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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:03.127)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Lambert Zeidervart, resident fellow at the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University and honorary professor in philosophy at the King's College at Western University, which is located in London, Ontario. We're here today to talk about his book, Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth. Dr. Zeidervart, wonderful to have you on today.
Lambert Zuidervaart (00:28.952)
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.
PJ Wehry (00:32.401)
Dr. Zydevar, why this book?
Lambert Zuidervaart (00:35.672)
Well, there's a long answer and there's a short answer. I'll try to do the medium-sized answer. So I have been doing work on Adorno since the 1970s. My wife and I were newlyweds in 1977. And about nine months later, we moved to what was then West Berlin. And we moved to West Berlin because I needed to do my research on Adorno in Germany, since there was very little existing research and writing in
PJ Wehry (00:40.481)
Sounds great.
Lambert Zuidervaart (01:05.92)
English speaking countries. And we went to West Berlin specifically rather than to let's say Frankfurt because there was a musicologist and a philosopher of music in West Berlin by the name of Carl Dollhouse, who was one of the leading figures in both musicology and philosophy of music. And he knew Adorno's work very well. I had set out to write a dissertation on Adorno's philosophy of music.
So this looked like the best fit for me to go work with Carl Dahlhaus. Once I was in West Berlin and started doing the detailed research in both the primary and secondary literature, I discovered that I would need to do a lot more work on the rest of Adorno. And Adorno was a prolific and highly interdisciplinary figure. So he did work in social psychology. He did work also in music, course, philosophy.
cultural criticism, just very, very expansive. So that meant I had to broaden my horizons. And in the meantime, I thought, well, this has still got to be a manageable project. So I settled finally on just writing about his late work, the work that was published after he died called Esthete Chaterie or Aesthetic Theory in English. He died while still writing that. was
published a year after his death, so he died in 1969. It was published in 1970. I arrived in 1977. So it hadn't been out that long, had not yet been translated into English. It wasn't translated into English until 1984. And there was no real literature in English about it. So I was really deep into the water for working in German on a German figure.
But what I really wanted to work on in Adorno, because of my interest in the topic already, was the notion of truth in art. Adorno had a very strong notion that art has its own kind of truth. It's not the sort of truth that can be captured or re-articulated well in the sciences or in philosophy. And that
Lambert Zuidervaart (03:25.878)
type of truth is really, really important because it gives us a window, if you will, onto what's happening in society and culture that we would otherwise lack. And that window is a window that both gives us a sense of what's wrong in society and also how what's wrong could be made better. Now that's, you know, informal way of describing his project. I mean, he has very, very technical terms and I will sometimes use those terms, but right now I'm just giving you a general sense of the project. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (03:25.891)
you
PJ Wehry (03:53.183)
I appreciate it.
Lambert Zuidervaart (03:55.51)
So artistic truth is a way to get at what's wrong in society. The word he uses for that is what's false in society or untrue in society. So already there you have a notion of social or societal truth alongside the notion of artistic truth, alongside the notion of philosophical truth, and maybe even alongside the notion of scientific truth.
However, Adorno does not spell out in any of his writings what is the interconnection among these types of truth. What would be the general way to think about truth that would allow you to make these distinctions and relations? That did not stop me from writing a book on the notion of truth, artistic truth, in his aesthetic theory. That was the dissertation I defended in 1981, and then I worked a number of years into
turning it into a book which was then published in 1991 as Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, subtitled The Redemption of Illusion. Now, the redemption of illusion means the redemption of shine in Germans. Shine in German is better translated as semblance. And for Adorno, art is a semblance that tells the truth. Now.
What I had by that point was a pretty strong idea of what artistic truth meant for Adorno, sort of a vague notion of what truth came to beyond that in Adorno, and a commitment on my own part to work out a notion of artistic truth that would make sense in an Anglo-American context. So.
I get back to North America, get my first teaching job in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada. By the way, I'm now a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, but at that time I was still only a U.S. citizen. So I land in Edmonton in 1981. In 1982, the American Society for Aesthetics decides to have its annual conference in Banff, Alberta.
Lambert Zuidervaart (06:12.514)
which is a wonderful mountain resort. And that's only four or five miles, four or five hour drive from Edmonton. I submitted a paper for that on Adorno's notion of artistic truth. I really didn't know whether it would be accepted because at that point...
hardly anybody in the American world or even Canadian world of aesthetics at his philosophy of the arts knew much about Adorno or had read anything by Adorno. So I sent this paper in thinking, well, they'll probably turn it down, but they didn't. They actually accepted it. And then they went a step further and they got to the most prominent Adorno scholars in North America to be the commentators.
So it was great. No pressure. Martin Jay, one of the leading intellectual historians of the Frankfurt School, and Susan Buckmores, who had published one of the first books in English about Adorno's work. They were the ones who were invited. So I get to Banff. I meet them. They give very generous and complimentary comments on my paper.
PJ Wehry (07:05.654)
No pressure. Yeah.
