmo há um mecanismo que reúne e exaltatudo o que nasce na Terra, antes de consagrá-lo à morte. O além esvazia-se eagora se expõe à luz do mundo de forma drástica, para se desembaraçar de

um último céu e para colocá-lo (...) em condições de poder um dia aniquilar,dentro de si, com catastrófica violência, a terra” ( D.B.A,p. 90, trad. modifica-da). Mártir-tirano, o herói está privado da transcendência em um mundo semDeus. Suas motivações não possuem caráter religioso, permanecendo noâmbito da ordem ética e social — constatação suficiente, para Benjamin re-conhecer nesses Dramas o eclipsamento do divino. O recinto da côrte é olugar da secularização, assim como o cenário barroco transforma-se em anfi-teatro estilizado onde, em espetáculo, o corpo nu é dissecado alegorizando-seo cadáver. Uma vez desdivinizado, o corpo não é mais “imagem e semelhan-ça de Deus”. Um mesmo campo de linguagem reúne secularização e

dessacralização — profanação moderna do princípio da Christianitas — anu-lação da mensagem da salvação, cuja reminiscência se manifesta, agora, emuma “graça profana”9 . À linguagem simbólica e abstrata da Ciência do more


6 Introduction à l’histoire de la Philosophie , ed. Minuit.7 Cf ,Kantorowicz, Os dois Corpos do Rei , ed. Cia das Letras, 1998.8 Benjamin, Drama Barroco Alemão,ed Brasiliense, p. 86. A partir daqui, essa obra será designada por

“D.B.A.”, seguido do número da página.9 Cf Grimaldi,N., Six Études sur la Volonté chez Descartes , Vrin,Paris, 1988.

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geometrico corresponde uma linguagem que esteja à altura da violência dosacontecimentos históricos. Nos dramas, proliferam neologismos: “Hoje, comoantes, exprime-se em muitos deles a procura de um novo pathos(...). O ponto

de honra (da linguagem desses escritores) não era o uso de frases metafóricase sim a criação de palavras metafóricas, como se seu objetivo imediato fosse,ao inventá-las, inventar as palavras da língua(...).O perigo de cair dos pínca-ros da Ciência no abismo profundo do espírito barroco, é grande e não podeser desprezado. Encontramos, freqüentemente, nas tentativas improvisadasde apreender o sentido dessa época, uma sensação característica de vertigem,produzida pela visão de um universo espiritual dominado porcontradições”( DBA.op. cit,pp78-9).

O desejo cartesiano de criar uma linguagem só da ciência procede danecessidade de uma aprendizagem ascética a fim de “adquirir a força neces-sária para ver o panorama, sem perder o domínio sobre si mesmo”10 . Nestesentido, a questão do método apresentada no Drama Barroco Alemão tem,entre outros, o objetivo de seguir o itinerário da Ciência que submete as pai-xões. Benjamin reconhece na Ciência Moderna uma indiferença entre o mo-mento especulativo e o emotivo no conhecimento, uma vez que as paixõessão drenadas para o mundo externo, a fim de excluí-las do campo do pensa-mento objetivo: “o amortecimento dos afetos, e a drenagem para o exteriordo fluxo vital responsável pela presença no corpo desses afetos, pode trans-formar a distância entre o sujeito e o mundo numa alienação na relação com

o próprio corpo” ( D.B.A, p. 164). Na gravura de Dürer, Melancolia I , Benja-min reconhece a despersonalização do homem no mundo pelo advento daCiência: “É consistente com esse conceito que nela estejam dispersos no chãoos artefatos da vida ativa, sem qualquer serventia, só como objetos de medi-tação constante e exaustiva (grübeln). Nela, o saber assim obtido e a ciênciadesenvolvida pela pesquisa se fundiram intimamente no homem barroco”(idem).

A modernidade secular, mundana, científica, triunfará sobre os saberesque se faziam em crepúsculos clandestinos, quando os homens de ciência,dissecadores de cadáveres11 , entravam furtivamente em cemitérios para pers-

10 Descartes, op cit.,p 79.11 É um nosso contemporâneo,Louis-Ferdinand Destouches,melhor conhecido como Céline,que introduz

