Infinitesimal freedom: Theodor W. Adorno meets Jiddu Krishnamurti

30 min readFeb 17, 2021

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Jiddu Krishnamurti. It focuses upon how both thinkers employ a determinately negative epistemology, and, eschew Hegelian dialectics as a manner of ratiocination to resolve socio-political problems, in favour of non-identity thinking. The paper highlights how Adorno helps shape Krishnamurti’s critical task through a rigorous and exacting project, but also that the latter helps demonstrate how the former is able to exceed his philosophical tradition, and articulate a (non)theory of knowledge, which given the number of global socio-political crises, is as timely in 2019, as when spelled out during the mid-twentieth century.

Context

I have had an interest in the esoteric works of Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) since 2009, when I was told his oft quoted dictum: ‘‘the observer is the observed’’. This pithy quote demonstrates a shadow of the thought of Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose works I later discovered Krishnamurti was well versed in. Undertaking my MA during 2009/10, I was formally studying the works of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and, in particular, those of Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969). Neo-Marxists concerned with the insidious role culture played in preventing social emancipation amidst late capitalism, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, with Adorno pre-eminent amongst them, dedicated their careers to exposing the liberal fiction of freedom in the cultural West.

Krishnamurti and Adorno both lived and developed their theories of what it meant to be a socio-culturally embodied subject, and to suffer during the socio-political turmoil of the qualitatively long twentieth century. Krishnamurti spent his middle to mature years (1930–1986) in California, whilst Adorno resided between the United States, in exile during National Socialism in his native Germany, before returning to West Germany (1949). It is not known whether they were at all familiar with each other’s critical projects. Given the similarities of the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault (1926–1984) and neo-Marxism of Adorno, that even this pair did not know of each other’s works suggests that it is highly unlikely that Adorno would have been familiar with the thought of Krishnamurti, or vice-a-versa.

A literature review to source works which compared the thought of these two important thinkers of the twentieth century revealed only two prior manuscripts: a 2007 dissertation from The University of Buffalo by Ashutosh Kaisi, entitled The ending of nihilism: from Nietzsche to Krishnamurti, and the other, a 2012 piece by Dudley A. Schreiber at The University of South Africa, entitled On the epistemology of postmodern spirituality. 1 Even within these two pieces, whilst Adorno and Krishnamurti are referenced, their thought is not explicitly discussed in conjunction. This is surprising, given the clear affinity that key tenets of their respective critical tasks share. It was thus the aim of this research to elucidate how these two thinkers relate to each other, how they differ, and, how combining their thoughts proves a fruitful exercise which strengthens the critical efficacy of both of their key tenets; namely, that determinate negation is needed amidst a culture of reified thought.

What these key tents exactly mean, and how they are articulated in Krishnamurti and Adorno respectively will form the main body of this paper. It will begin by briefly introducing the two main thinkers under discussion. This will serve to justify the case for comparing their thoughts. The next section will focus upon how both thinkers employ a determinatively negative epistemology to articulate their thoughts; in effect, how both respond to their predominant intellectual climate of positivism. This leads on to analysis of Adorno’s project of negative dialectics, as an inversion of the positive version articulated by Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). The argument then develops by exploring Adorno’s notion of, responding to György Lukács’s (1885–1971) idea of reification, non-identity thinking, as a manner of non-violent conceptual elaboration. In this way, the paper will demonstrate how both Adorno and Krishnamurti highlight contingency over necessity, and reject positive identity thinking and positive dialectics as emblematic of reified thought. As such, the argument develops by exploring how for both central thinkers, political demonstration and the possibility of the socialised subject thinking their way out of a problem via ratiocination is rendered complicit in the very conditions it responds to. The paper concludes by highlighting how Adorno helps shape Krishnamurti’s critical task through a rigorous and exacting project, but also how the latter helps demonstrate how the former is able to exceed his philosophical tradition, and articulate a (non)theory of knowledge, which given the number of global socio-political crises, is as timely in 2019, as when spelled out during the mid-twentieth century.