Lambert Zuidervaart (07:32.622)
We hang out, we go up the gondola along the mountainside, we have a great time, they become friends. So this is like the beginning of, you know, my actually being able to say something about Adorno in a North American context. And that gave me a lot of impetus. It also gave me a lot of support, especially for Martin Jay, who really promoted my work from then on. In fact, you know, this latest book on Adorno Heidegger and the politics of truth is dedicated to Martin Jay.
So anyway, that's a long way of saying this idea of writing about Adorno's conception of truth has roots in my earliest scholarship. However, in the meantime, I then wanted to work out an idea of artistic truth that would be my own, that I could also articulate to a North American and broader, more Anglo-American audience. And I was able to do that in a book called Artistic Truth, which came out in 2004.
But I knew that if I was going to write a book on artistic truth, then in a sense I was committing myself to do what Adorno never really did, and that is work out a more comprehensive notion of truth that would be able to account for how artistic truth is related to non-artistic truth. So that was the rest of my career, as it were, working out a much more comprehensive notion of truth.
I did that in many different stages, but two books are really the key to this articulation of a more comprehensive notion of truth. The first is a book that came out in 2017 called Husserl Heidegger, Truth in Husserl Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. That was my attempt to work through the 20th century German tradition on the topic of truth.
to figure out how I position myself relative to that tradition and also to give myself a better sense of where Adorno was coming from. The second book, which came out just a year before this new Adorno book, is called Social Domains of Truth, subtitled Science, Politics, Art, and Religion. And that book is the one in which I systematically lay out my own comprehensive conception of truth and show how it can make sense of
Lambert Zuidervaart (09:58.1)
what I call propositional truth, the truth of statements and assertions and the like, scientific truth, artistic truth, religious truth, and get it, political truth. Okay, so that's very ambitious project.
At the same time, I had the experience when there was a book session about my Husserl, Heidegger, and so on book at SPEP, that's the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. I had the experience that rather than focus on Husserl or Heidegger or Horkheimer, one of the members of the Frankfurt School, or Habermas, a second generation,
PJ Wehry (10:42.947)
Mm-hmm.
Lambert Zuidervaart (10:43.094)
all of whom I wrote extensively about in the book. People wanted to focus on Adorno, whom I didn't write about much at all.
PJ Wehry (10:49.923)
That is kind of, I was reading the introduction. was like, this is kind of ironic that you did your dissertation in Adorno. You didn't write much about him. Everyone's like, where's Adorno? It doesn't seem like you dealt with Adorno enough.
Lambert Zuidervaart (11:01.186)
Yeah, exactly. So the entire session really was about what I didn't say about Adorno. And I thought, well, OK, maybe I should say something more about Adorno's conception of truth. And I should relate it to what I've been doing on my own to map out a conception of truth as a whole is the term I use, a comprehensive conception of truth. And now I was actually ready in terms of my own, you know,
ability to articulate things, to say something more meaningful about Adorno's overall conception of truth. Because I had worked out my own conception, so I had some something to refer to, as it were, and to structure the dialogue. So that's really, know, both it's a long-term project because I started out thinking about Adorno's conception of artistic truth, and it's a much more recent project because
By the time I wrote the book, I had already worked out a more systematic conception of truth as a whole. Okay, that's... Yeah.
PJ Wehry (12:03.127)
You've come all the way around. was... That's awesome. That's really cool.
Lambert Zuidervaart (12:09.678)
In the end, it's my thing. In the end, it's my thing.
PJ Wehry (12:11.435)
Thank you. Go ahead. sorry. Exactly. I was curious, why is Adorno himself so reticent to talk about truth? You mentioned he literally has a debate about the sociology of literature with, if I'm saying this right, Lucian Goldman. He mentions truth multiple times but refuses to articulate it. Why do you think Adorno
Lambert Zuidervaart (12:32.471)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (12:39.597)
didn't write about truth.
Lambert Zuidervaart (12:41.816)
Well, this gets us into the very heart of Adorno's project. Because one of the famous things he says and that people always go back to is the whole is the untrue. The whole is the untrue. Sometimes translated as the whole is the false, but really it should be the whole is the untrue. And that's just an aphorism that he put forward in Minima Moralia, the book he wrote during the Second World War as a gift to Horkheimer, his
co-author on dialectic of enlightenment. OK. That's a very, very direct take on his objections to Hegel. Because for Hegel, the slogan would be, and in fact is, in the phenomenology of spirit, the true is the whole. Or the true is the whole, right? So Hegel has this holistic conception of truth.
And in the end, everything belongs to truth. Of course, in a very dialectical way, so that there's negativity built in and so on and so forth. Adorno thinks that that way of thinking about truth is, shall we say, premature. In other words, you could only have a conception of truth as a whole if you had a society that was in general or as a whole.
But we don't have that we have a society that in general and as a whole is false and that's because for him the capitalist economy Married in a sense to what I call the administrative state has so driven our society and so Dominated our society that what would actually be a good society
is not currently possible. However, he doesn't say it's impossible, uberhaupt in general. There are things in our society that, if redirected, could lead to a true society. But we're nowhere close to that right now. So the notion that there would be truth as a whole would require that there be society that's true as a whole.