,em sua tese de Doutoramento em medicina,a questão acerca do tabu da morte e dos mortos,o horrorarcaico aos cadáveres.Escrevendo sobre A vida e a Obra de Semmelweis , ,mostra o confronto com seu século e seus pares.Semmelweis,jovem assistente em obstetrícia é levado,no ano de 1846,a constatar que as práticas médicas,em pleno exercício da cientificidade do século XIX,careciam das mais simples medidas profilática,pois os anatomistas,sem lavar as mãos,passavam do bisturi que dissecava o cadáver ao corpo vivo ,sem lavarem as mãos para a cirurgia.Ao introduzir o rito laico de lavar as mãos antes de passar do cadáver ao corpo vivo,recebeu total discrédito dos médicos,pois reclamavam do “desconforto” da pia na sala cirúrgica.Além de obstruir espaços,a pia incrimina as mãos que curavam,quando voltam

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crutar os mecanismos da vida e, ao mesmo tempo, os de sua12 destruição. Noséculo XVII, como testemunha “A Anatomia do Dr. Tulp” de Rembrandt, amorte passa a ter direito à claridade do dia e o corpo torna-se objeto e fonte de

saber. Com sua transmutação, o cadáver, antes condenado à decomposição,torna-se uma das mais claras figuras da verdade: “não mais haverá sepulturasvioladas em missas negras anatômicas. Estamos em plena dissecação”13 . Anova filosofia é a do pathos da fundação do saber, desembaraçado de precon-ceitos e superstições. O sujeito novo que a ele corresponde, só considera aneutralidade mecânica da natureza sem qualquer finalidade moral: o terror dodesconhecido e o medo do longínquo cedem diante da exploração científicado mundo. A Terra e o Céu adquirem um sentido profano: a terra se torna umlugar de viagem, de conquista de novos continentes, de comércio e tambémde dominação. Quanto ao céu, é apenas objeto de investigação. Nem empírico,nem histórico, o sujeito do conhecimento é o Eu da solidão e da fria luz doraciocínio lógico, bem como a Ciência é sem passado: “as ciências que rece-bemos dos antigos em nada demostram melhor sua insuficiência, quanto noque diz respeito às paixões (...). Não me resta outra esperança de aproximar-me do verdadeiro a não ser distanciando-me de todos os caminhos construídospor eles. Razão pela qual serei constrangido a escrever como se se tratasse deuma matéria jamais enfrentada antes”14 .

Em meio à “crise da consciência européia”, Descartes procura “colocarem palavras” o Sujeito — aquele que diz o verdadeiro por idéias claras e

distintas na filosofia e na ciência, mas também eu que se relaciona com aspaixões. Esta questão se diferencia do plano da tradição epistemológica, mastambém daquela metafísica.15 Que se considere o lugar ocupado pelo cogito

sujas das aulas de anatomia: “ por paradoxo,é essa volta à sabedoria supersticiosa dos antigos,é o sensoda separação,o princípio mesmo do sagrado,que funciona,no caso,como condição de progresso emodernidade.(Cf. Céline,Vida e a Obra de Semmelweis,ed. Cia das ;Letras ,1998 e Motta,L.T .,in EspecialLivros, O Estado de São Paulo,24/05/98).

12 Que se recorde:Descartes freqüentou,ao que tudo indica,as aulas de anatomia do Dr. Tulp e deve terestabelecido contatos com o pintor.(Cf-Cavaillès,La Fable du Monde,ed. Vrin,1992;Chauí,Marilena, “ALuz em Rembrandt”,Revista Discurso n 28,Depto de Filosofia,USP)

13 Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique , ed. Puf, 1975, p. 126.

14 Descartes, op. cit. artigo no. 1, p. 228.15 Há diversas valorizações da obra de Descartes.A predominância do epistemólogico sobre o metafísico,na obra de Descartes, deve-se à interpretação dada por Malebranche,principalmente porque, ao final doséculo XVII e no XVIII ,os iluministas ingleses tendiam a ler Descartes através de Malebranche (Cf.Waltson,Richard, The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics,Atlantic Hylands,NY,1987).Quanto à superestimaçãoda Metafísica,esta se deve a Martial Guéroult que,em Descartes selon l’ Ordre des Raisons estabelece asMeditações Metafísicas (1640) como texto canônico com respeito ao qual devem ser lidas as demaisobras,tanto as de juventude (período em que narra seus estudos e vida no Collège de La Flèche,bemcomo começa a voltar-se para a álgebr a) — quanto as da maturidade ( Discurso do Método ,de 1637 ,Paixões da Alma,de 1649).Discreto em questões teológicas e professando fé católica,Descartes é ,nãoobstante, referência para teólogos calvinistas ,sobretudo na segunda metade do século XVII;suas Medita- ções ,por outro lado,eram lidas, durante a Semana Santa, pelos jesuitas na Companhia de Jesus(Cf.Subirats,E.,El Alma y la Muerte ,ed.Ariel,Barcelona,1976).


