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| Theodor Adorno, Self-portrait. |
Theodor Adorno on Theory and Practice.
From Problems of Moral Philosophy. Stanford University Press,1995: 4-5. [Lectures: May 7, 1963 - July 23, 1963.]
"Ladies
and Gentlemen, I urge you therefore to exercise a certain patience with
respect to the relations between theory and practice. Such a request
may be justified because in a situation like the present - one about
which I do not entertain the slightest illusion, and nor would I wish to
encourage any illusion in you - whether it will be possible ever again
to achieve a valid for of practice may well depend on not demanding that
every idea should immediately produce its own legitimizing document
explaining its own practical use.
The situation may well demand
instead that we resist the call of practicality with all our might in
order ruthlessly to follow through an idea and its logical implications
so as to see where it may lead. I would even say that this
ruthlessness, the power of resistance that is inherent in the idea
itself and that prevents it from letting itself be directly manipulated
for any instrumental purposes whatsoever, this theoretical ruthlessness
contains - if you will allow this paradox -- a practical element within
it. Today, practice - and I do not hesitate to express this in an
extreme way - has made great inroads into theory, in other words, into
the realm of new thought in which right behavior can be reformulated.
This idea is not as prardoxical and irritating as it may sound, for in
the final analysis thinking is itself a form of behavior. In its
origins thinking is no more than a form in which we have attempted to
master our environment and come to terms with it - testing reality is
the name given by analytical psychology to the function of the ego and
of thought - and it is perfectly possible that in certain situations
practice will be referred back to theory far more frequently than at
other times and in other situations. At any rate, it does no harm to
air this question.
It is no accident that the celebrated unity of
theory and practice implied by Marxian theory and then developed above
all by Lenin should have finally degenerated in [Stalinist] dialectical
materialism to a kind of blind dogma whose sole function is to eliminate
theoretical thinking altogether. This provides an object lesson in the
transformation of practicism into irrationalism, and hence, too, for
the transformation of the practicism into a repressive and oppressive
practice. That alone might well be a sufficient reason to give us pause
and not be in such haste to rely on the famous unity of theory and
practice in the beleif that it is guaranteed and that it holds good for
every time and place. For otherwise you will find yourself in the
position of what Americans call a joiner, that is to say a man who
always has to join it, who has to have a cause for which he can fight.
Such a person is driven by his sheer enthusiasm for the idea that
something or other must be done and some movement has to be joined about
which he is deluded enough to believe that it will bring him a kind of
hostility towards mind that necessarily negates a genuine unity of
theory and practice."