Lambert Zuidervaart (15:06.24)
And to articulate that notion, you'd have to be in such a society that we're not. So you can only gesture, really, towards what truth as a whole would be like. Because that would mean a fundamental change in society would have to take place first.
Lambert Zuidervaart (15:26.892)
He does make these gestures and one can point to them, but they are gestures. They are not articulations. They are not laying out in detail what this actually comes to.
PJ Wehry (15:42.623)
So you mentioned that little bit of how Adorno interacts with Benjamin and it's been a while since I've read Kierkegaard, but...
Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel is that objectivity is sort of what man knows, subjectivity is what each individual person knows. And then for Kierkegaard, kind of famously, you have the absolute.
How does Adorno, who has this processual dynamic approach to truth, and of course for Benjamin also it's timeless, how does he respond? Because it sounds in some ways that they're critiquing Hegel in the same way because Kierkegaard's point is that society doesn't, like, not true. Like, I don't know what society you're living in, Hegel, but this is not true. He's like, so obviously,
know, God is truth, the absolute is truth. And then you have Adorno. How does Adorno respond to kind of this absolute idea of truth? And what is he even looking for then in a dynamic processual truth? What does it mean to have a true society? Because that's not a normal way, certainly that Americans speak.
Lambert Zuidervaart (17:02.784)
No, right. You're right. And that's an excellent question. You probably realize also from whatever reading you've done around this that Adorno wrote his Habitatsionschrift. That's the second doctorate that you write in order to become a professor in a German academic setting. He wrote it on Kierkegaard. So his engagement with Kierkegaard started very early. His engagement with Hegel actually came a little later. But already,
He had worked his way through Kierkegaard and developed a quite extensive critique of Kierkegaard. But what I think he takes from Kierkegaard and retains from Kierkegaard, and Peter Gordon has a nice book in which he tries to lay out these relationships between what he calls the existential tradition going back to Kierkegaard and Adorno's negative dialectics. So what he takes from Kierkegaard, I think, is this view that there cannot be
We don't have access to absolute truth in society.
Whether we have access to it in art is still up for grabs, think, for Adorno. But we don't have it in society in the way our society runs, in the way we experience things as social beings. And so Hegel's thinking that absolute truth manifests itself throughout society, in the state, in civil society, in art, in religion.
especially in art, religion, and philosophy, of course. Those are really the forms of absolute spirit for him. really the pinnacle of the revelation of the absolute is in art, religion, and philosophy. Hegel's thought that this would be sort of manifest throughout our society is bogus. I think he agrees with Kierkegaard on that. But he does not agree with the Kierkegaardian move to
Lambert Zuidervaart (19:04.554)
internalize access to the absolute. In other words, it's only in the interior of the subject, the individual subject, that you might have some kind of access to absolute truth. Make a leap of faith and you'll find out, right? So he doesn't go that way. That for him is just an ideological move to avoid what's really wrong in society.
So we actually, if you want to really address what's wrong in society, you actually have to deal with society. have to actually show what's wrong. OK. This is also one of the things that I think sets him off with regard to Heidegger, one of the other major figures in the book that I wrote. Because in Heidegger, especially in Being in Time, the key to
accessing truth is what he calls authenticity, eigentlichkeit. And that notion of authenticity goes back to Kierkegaard.
I think this notion, this emphasis on authenticity in Heidegger really sets Adorno's teeth on edge. Because he hears not only this, know, hearkening back to the interior of the individual subject, but he also hears already in Being in Time, but especially later, a locating of access to truth.
and living the truth in the authentic community. Well, who is the authentic community? das Volk, the people, right? So he already in the late 1920s, when he's writing this Habilitation Trift on Kicker Guard, he's already got his eyes on Heidegger's masterpiece, Sein und Zeit, Being in Time, and what he thinks of as a very, problematic
Lambert Zuidervaart (21:14.834)
ideological formulation of what truth comes to and how we access it. Now myself, I'm much more sympathetic to that Heidegger, the Heidegger of being in time. And my own conception of truth actually draws on some sides of what he articulates in, not the authenticity side. In fact, I have a chapter in the Husserl Heidegger book on Heidegger's notion of authenticity.
and what I consider to be an inverse conception of philosophical experience in Adorno. So that in a sense, these are dialectical reverse images of each other I talk about there. And I have, you know, so I have a critique of Adorno on that. I won't get into it now. But anyway, it's something that I've been trying to wrestle with for quite a while because it's clear in Adorno's work that
Heidegger is both the most important 20th century figure, as far as he's concerned, in philosophy, and the most to be rejected. I mean, he's really, really adamant. And the book in which it's most obvious is this little book called The Jargon of Authenticity, which came out in 1964, just a couple of years before his masterwork called Negative Dialectics. And in that, it's a polemical book. And he's talking about how this
the language of authenticity has become part of the culture in Germany. You bureaucrats speak about being authentic, it were, or having authentic policies and so on. He says it's nonsense, but it comes out of this Heidegger speak that had become more more pervasive. Well, I don't know whether I got around to answering your question, but I certainly was prompted by it.