Krishnamurti

Born in India into a lower middle-class Hindu family — his father was clerk for firstly the British Colonial government, and later, the Theosophy society — through a chance encounter with Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934), Krishnamurti was groomed for twenty years (1909–1929) to become a prophetic ‘World Teacher’. Schooled in the thought of Theosophy, and through a classically British education, Krishnamurti nonetheless rebutted the indoctrination he had undergone the previous two decades. 2 At an event held for him to demonstrate his legitimacy as World Teacher, Krishnamurti instead remarked:

‘‘I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally.’’ 3

In this manner, he dissolved the order of which he had been groomed to be the head of, and embarked on speaking tours across the world, eventually settling in Ojai, California. From 1940–1944 he did not speak publicly, as he had come under FBI surveillance for his anti-nationalist and pacifist thought amidst a jingoist atmosphere. From the end of World War Two until his death in 1986, Krishamurti continued to speak across the globe, and held discussions with numerous leaders of state. His discourse with physicist David Bohm (1917–1992) over a period of approximately two decades, from the 1960s — 1980s, has been collated into a text entitled The limits of thought, and is an excellent introduction to Krishnamurti’s critical task. In sum, with a clear link to Quantum Theory and the observer effect in Physics, 4 Krishnamurti argues that, as noted above, the observer is the observed. Therefore, to philosophise, or, aim to correlate observation with material fact in positivist fashion, 5 is rendered problematic. The best a social subject 6 can do is to realise the impossibility of corresponding knowledge with lived experience in its unfathomable totality. What Krishnamurti’s critical task results in is a different manner of learning, a process that inspired the creation of a number of schools across the globe based upon central tenets of Krishnamurti’s thought.

Adorno

Adorno was born into a mixed household: his mother was a devout Catholic, and his father had converted from Judaism to Protestantism. An intellectual nonconformist and polymath, Adorno was a precocious child who could play Beethoven on the piano by age 12. 7 He later formally studied philosophy, psychology and sociology, eventually completing a doctorate on the hermeneutical phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Schooled in the classic post-Enlightenment, Western European intellectual tradition, it may strike the reader as being odd to compare the esoteric thought of Krishnamurti, who, in the culturally Western paradigm, would be deemed an Eastern mystic, with that of the neo-Marxism of a sociologist, philosopher and musicologist such as Adorno. That said, what connects the two thinkers in an essential way is their aversion to first philosophy after René Descartes (1596–1650), in effect, that knowledge can be constructed through ratiocination. Krishnamurti, after Nietzsche, was eager to demonstrate the limits of thought, and, as noted above, deemed truth ‘a pathless land’. Adorno essentially agrees with this anti-positivist perspective, but, crucially, he sharpens its articulation in a performative and ironic fashion: by using reasoned arguments, vis-à-vis the study of aesthetics, to demonstrate how such arguments fail to satisfy their demands; the ouroboros firmly comes to mind. 8 It is with this notion of knowledge being a serpent that eternally consumes itself that the first main section will focus upon the determinate negation within both Adorno’s and Krishnamurti’s critical tasks.

Determinate negation

Adorno considers it facetious to posit notions of the best set of affairs in which to live. Rather, his determinately negative reading of social existence requires that the conditioned social subject must realise that they are wed to a set of contingent criteria that they have been accepting as sacrosanct. For Adorno, this realisation is a painstaking and humble endeavour, which is in sharp contrast to the — as he sees it — unwarranted self-assuredness of his cultural peers. 9

This epistemological negation in Adorno is to be juxtaposed with colloquial connotations of emancipatory action such as direct protest, demonstrations and revolutionary upheavals. Crucially, for Adorno the moment for Philosophy to be able to qualify such action has passed, and in effect, by engaging in such modes of praxis, the subject will merely reinforce the very ideological violence that has created existing problems. On that note, Adorno observes:

We like to present alternatives to choose from, to be marked True or False. The decisions of a bureaucracy are frequently reduced to Yes or No answers to drafts submitted to it; the bureaucratic way of thinking has become the secret model for a thought allegedly still free. But the responsibility of philosophical thought in its essential situations is not to play this game. 10

Building upon a Nietzschean theme that knowledge that is not dangerous is not worth thinking about, 11 Adorno argues against the prevalent positivist canon during his time, which attempts to qualify philosophy along the lines of a scientific method. For Adorno, positivism represents instrumental identity thinking, which in a disingenuous manner attempts to reduce the social life-world to a series of ‘yes or no’ answers. In other words, positivism is a reductionist model that does not account for the complexity of human experience. In response to this, Adorno argues that the task of philosophy ‘‘is not to reduce the entire world to a prefabricated system of categories, but rather the opposite, viz. to hold itself open to whatever experience presents itself to the mind.’’ 12 Instead of a ‘‘bureaucratic way of thinking,’’ in Adorno, F. H, Bradley’s pithy emblem that ‘‘where everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst,’’ 13 effectively summarises Adorno’s determinately negative critical task.

