Living is a Messianic Thought Experiment

Sketches in Messianism

There is a text that I’ve carried around with me for years. It's the last maxim of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia and, if you can bear his rather knotty use of language, I will relay the whole passage, in parts. It begins like this:

"The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estranged the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects — this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite.”

Adorno's thread here suggests that messianic thought is common to all, in some fashion. We all groan against what we feel is askew. Against that groan is some implied an opposite vision: the world as we wish it was. I suspect it takes a little more intentionality to do the thought process the other way around, as Adorno proposes: to envisage the world as we long for it to be, and from there to reconsider the broken workings of the world as we presently experience it. This is a messianic thought experiment: an exercise in the politics of longing. At one end it might be a thoughtful, intentional, dialogical process toward images of hope and liberation. At the other end, ill-considered grievances are easily exploited toward other kinds of change, as we so clearly see today. The tribes are ever forming around whichever world they all will fight for in the morning. Evidently, mapping our longings is not a process that guarantees good results. Our longings are conditioned by our own part in the broken present.

And so Adorno goes on to caution messianic thought. He says:

“It is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we know that any possible knowledge must not only be wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world.”

This, I believe, is to say that messianic thought is always subjective. We can only envision the world made whole from our present place amid its brokenness. Our visions will be incomplete because of our smallness, and possibly also dangerous because of our own involvement and entanglement. We are not separate from the world we envision. We are part of the thing itself. So what then? Shall we collapse into helplessness and do nothing? By no means, says Adorno:

“Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible.”

I can only face my vision with sober self-doubt. I am small, and I am part of the brokenness of the world. But even so, my best vision is the best I have. I am obliged to move toward it in goodfaith, held with the open hand of humility and not the closed fist of hubris.

“But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”

The last sentence feels like a rorschach test. Do I hear the dismissive disenchantment of Modernity, or faith in the possibility of some deeper magic, some messianic answer to messianic longings? More on this in a future post. For now, I'll note that Adorno says it hardly matters. Is this true? I wouldn't word it quite so, myself, but as far as pistis — goodfaith — is concerned, maybe so. Pistis moves toward its best vision, whatever the outcome.

“There never was much hope,” says Gandalf “Just a fool's hope…”