PJ Wehry (23:03.745)
Yeah, no, I'll be honest, I don't remember the original question, but I was having a great time. So that was...
Lambert Zuidervaart (23:08.984)
Well, your question was about the similarity between Dorno and Heidegger, or Kierkegaard, so that's what I was taking...
PJ Wehry (23:15.415)
Kierkegaard, yes, but you're tracing it all the way through and I could see that. we were talking about, and I asked about the true in society and I can see where both the interiority in Kierkegaard and the authenticity in Heidegger are the main thread that.
we have to actually deal with society, not just retreat to ourselves, or retreat to a very specific segment of the society, which historically has not played out well.
Lambert Zuidervaart (23:50.158)
And I just add a little footnote to all of that. In the very last pages of negative dialectics, Adorno says what the absolute would be. There's a sentence that starts, absolute wäre, and then he fills it in. So the absolute would be, he says, the non-identical that would not emerge until
PJ Wehry (23:54.327)
Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (24:19.606)
the dominance of identity or the prominence of the principle of identity has loosened its grip on society. Now that's a lot packed into that. But what's interesting is for him the absolute would not be the whole. It would be the non-identical, which would be in sense the individual creature.
object would probably be the word in German, but it doesn't really get at it. The individual creature in its integrity. A true society would allow that kind of flourishing of individual creatures in their integrity. That's the positive way of saying what he's, I think, saying in a very cautious, subjunctive, or counterfactual way. Das absolutive era, the absolute would be
the non-identical that would emerge if we didn't have this principle of identity in which we're trying to dominate everything and make everything the same, equivalent, exchangeable, fungible, commodity, you know, you can go on and on, but anyway.
PJ Wehry (25:35.723)
Is that similar to a lot of the ethical concerns in certain continental thinkers and thinking here of Levinas or others with the desire for encounter with the other and allowing the other to be other? Is there some correlation there?
Lambert Zuidervaart (25:54.798)
There's some crossover there, think, certainly with Levinas. Hint de Rees wrote a very fine book in which he compares Levinas and Adorno and shows that there's actually quite a bit of hidden similarity. The two of them never, you know, dialogued or wrote about each other's work, so in that sense you have to really construct some kind of dialogue between them. But, yeah, this notion of allowing the other to be other in its otherness.
Levine-Nassian type language would be compatible with Adorno's saying, we need to respect the non-identical. His notion of the non-identical is really a way of saying how he disagrees with Hegel. Because he thinks that Hegel, because the concept rules everything, doesn't allow for the non-identity of the non-identical.
you
PJ Wehry (26:54.499)
If you don't mind, I would love to try a concrete example and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. And if maybe you have a concrete example in response, I'd love to hear that too. I often think of kids because I'm dealing with them all day long, homeschooling. But when we talk about this, allowing the other to be non-identical, not fungible. I haven't heard that word in a while. I was happy to hear it.
That part of this is the mistake in parenting to not allow the child to develop as the child should, right? It's this desire to either lay on your own dreams under the child or you have a very carefully prescribed path that does not allow the child to become what really the child has the capacity to. Like every child is so different. so creating opportunities while at the same time, not just
Lambert Zuidervaart (27:31.16)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (27:52.673)
relinquishing discipline in its, you know, I don't mean that, I mean that it's more positive aspects, but it's not about just a free for all. It's about allowing the full mature expression of the child as the child, as the other. Would that be an example, a concrete example?
Lambert Zuidervaart (28:15.958)
I think so. Adorno did write about education, but it was more in terms of the institutions of education rather than individual development. And he never had children, so he couldn't test out his theories very well in the home, as it were. But I think there is so.
What Adorno would be most concerned about, I think, is not that there are parenting styles that don't allow individual children to flourish, but that we've set up an entire culture, what he talks about as the culture industry, and an entire way of educating what's called the school system, which regardless of what parenting happens in the home, is driving people into the same mold all the time.
You can have homes that are doing the work of allowing individual children to come to their own. And yet they're still going to be part of what we now have is the social media world, the consumer world, the graded competition world. Then you're homeschooling your children. So you might not face this as directly, but any parent who sends their kid off to school,
is going to face this no matter what, right? I mean, it's all about grades and getting the job down the road. And that's the way the school system is set up. I mean, there's a lot of good stuff happening in schools. I don't want to be like a complete negative critic of schools. But the schools are constrained. They're constrained by the economic and political system that they are answerable to. And I think that's what Adorno would want to focus on.
PJ Wehry (29:53.197)
Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (30:03.008)
And I think he'd be a little bit skeptical because of his background in Freudian psychology, this notion of basically let 1,000 flowers bloom. Everybody has their own individual path because that goes right back to this notion of authenticity that he's suspicious about. So I think he would have some, he'd want to make some qualifications to your example, right? But I think it's a good example of how
PJ Wehry (30:26.615)
Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (30:32.91)
how he thinks our society needs to change so that the possibilities that people have as individuals will actually come to fruition.