Krishnamurti’s perspective is remarkably similar to that of Adorno’s. Throughout his mature speeches, 14 Krishnamurti repeatedly articulates the following in a variety of guises: ‘‘Through negation come to the positive; do not seek the positive, but come to it by understanding what it is not’’. 15 Moreover, Krishnamurti argues that

‘‘order can be brought about only when you understand the disorder in which you live. If you create order then it will be a blueprint, won’t it? Whereas if one begins to understand the nature of disorder in one’s life then in understanding disorder, order naturally comes in’’. 16

Similar in its advocacy of determinate negation in lieu of positive ratiocination, Krishnamurti’s analysis, whilst Adornian in its aversion to blueprint, or, bureaucratic, thinking, still lacks nuance insofar as it deems order to naturally arise by understanding disorder. This is where Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ help to sharpen the thought of Krishnamurti. What negative dialectics consists of and how it operates for Adorno will be spelled out in the next section. In doing so, clear links between Adorno’s and Krishnamurti’s critical tasks will be elucidated.

Negative dialectics

A simultaneous homage to, and, a reworking of, Hegel’s ‘positive’ dialectical method, negative dialectics is a manner of conceptual engagement that crucially refuses to promise a redemptive moment of affirmation and meaningfulness. Adorno argues that

‘‘it lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope’’. 17

For Adorno, this constitutes the ‘hope’ in thinking in a world full of horror, where the moment of philosophy’s realisation through the exclusive power of reason, whereby Hegel’s, and, also Karl Marx’s (1818–1883), positive dialectical methods have been rendered ineffectual. More nuanced than Krishnamurti’s advocacy of understanding disorder to come to order, Adorno’s negative dialectics staunchly refuses to provide palatable logical conclusions drawn from apparently fixed first principles:

‘‘negativity in itself, if such a concept were not nonsensical — since by virtue of its being in itself, a concept that exists essentially only in context, i.e. for others, turns into its own opposite — negativity in itself is not a good to be defended. If it were, it would be transformed into bad positivity’’. 18

Adorno argues that concepts only make sense when understood in context. Therefore, to regard negativity as the mere inverse of positivity, or, in Krishnamurti’s terms, disorder as the mere inverse of order, is too simplistic. Rather, negative dialectics does not ‘come to rest in itself’. More nuanced than Krishnamurti’s analysis instead of converting disorder into order, Adorno argues the Bradley-esque motif that ‘‘the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better’’. 19 Crucially, the false is not then rendered true, but, rather, only an ‘index’ of what is ‘right and better’. Gillian Rose helps shed light on the nuance of Adorno’s negative dialectics in observing that

‘‘negation is criticism of society which is positive (determinate) in that it aims to attain and present knowledge of society insofar as that is possible, but not positive in the sense that it confirms or sanctions [or reproduces] what it criticises’’. 20

This observation by Rose is commensurate with Krishnamurti’s ostensible critical task when his speeches are looked at in longitudinal fashion. However, Krishnamurti falls foul of not articulating this notion in as meticulous fashion as Adorno. Krishnamurti argues, in only a slight variant of what was presented above concerning (dis)order: ‘’if you merely observe actually what is, then what is, is order. It is only when you try to change ‘what is’ that there is disorder; because you want to change according to the knowledge which you have acquired’’. 21 It is politically problematic to argue against attempting to change ‘what is’. For example, in the case of apartheid South Africa, to think of only one controversial example prevalent within Krishnamurti and Adorno’s lifetimes until their deaths, it appears that ‘what is’, was highly disordered, especially from the perspective of a South African subject considered either black, or ‘coloured’. How order would arise from such subjects’ acceptance of ‘what is’ is highly questionable. It is at this junction that Adorno’s critical analysis of what he deems ‘identity thinking’ may help to and once more sharpen Krishnamurti’s thought, or, at the very least, clarify the hermeneutics of the latter thinker.