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na filosofia cartesiana: indubitável por natureza e constitutivo do sum, pareceexcluir qualquer discurso que não seja o científico, de forma a não permane-cer nele nenhum remanescente das paixões. Neste sentido, Descartes escre-

ve: “meu propósito não foi o de explicar as paixões como orador, tampoucocomo filósofo moral, mas somente como físico”16 . As paixões são concebi-das segundo uma mecânica da alma e a natureza a partir de dispositivos algé-bricos e geométricos .

Desconfiando do conhecimento transmitido pelos antigos, mas tambémde seus contemporâneos, Descartes encontra-se na situação de “enfrentar umaquestão jamais colocada antes”. Recusa a ataraxia estóica — que encontra naapatia a independência da alma, bem como a consideração das paixões comodoença: “Zenão (considerou as paixões) a tal ponto inimigas do prazer, con-siderando todos os vícios iguais entre si que, a meu ver, apenas os melancóli-cos ou os espíritos a tal ponto desembaraçados do corpo poderiam ser seusiguais (Carta à princesa Elizabeth de 18 de agosto de 1645, AT, IV, 276).Recusa, também, a mística medieval em cuja ascese o filósofo identifica des-prezo das paixões, fonte de pecado e obstáculo à virtude. Descartes criticaseus predecessores não segundo um ponto de vista moralizante ou humanista(que exaltava as paixões mas despreocupava-se da busca de suas causas) maspor considerar aquelas asserções insuficientemente científicas. Para garantircientificidade, Descartes considera ação e paixão determinações fundamen-tais de um Sujeito. São ambas o mesmo já que constituem modalidades do

Sujeito, só se diferenciando segundo a referência a dois sujeitos diversos.Ação e paixão entrelaçam-se no corpo e na alma. A ação e a paixão não sãosó do corpo ou só da alma, pois se dizem do corpo e da alma: “embora agentee paciente sejam diferentes entre si, a ação e a paixão são sempre a mesmacoisa com dois nomes, segundo se as refere a um ou outro dos dois sujei-tos”17 . E no artigo 17 das Paixões da Alma, Descartes continua: “Chamoação da alma todos nossos atos voluntários, porque os experimentamos comovindo diretamente da alma e que só dela parecem depender; podemos cha-mar, ao contrário, paixões da alma percepções e conhecimentos de toda espé-cie que em nós se encontrem, pelo fato de que, na maior parte das vezes, não

é nossa alma que as tornam tal qual são, pois as recebe sempre das coisas queas representam”. Sendo assim, Descartes restitui à alma aquilo que lhe é ex-clusivamente devido — o pensamento — reservando às paixões, por seu ca-ráter passivo, a condição de “falta de vontade”.

O corpo é passivo por ser máquina composta como as engrenagens de

16 Cf. carta publicada como prefácio a Paixões da Alma ed Abril, 1973.17 As Paixões da Alma, artigo I, op. cit.

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um relógio: o plano da relação causal entre corpo e alma é abandonado paraasceder àquele da atribuição de significado não em sentido lógico, mas práti-co (o que é útil, prejudicial, justo e desejável). Causar , aqui, significa ocasi-

onar e não deve ser lido na direção de um ocasionalismo ou de umdeterminismo causal do corpo: “as paixões — pensamento sem vontade —dando sentido aos movimentos do mecanismo corpóreo, solicitam a vontadede ação do pensamento conforme a conservação deste mesmo mecanismo”18 .Nossa ambigüidade nativa — seres corpóreos e espirituais — , vê-se trans-cendida na verdade de um corpo que não é senão um feiche de músculos,nervos e sangue: mortal e condenado à dissolução. É esta a consciência quese manifesta no emblema por excelência do barroco: o crânio, a caveira. An-tes de o homem ser tomado como destinado à morte é, melhor dizendo, umaconsciência da vida que se exprime no esqueleto. Percepção da finitude e datransitoriedade, o século XVII protagoniza a transformação gradual das cren-ças coletivas em alegorias individualizadas, sob o impacto do racionalismofilosófico e científico: “a extinção das figuras ou imagens e a abstração dosconceitos constituem os pressupostos para a transformação alegórica doPantheon num mundo de criaturas mágico-conceituais” ( Drama Barroco Ale-mão, op. cit. p 249). Fetichista a sua maneira, a racionalidade abstrata econceitual desfaz as crenças em demônios e quimeras, constituindo um mun-do “sem qualidades”.