PJ Wehry (30:49.741)
Yes, I just had Dr. Rebecca Foster on and I think of this because you mentioned social media and she just edited a book on parasocial relationships and not that we're constantly degrading. You can get into some weird, I want avoid certain types of discourse here, but one example of
What we're what you're talking about with the advertising culture is the advent the the new beginning of marketing that preys on parasocial relationships that claims to be authentic where it's like Instead of having an ad that's very clearly polished you have influencers talking directly to the camera and communicating a relationship In many cases solely for the purpose of advertising
Lambert Zuidervaart (31:21.198)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (31:47.041)
And that would be like a really negative example. Like a really, that's like, that's what Adorno really dislikes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (31:54.72)
Exactly. And he saw that trend starting already back in the 1930s. So this pseudo individualization, pseudo individuality that is promoted by the culture industry, by movies, by radio programming at that time, television programming later. He actually wrote an entire study of television in the early 1950s, which most people don't know about. But at same time that he co-authored with several social psychologists,
a major study called the authoritarian personality in which they try to establish what it is in people's character and their personality that might incline them to be supporters of fascism. And the famous and controversial scale that they developed in order to measure that is called the F scale, F standing for fascism. So they tried to figure out, and this is in American culture. I mean, this study was taken, you know, undertaken in the United States.
They tried to figure out what would make people open to or maybe enthusiastic about, I'll call it by its current term, authoritarian populism. What would make them supportive of that? Because this is a big issue. mean, why was it that Germany, the working class and a good part of the middle class cozied up to or enthusiastically embraced the Nazis? Why did that happen?
They are trying to figure out what in the social psychological dynamics forms people in such a way that they would be ready for that. That's a very, important study. But for Adorno, this is all of one piece. He thinks of culture industry. He thinks of sort of parenting patterns. He thinks of the consumer patterns that we establish.
PJ Wehry (33:37.944)
Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (33:53.354)
as all being of one piece. There are all ways in which the capitalist economy drives life and keeps people in check. So.
PJ Wehry (34:08.507)
The bureaucracy you mentioned earlier too, right? The administrative, married... You called it administrative government that was married with capital? Go ahead. Administrative state. Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (34:11.694)
Yeah, administrative state, administrative state, which now is a term of art because so many people who are supporters of Trump are going after the administrative state. So the administrative state, mean, that term doesn't really occur in Adorno's writing. It does occur in his students writing, Jürgen Habermas. And that really refers to the way governments
have become more more involved in regulating all the details of our lives. there are things to be said in favor of that, and there are things to be said in critique of it, depending on exactly how it gets worked out. But you can see, especially after the Second World War, governments across the West, at least, set up all sorts of agencies and all sorts of agency-driven laws and agency-driven
court systems which are beyond the reach in many ways of the legislature and not accountable to the general population either. So this is a problem. In a constitutional democracy, this is a problem because fundamentally we think the laws should be formulated by our representatives and
implemented by a duly elected administration, a duly elected administration, which is accountable also to the legislature. So that's, but one of the reasons this sort of regulatory apparatus had to be set up is to both
foster the capitalist economy and to counteract all the ways that it impinges on people and sorts people into the haves and the have-nots. So, or the environmentally distressed and the environmentally protected. You know, you can go on, there are many, many divisions that you can think about. yeah, the governments in Western Europe,
PJ Wehry (36:30.21)
Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (36:35.318)
the United States, Canada, UK, they all tried in some way to.
level the playing field a bit relative to what it would be if the government didn't get involved. And at the same time, make sure that the different needs of society were being properly met, especially because the capitalist economy wasn't going to meet them. We're talking about environmental regulations. We're talking about control of the market. mean, all kinds of regulations to govern how the stock market works. We're talking about healthcare. You know, there's just a whole lot. Anyway.
You got my own attention.
PJ Wehry (37:14.529)
Yes. No, no, it's no. This is so what does it mean not to have a true society? And just as an aside, I brought up the homeschooling because I'm dealing with that every day. And it's so it's what comes to mind. But I don't think of that as a silver bullet. And I think what you're talking about is that, you know, even if my homeschooling was perfect, which it is not, let me be clear, it I still my kids are still products to the culture machine. Right.
Lambert Zuidervaart (37:34.306)
Let's go.
PJ Wehry (37:42.359)
They still come to me. I'll never forget the first time we'd never, know, this is also strange to me. I grew up with ads on television. They grew up with streaming services. And then they were three years old and we were over at my grandparents' house and they said, dad, the TV is broken because ads had come on. And immediately, last afternoon, they came over to me and they said, dad, we need to get Gator Golf. And I was like, what?
Lambert Zuidervaart (37:52.099)
Right.
Lambert Zuidervaart (38:00.232)
I see.
PJ Wehry (38:11.285)
what's Gator, why do you need, and it's like they'd seen a commercial and they were like, I will not be complete until I have Gator Golf. And that's such a silly example. And it's, we are so used to turning down ads that we don't recognize how they shape us. But I, yeah, it's not, it, it isn't something that's just like, well, if, you know, if we just retreat into ourselves and we're just completely interior, we will find the genuine inside us and, and
triumph over, you have to be able to engage society.