Identity thinking

Adorno’s thesis deems post-Enlightenment thought as emblematic of identity thinking. That is, identity thinking is commensurate with a positivist canon which aims to irrefutably correlate conceptual analysis with lived, experiential, fact. The problem with this for Adorno is unequivocal:

‘‘Just as little as a simple fact can be thought without a concept, because to think it always already means to conceptualize it, it is equally impossible to think the purest concept without reference to the factual. Even the creations of fantasy that are supposedly independent of space and time, point toward individual existence — however far they may be removed from it”. 22

Adorno’s analysis leaves little space for conceptual analysis, as understood in the Western philosophical tradition as one of either inductive or deductive reasoning, and ratiocination. Adorno builds upon the Marxist theory of his predecessor Lukács, and in particular, the latter’s concept of ‘reification’, or, in other words, the false necessitation of particular contingent social factors, to reveal how reification is inextricably tied to instrumental identity thinking, which seeks to make unlike things alike. Identity thinking is necessarily instrumental because it involves the teleological use of concepts to achieve ends through normative discourse. This predicament of reified thought leads Adorno to remark that

‘‘the more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter’’. 23

This leads on to his oft quoted dictum that ‘‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’’. 24 By this, Adorno attempts to demonstrate the problem of discursive logic based upon reason and use of concepts in instrumental manner; this state of affairs has become so dominant, that attempts to bypass it only strengthen it.

Whilst not articulating a thesis concerning reified thought in a manner after Lukács and Adorno, Krishnamurti’s reading concerning what he perceives to be the limits of thought is remarkably similar. Repeatedly throughout his discourses are excerpts like the below:

“Thought is everlastingly conditioned, because it is the response of the past as memory. Thought is always mechanical; it falls very easily into a pattern, into a groove, and then you consider you are being tremendously active, whether you are confined to the communist groove, the Catholic groove, or whatever it is. It is the easiest, the most mechanical thing to do — and we think we are living”. 25

In Krishnamurti’s, as well as Adorno’s, analysis, it is not possible for the subject to conceptually think their way to a palatable solution for what they perceive to be a problem. Such an apparently constructive manner of thinking is, for the aforementioned thinkers, fragmentary and duplicitous; 26 it is the subject’s desire to achieve logical, clear and consistent outcomes that results in an instrumental mode of thinking. For example, to articulate ‘freedom’ requires a conceptual framework in which its antonym, for example, ‘constraint’, is dialectically enmeshed, thereby rendering palatable outcomes as merely negotiations of competing narratives. This leads Krishnamurti to lament, asking in dialogue with Bohm in 1980: ‘‘why haven’t the intellectuals seen the simple fact that where there is accumulation there must be more’’? 27 Returning to the imagery of the ouroborous, for Krishnamurti, and Adorno, positive knowledge acquisition is merely the arrangement of conceptual taxonomies which are adapted to fit particular contexts to glean desired outcomes. Consequently, it will not suffice to conceptually elaborate a positive solution to a predicament, for that would be to fall foul to instrumental identity thinking. Instead, what is required is a non-identity thinking thesis, a notion which Adorno, once more indirectly doing much intellectual work on behalf of Krishnamurti, provides.

Non-identity thinking

Negative dialectics attempts to enact a mode of non-identity thinking; that is, a way of reading the relationship between Subject and Object such that the latter does not identify the former in a manner that subsumes it within itself, nor does the former subsume itself within the latter. Moreover, a concept always contains more than is realised in its object, whilst an object is always more than can be grasped by a concept. Non-identity thinking is, therefore, a move from necessity to contingency. Following the section above, an example of typical identity thinking is exemplified in a case whereby an individual (subject) claims herself to be ‘free’ (concept onto object), thus subsuming an element of the latter into the former. For Adorno, and, implicitly, Krishnamurti, this subsumption represents an act of regressive, and, even violent, thinking, whereby the ‘‘subject identifies a particular concept with the conceptual system as a whole’’. 28

Instead, non-identity thinking replaces necessity with contingency by ‘‘negating identity thinking, so preventing its decline to myth. Adorno captures the nature of this ‘force’ of non-identity thinking when he writes ‘the force that liberates the dialectical movement in cognition is the very same that rebels against the system’’’. 29 Thus, unlike positive dialectics which entails grandiose attempts to articulate comprehensive knowledge, it is only through a much more modest, but nonetheless painstaking programme of negative dialectics, and, an accompanying non-identity thinking, which may ensure that philosophical enquiry may retain some critical efficacy. 30 Adorno argues in a lecture on negative dialectics that