O Drama barroco reflete acerca da relação entre a perda da fé em mitos

fundadores (cosmogônicos ou teológicos) e o mandamento reiterado e urgen-te do “conhece-te a ti mesmo” moderno. Conhecer a si mesmo é, para Des-cartes, “conhecer em que modo e por quais causas alguém deve estimar oudesprezar a si mesmo”. A auto-estima volta-se às coisas segundo a represen-tação de seu valor, valor este que a paixão justifica .Não sendo aqui passivi-dade apenas, a paixão é mais que processo ligado à fisiologia; atribuindosignificado às coisas, ela torna-se “indicação de valor”: “as paixões, tal comoas lentes de aumento, fazem crer certas coisas muito melhores e mais desejá-veis do que em realidade são” (Carta a Elisabeth, 1o de setembro de 1645, AT,IV, 284). A representação é, pois, uma modalidade não-intelectiva de conhe-

cimento, detentora de significados, ocupando, aqui, o lugar da vontade “por-que todos nós representamos o fim desejado com mais realce do que o devi-do, o que faz imaginar, antes de possuí-lo, prazeres bem maiores do que acha-remos depois de tê-lo alcançado” (idem, ibidem). O “tratado” das paixões éum conjunto de regras para a direção dos desejos. Face ao que é mais impor-

18 Bonicalzi, F., “Passioni como linguaggio”, in Passioni della Scienza: Descartes e la nascita della psicolo- gia, Jaca Book, Milano, 1990, nota 38.


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tante saber “que coisas que não dependem de nós, por melhor que sejam, nãodevemos desejá-las com paixão”. O que impõe dominá-las é a percepçãoaguda da fortuna, à qual se associa, no século XVII, a melancolia e o pessi-

mismo questionando a capacidade de mesmo a mais alta virtù poder superar-lhe a malignidade. Em um mundo contingente e em meio a uma temporalidadeincerta, inscreve-se a modernidade ordenadora e controladora das paixões.Da ciência contemplatica passas-se à vita activa.

Suspeitando do pleno êxito do homo faber — na Ciência — e do Cogitona filosofia, Benjamin chama a atenção mais para as incertezas do que para aauto-realização de suas Luzes. No Drama Barroco, a alegoria é o outro darazão abstrata moderna e indica o limite de sua auto-suficiência no arbitrárioque se aloja no mundo moderno. O filósofo o lê à luz da melancolia da Refor-ma, descrevendo o esvaziamento do sentido do mundo e das coisas, uma vezque a alegoria só faz reproduzir a estrutura depressiva do sujeito melancóli-co, o “eu não sou nada” ou ainda o “eu não sou quem eu sou” de Iago noOtelo. Para além da interpretação teológica — que mostra a alegoria comotestemunho da insignificância do mundo profano — no drama barroco reve-la-se a culpabilidade da criatura decaída. A alegoria não exprime tão somentea ambivalência das coisas: ela a representa. A ciência nascente — a do séculoXVII — não estaria a salvo do binômio ciência-melancolia por ser “ciência-alegoria”, pois o emprego de modelos teóricos na ciência se assemelha ao usode metáforas na alegoria. Com efeito, Descartes escreve que o filósofo “não

ignora que freqüentemente tomam-se por verdadeiras, coisas falsas, paramelhor esclarecer a verdade” — da mesma forma que os astrônomos imagi-nam no céu um equador, um zodíaco e outros círculos, ou os geômetras acres-centam novas linhas a figuras dadas. É este o sentido do recurso a fábulas,essas ficções heurísticas. Recorrer a uma “fábrica de ilusões” não significaaceitar seus argumentos mas dar às coisas um “embelezamento estratégico”.Comportando-se como hipótese, o mundo das fábulas é mais real do que arealidade nos efeitos que produz para o conhecimento na ciência. Hipótese,alegoria e metáfora podem ser utilizadas de modo “racional”, indicando apolissemia de seus termos. Fábula é a “história de minha vida” — de que fala

Descartes na 1a parte do Discurso do Método — e também o tratado do Mun-do e do Homem. Fábula e fantasma aproximam-se como máscara e ficção. Ofabuloso e o fantasmático possuem elo comum por não pertencerem ao cam-po nem ao verdadeiro nem do falso, nem ao veraz ou à mentira. Manifestam,melhor dizendo, virtualidade ou latência de sentidos. Sem consistir em ver-dades ou enunciados propriamente verdadeiros, fábulas não são erros ou en-ganos propositais, nem falso testemunho ou perjúrio. Participando do pseudo-lógico, a fábula e a alegoria podem significar outra coisa do que mentira: ela

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