Lambert Zuidervaart (38:41.806)
Well, yeah. Well, Joe Heath, who's younger than I am, he also does work in critical theory. He's at the University of Toronto where I was for a number of years. Wrote a book, I don't remember the title, which basically says that the language of authenticity is the language of marketing. So.
You have all these people who are out there, know, embracing the latest fads because they want to be authentic. But of course, what they're doing is they're just taking on whatever is being mass marketed. So the mass marketing of authenticity is really at the core of the consumer culture that we're part of. That's why another reason why, you know, in my own voice, quite apart from what Adorno said, I'm quite suspicious of all this language of authenticity. And when I watch, you know, movies or watch
series on TV, I'm just struck by how much that is a core theme. that becoming your authentic self really is the thing that people are striving for. The characters need somehow to find that authentic self. And usually they don't get there, but nevertheless, that's what really is the goal. And I think surely there's more life than that. mean,
Maybe we could just feed the poor or something, you
PJ Wehry (40:10.345)
that's painful. So I mean, I think this is a good segue here. That said, think largely in agreement with you. Let me be clear. That's painful because like, I feel better about myself. I feel like I'm authentically myself as someone starving next to you. It's just too soon. Okay. So.
Lambert Zuidervaart (40:14.626)
What?
PJ Wehry (40:37.391)
As a segue here, you also talk about that there's a lot of proximity between Adorno's conception of truth and Foucault's politics of truth. And so we've talked about, you actually mentioned it kind of alongside Adorno's critique of Heidegger. And so what is the proximity between Adorno's conception of truth and Foucault's politics of truth?
Lambert Zuidervaart (41:02.798)
I'll say it this way. Neither of them wants to divorce truth from the dynamics of power. They think the dynamics of power and truth are interrelated and that you cannot properly think about truth if you ignore the dynamics of power. Now in Foucault, that's very, very clear because he has a conception of regimes of truth. Regimes of truth are really the linking of power and
PJ Wehry (41:25.057)
Yes.
Lambert Zuidervaart (41:32.77)
truth in an intimate way and that there are different regimes over different periods of time. So he talks about the modern regime of truth. In that regime of truth, it's really scientific expertise that calls the shots. And so his famous essay on truth and power really calls on intellectuals in France to address the dynamics of power inside
the, to use my term, domains of truth that they inhabit, whether it be the hospital, whether it be a prison system, whether it be family dynamics, you know, all the, all the institutions and organizations that we're already part of, we need to actually sort ou t exactly who has the authority to speak truth, what are the ways that we check that authority, and so on. And he says for the, these are positions of power.
The positions that people have to actually speak the truth and be known for that are positions of power. Adorno doesn't go exactly that route, but he does think that whatever truth claims we make in society are always made in the context of a pattern of domination that affects all of us. And that pattern of domination has really three
aspects to it. One is the domination that occurs between people. So some people dominate others. It's been that way since the dawn of civilization. It continues to be that way. It's more hidden now because it's in a sense indirect. It's mediated by the economy. But nevertheless, you have people dominating other people. So that's one kind of domination. Marks.
PJ Wehry (43:28.235)
Is he pulling on Nietzsche there? Forgive me.
Marks, okay.
Lambert Zuidervaart (43:32.844)
Marks. Yep. mean, the domination of one class over another would be the classic Marxian formulation. Darno doesn't talk the class language so much because he thinks that the patterns of domination have gotten a little more sophisticated than that, a little less direct. But OK. Marks. The next one would be the domination of nature. So human beings, whether they're in the dominant class or the
subordinate class in terms of human society are dominating nature and that and we see ourselves as needing to dominate nature in order to flourish well that's another problem and the third one which really goes back to Freud I guess and Nietzsche as well is the domination of our own natural selves the domination of our own bodily needs and desires and so on
And these three forms of domination are completely interlinked as far as Adorno is concerned. So domination works itself out in all three ways all the time. To try to make truth claims in a society where this kind of domination is occurring all the time means that you're always going to have to say something against the domination. You can't just make positive truth claims and leave it at that. You also have to always be critiquing the patterns of domination that
are in the fabric of the culture itself. So in that sense, Adorno and Foucault, although they have different vocabularies and different histories, are talking about the same problem, the same problem of how power dynamics not just infiltrate, but in some ways make possible any kind of truth language and truth claims. Now, in Foucault, I say.
Foucault doesn't have a good way to sort out what would be a better way of making truth claims than the way that are already in place. What would be a better way of doing science, for example? He doesn't really have the normative language to say that. And I think that's a problem. And Adorno's problem is much more, I think, that he has not really fleshed out.
Lambert Zuidervaart (45:58.152)
the genuine normative differences between these types of domination. And for me, to use the same term for all three of these patterns is problematic. oppression, which would be the way people dominate each other, is different from
Lambert Zuidervaart (46:22.122)
improper control of nature. I think Adorno would say yes, some control of nature is legitimate and important. Without it, we couldn't have culture. We couldn't have society. So you can't get rid of all control of nature. The question is, what is the appropriate and what is the better way to control nature than the ways that we've developed, at least in the West? But that's a different problem as far as I'm concerned.