[B]y virtue of its own methodology philosophy bars its own way to what it wishes to achieve, namely, to be in a position to judge matters that are not itself, that are not concepts. And I would like to suggest quite simply as a programme that philosophy should reflect conceptually on this process in which it deals only with concepts and, by raising it to the level of the concept, should revise it and reverse it again, in so far as this can be achieved with conceptual methods. 31

Adorno’s critical task is thus a humble endeavour, and at odds with the aims of the vast majority of his contemporaries, who follow in the tradition of first philosophy to reach valid conclusions. Instead, Adorno, and, also Krishnamurti, expose concepts as fallible, and reveal them instead solely as tools to articulate contingent narrative, as opposed to timeless Truth. 32

Owing to this conceptual bind, Adorno cannot prescribe what non-identity thinking will necessarily consist of. Instead, through his negatively dialectical non-identity thesis, Adorno reworks the Lukácsian reading of ideology as a theory of how material and economic structures are related to the way in which a socially embodied subject actually thinks. Adorno’s critical lens is therefore necessarily a much more nuanced one than instrumental identity thinking. It is thus apparent why Adorno enacts a negative dialectic, accompanied as it is with an advocacy of non-identity thinking: it is to avoid repeating, and thereby in effect strengthening, the stranglehold of the existent regressive mode of instrumental identity thinking which can only ever reify the concepts examined through it.

Echoing the central thesis of Adorno’s critical task as outlined above, Krishnamurti explores the psychological problems, which manifest as material, socio-political problems, resulting from fragmentary identity thinking and positive dialectics. In one telling excerpt, Krishnamurti remarks that contradiction, the fundamental basis of all positive dialectical thinking, provides the subject with an unhealthy impetus to live:

“The very element of friction makes us feel that we are alive. The effort, the struggle of contradiction, gives us a sense of vitality. That is why we love wars, that is why we enjoy the battle of frustrations. So long as there is the desire to achieve a result, which is the desire to be psychologically secure, there must a contradiction; and where there is contradiction, there cannot be a quiet mind”. 33

For both Krishnamurti and Adorno, there is no psychological security to be gleaned through ratiocination. As outlined above, for Krishnmaurti, ‘truth is a pathless land’. Similarly, for Adorno, ‘Truth’ is only a remainder, or, as he puts it, the ‘‘dregs of the concept’’ — the non-conceptual — as opposed to the hitherto sacrosanct Platonic ideal. 34 Taking this notion to its limit, Krishnamurti pithily remarks: ‘‘die to everything that thought has built as creation, as tradition.’’ 35 The romanticism of such counsel aside, in light of socio-political challenges, as briefly alluded to above in relation to apartheid South Africa, it is problematic to correlate non-identity thinking with praxis as conventionally understood.

Praxis

Krishnamurti and Adorno both deem the separation of thought and action as fallacious. Similarly, they both — not insignificantly given that they lived through the multifarious crises of World War Two — disavow political activism as conventionally understood. When questioned regarding his thoughts on activism, Krishnamurti responded in 1985: ‘‘you can’t demonstrate, you have to live it. And when you live it; that in itself is a demonstration’’. 35 For Krishnamurti, building upon the problem of identity thinking as outlined above, thought cannot solve problems, because thought itself is the problem. Krishnamurti lays out the paradox of attempts to positively articulate solutions to problems created by thought in the tradition of conventional contemporary party politics:

I want order here in the world of reality, because order means security, safety, and protection. I must have that for everybody, and thought cannot produce that order, because thought itself has created the disorder, thought itself is fragmentary. So thought cannot bring the order which is essential for human beings. 36

Instead of duplicitously attempting to create order through disordered thought, Krishnamurti — echoing Adorno’s non-identity thesis — asks ‘‘what is the state of your mind when it is no longer looking for an answer’’? 37 Krishnamurti implicitly responds to the positivist canon when asserting that a ‘right’ question ‘‘will have no answer, because the question itself will open the door. But, if it is a wrong question, you will find ways and means to solve the problem and so remain in bondage. For he who asks the question is himself the bondage’’. 38 This notion of an unanswerable question being the only one worth asking is commensurate with non-identity thinking, as well as the Japanese Zen Buddhist tradition, in which Koans are issued to monks to enable them to realise the limits of rational thought. 39

