[FRA:] [Adorno-Hegel] Something about Kant from ND

[James Rovira]

I think Habermas credits postmodernism with too much originality.
There's significant overlap between postmodern hermeneutics and, say,
Medieval hermeneutics -- really, Catholic hermeneutics up to Luther,
in their assumptions about the text, its authority, etc.
"Christianity" is too big a word to be meaningfully used as Habermas
seems to be using it.

But I'm not sure what Habermas means by "Christianity" in that
quotation.  You might be able to argue that the ethical systems (and
to some extent, the metaphysics) of German Idealists were strongly
informed by -German Protestantism- (probably what Habermas means by
"Christianity"), but that's not saying much.  Hegel knew that but
believed he was taking the next step -- so religion is picture
thinking and philosophy leads to the truth.  Of course we'd expect a
similarity of patterns between the two, but there's no question what's
being privileged and what's being left behind, either.  In this view
"Christianity" has a place in an evolutionary narrative, but like
everything in every evolutionary narrative it's to be left behind.
Does this make Hegel a Christian?  Or Marx?  Or Adorno?  Hegel's
narrative seems to me to have much more in common with hermeticism or
panentheism than with Christianity in the end.

The only persons to really reject Christianity -- to not give it any
place -- seems to me to be Nietzsche and Stirner.

Adorno, if I recall, expressed a great deal of hostility toward
Kierkegaard's Christianity in his book Kierkegaard, but at the same
time seemed to prefer Benjamin's Jewish inflected writings more than
his communist writings -- he at least seemed to find them more
interesting.  The Jargon of Authenticity seems to be harsher toward
Heideggerian existentialism than religion as well.  These ambivalences
could be nothing more than differentiating the bad from the worse,
though, but I haven't quite worked it out yet.

Jim R

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Lev Lafayette
<lev_lafayette at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> I'm not sure of that specific quote but there is the rather notorious remarks of 2004:
>
> "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
>
> (cf., http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=347)
>
> Personally, I think Habermas' uhhh, "epistemological turn" occurred with the publication of The Future of Human Nature in 2003.
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Lev