You can't just talk about domination there. It's a matter of trying to find appropriate control rather than simply no control. I mean, you can't give up control. Then the third one, repression. Let's call it repression, the way in which we sort of reject our own desires and so on and so forth. That really needs to be counteracted by some kind of appropriate sublimation, where
needs and so on are directed in such a way that the individual as well as the community can flourish. Adorno has, I think, somewhat tacit notion of sublimation, but he doesn't really work it out. so not only are the problems different, but the solutions are different. So sublimation is not going to work to get rid of oppression in society, for example. And
Getting rid of oppression in society in and of itself will not give us the appropriate control of nature. these things, I think, have to be teased out a bit. And the other thing that I say in that chapter on Foucault and Adorno is that Adorno has, and this is what I applaud, Adorno has a sense of society still having the potential to be true, still having the potential to be.
one in which human beings and other creatures can flourish. And it's hard to find that in Foucault. And I hang on to, I call it the utopian dimension of Adorno's thought. It's where Adorno commentators have their disagreements, of course, in one of the places. But I hang on to that. That hope for some better society, I think, remains in Adorno, even though he has very few ways to say how we could ever get there, unlike...
Lambert Zuidervaart (48:42.018)
classical Marxists who had a pretty good idea of how to get there. But by the time of the 1930s, that whole way of thinking about revolution had come to a dead end. And Dornal Horkheimer, young scholars in the 1930s were honest enough to recognize that and say we can't keep talking about the language of revolution in a Marxist sense when it's not possible. It's not possible.
Ahem.
PJ Wehry (49:12.301)
which is what really distinguishes the Frankfurt School. Yeah. Forgive me. And I love the beautiful answer. immediately I can feel the difference between oppression, the improper domination of nature, and repression. Can you explain what you mean by sublimation? How would that fix repression?
Lambert Zuidervaart (49:15.916)
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Lambert Zuidervaart (49:38.07)
Yeah, sublimation. So one of the issues in Freudian psychology, and I'm by no means an expert in this, I come to Freudian psychology primarily through Adorno and Kristeva and other people who draw on it and make it part of their work. But one of the issues that's identified in Freudian psychology is to find the proper relationship between
the id, let's call it our drives.
PJ Wehry (50:10.435)
Hmm.
Lambert Zuidervaart (50:12.014)
the ego, which we will just call the self, and the superego, let's just call it society, to find the proper relationship among the society as it's internalized inside the human being, the ego and the id. Now, there are many ways in which this can go wrong. One of the ways it can go wrong is if the
Ego never really develops a relationship to...
other authority figures, it remains narcissistic and then turns itself into the authority figure for everybody. I won't name names, but we have such people in our society and some of have immense power.
PJ Wehry (51:04.995)
Hmm. I'm sure I don't know, have any idea who you're talking about.
Lambert Zuidervaart (51:06.606)
So let's move on.
I write about these things in my blog post, but I'm not going to talk about them now. That's one way I can aspire. Another way would be when you have such a stern father figure, getting back to your earlier comments, that the father figure doesn't allow the individual to find his or her own way of expressing needs.
PJ Wehry (51:17.899)
Yeah.
Lambert Zuidervaart (51:39.436)
desires, drives, and the like. Instead, they all have to line up with what the father figure on behalf of society.
not only deems but demands as the right way. So that's another way, right? That would be a kind of repression. I think actually narcissism involves a different kind of repression, but I'm not an expert on this and I'm not going to try to describe it. So there are different ways in which this can can misfire and they quote the ideal would be to have these three components, if I can put it that way.
line up in such a way that it's harmonious. Now, whether that's possible in a mature individual, it should be. mean, but it could take long hours and many, many years of psychotherapy for many of us to get close to that. Or alternatively, we could just change society in such a way that we don't have some of these patterns so strongly as part of the way people get nurtured.
But anyway, that's exactly bringing our needs and desires in harmony with what would a mature individual needs in order to be a flourishing member of society. That's my terminology. That's not Freud, but yeah.
PJ Wehry (52:48.247)
Yes. So sublimation is to bring that into harmony.
PJ Wehry (53:05.763)
Thank you though. That's one way. I mean, I want to be respectful of your time. And I would love, know, at some point, because you have to have a similar process for society at large, right? For oppression, and you need a different kind of process. And those are going to be, if I understand, like different dimensions of truth are going to help, or those probably map slightly differently, but they all help with those things.
Lambert Zuidervaart (53:35.826)
Right. So I talk about social domains of truth, and each of them has its own distinct task in society. So science, I just talked about that yesterday in a lecture, has a distinct task in society. It's a legitimate task. It's a task that often gets turned in the wrong direction, and is very vulnerable to pressures that come from both the economy and the administrative state.
pressures that are mediated through the university. So the universities are really the way in which the economy and the state exercise a very, very strong control on what happens in the academy. So what happens in science. Now, science, I'm using that in a very broad sense to include all the academic disciplines. So I don't mean just the natural sciences. I mean social sciences, humanities, mathematics, the entire mix of academic disciplines.
PJ Wehry (54:32.269)
Are we going back to like, theoria there in some sense?
Lambert Zuidervaart (54:35.818)
At least back to the German Wissenschaft in the 19th century, where you could have Naturwissenschaften, and those are the natural sciences, and you could have Geisteswissenschaften, which would be cultural sciences, but they included what we now distinguish as social science and humanities. And then mathematics has always been a little bit hard to classify because it's not either one of those, right? So, but I just, I'm...
Ecumenical, I bring in the entire mix.
PJ Wehry (55:06.957)
Hahaha
I like that. So I want to be respectful of your time. One, Dr. Ziedewart, this has been tremendous. So thank you. As a final question, reading, buying and reading, excuse me, besides buying and reading your excellent book, Adorno, Heidegger, and The Politics of Truth, what would you recommend to someone who's listened for the last hour?
that they should either do or meditate on over the next week.
Lambert Zuidervaart (55:43.037)
Well, that's a great question. I think that a good place for us to start is to ask ourselves, what is it about our society that we think is worthwhile? And what is it about our society that we think is not so worthwhile? And then what would be required in order to move from the one to the other, to move from a society that is problematic
PJ Wehry (55:58.509)
Hmm.
Lambert Zuidervaart (56:11.842)
the society that actually promotes human flourishing and really the flourishing of all creatures, I talk about interconnected flourishing. What would be required? That to me seems to be one of the deep issues in Adorno's work. He doesn't articulate it that way, but he's passionate about what's wrong with our society, tentatively hopeful that in fact, what's already present in society could
if we redirected to everything, could lead to a society that actually is a good society, or in his terms, a true society. Now, I think that's a worthwhile thing to think about. It's a big topic. Most of the time we don't spend our time thinking about these sorts of things. As a philosopher who works with Adorno and other people in that field, I guess I spend more of my time doing that. But I think it's a good topic.
By working at that a little bit, think maybe we'll get ourselves a little bit out of the political morass that we're in right now, where everything is an instant issue, soundbite, attack.
trivial response, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really a question of how do we get beyond the current political moment towards something that would actually be better? It's going to take more than just political regime change, I think. It's going to require something much broader than that. In my other works, I talk about differential transformation. By that, mean we need a transformation of society as a whole.
PJ Wehry (57:40.195)
Hmm.
Lambert Zuidervaart (57:55.074)
But it's not going to be like a revolution where you throw out the one government and then you put another one in and then you try to work everything out from there. It's really a transformation that has to occur in many different domains. It has to occur in health. It has to occur in art. It has to occur in the sciences in the broad sense. It has to occur in political systems. has to occur especially in the economy. And if we cannot actually break out of the
digital global capitalist economy towards something else, then I'm not sure much of the other, many of the other changes that I think are necessary are actually going to be pulled off, including the changes that would allow us to have an ecologically meaningful future. I'm just now reading the latest novel by Ian McEwen, which,
is set about 100 years beyond now, after the world has been completely inundated by the oceans. And it's the UK, in order to get from one place to another, you always have to take a boat, because most of the land is underwater. It's fascinating. mean, he's talking about a world that is not inconceivable. It's not inconceivable. It could very well happen. And he's talking about looking back.
from 100 years at where we are at right now and trying to sort out what's good about it, what's not good about it, and how is it that we're laying the patterns that could actually result in a huge ecological disaster. Anyway, we can talk about that for another hour, but I think you asked. I thought I would be.
PJ Wehry (59:43.331)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes!
Yes, what's the name of the book, not to put you on the spot?
Lambert Zuidervaart (59:52.814)
Something about knowledge. What can we know? I think it's what can we know?
PJ Wehry (01:00:01.963)
Ian McCune.
Lambert Zuidervaart (01:00:03.502)
Ian McEwen.
PJ Wehry (01:00:05.539)
Do you and
PJ Wehry (01:00:09.429)
what we can know.
Lambert Zuidervaart (01:00:10.84)
Yeah. What can we know? I think it's more like a question.
PJ Wehry (01:00:17.027)
Well, let me just say, go ahead.
Lambert Zuidervaart (01:00:19.194)
I might have got one of those details wrong. I might even have the author's name wrong. But if you put it together in a Google search, you should find it. It just came out this year.
PJ Wehry (01:00:27.009)
No, I have it. It's Ian McEwen, What We Can Know. That's what it, yes, yes. So for those listening, because it sounds like a great read, but I wanted to say thank you because, and I think this is when you talk about getting past this political morass, part of it, when you talk about the trivial response, we're constantly talking about what's not worthwhile. And I love that you started with what is actually worthwhile about our society?
Lambert Zuidervaart (01:00:31.618)
What we can do. Okay, there you go.
PJ Wehry (01:00:56.247)
What do we actually want to keep and what do we want to grow? And I think that kind of what you talked about with the utopian dimension of Adorno's thought, I think that kind of positive and uplifting ending and application and that belief in that faith is important. So Dr. Ziedever, it's been an absolute joy. Thank you.
Lambert Zuidervaart (01:01:16.12)
Thank you and keep doing what you're doing.
Thank