There is, then, in Krishnamurti’s thesis, a mode of praxis. It is certainly unconventional, but a mode of praxis that is non-identical. In effect, Krishnamurti advises the subject to (not)think in a different paradigm to that of the normative one. This, he deems, will enact a different way of living. For example, he observes that ‘‘the clerk, when he seeks to become a manager, becomes a factor in the creation of power-politics which produce war; so he is directly responsible for war’’. 40 So, instead of political activism as normatively understood, for example, placards and protests, Krishnamurti argues that it is the responsibility of the individual, socialised subject to reflect upon how their conceptual analysis and sense-making faculties are inextricably enmeshed within the structures they perhaps seek to supplant. Krishnamurti’s challenge is provocative, but not mouldable into concrete guidance asides from a negative argument, in effect, what the subject ought not to do.

Ironically, given that he articulated the notion of non-identity thinking, Adorno is actually more concrete in terms of proffering a better state of affairs without merely solely negating that which exists. For example, dotted throughout Adorno’s corpus, there are cursory suggestions of what a better world could consist of, which certainly refutes the charge that his critical task provides only an ‘‘oblique reference to a qualitatively improved state of affairs.’’ 41 Whilst charging the question of what life in a fully emancipated society may be like as falling prey to the spirit of positivism, Adorno concedes in so far as he states that

‘‘there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no one shall go hungry any more’’. 42

Moreover, he argues that an emancipated society would be the ‘‘realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences’’, 43 and a liberation from the capitalist mode of production necessitating surplus value: ‘‘Rien faire comme une beté, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfilment’’. 44 These are remarkably simple and reductive demands. Adorno’s ‘utopia’ of being beyond conceptual definition or fulfilment is similar to Krishnamurti’s enquiry as outlined above, surrounding the state of mind when the subject is not searching for an answer. Accordingly, a conclusion that both Adorno and Krishnamurti appear to reach concerning praxis is that the subject ought do away with projects and plans, and instead retreat to a place of less harm to their lived environment. 45

Adorno’s dictum that ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’, or, that ‘‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’’, 46 is a pithy emblem of his entire negative critical task. As Raymond Geuss points out, in Adorno’s sociological analysis, ‘‘what is at issue here is a structural feature of society, which makes a fully satisfactory life of complete consistency and sincerity impossible’’. 47 The problem here, as Adorno himself notes, is that he

“who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest; the detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such”. 48

This infinitesimal freedom as awareness of one’s entrapment is commensurate with negative dialectics. This vigilant mode of living may, in turn, be aligned with Krishnamurti’s critical task. Adorno could easily be interchanged with Krishnamurti when the former remarks that the subject ought to reject any

“preordained idea, however profound it claims to be; it means moreover that we should not accept one’s own ticket, one’s own slogan, one’s own membership of a group as the guarantee of truth, but should place one’s trust only in the ruthless power of reflection, without deciding that the truth is now fixed and that you have got hold of it once and for all. Resistance means refusing to allow the law governing your own behaviour to be prescribed by the ostensible or actual facts”. 49

For Adorno, the ‘ostensible facts’ have been necessarily agreed upon through the power of reified, instrumental identity thinking. Resistance in the Adornian programme thus involves a determinate refusal to ‘‘remain satisfied with the surface,’’ and instead insists upon ‘‘breaking through the façade’’. 50 Herein lies the importance of the individual subject in terms of affecting breakthroughs, as opposed to any given social collective. The importance of the individual for Adorno is, in effect, because in its potential eccentricity, it may rupture the homogenized and totally administered objectivity of the collective mass. 51 This goes for Krishnmaurti, also, who argues that collectivisation and socio-political movements can only ever regurgitate existing violence unless there is a paradigmatic shift in the manner in which each individual subject seeks to navigate their existence. 52 This links back to Krishnmaurti’s criticism of political demonstration, arguing instead that living ‘it’, in effect, a different way of being, is itself a better demonstration than protesting against that which the subject rejects.

Aesthetics

In spite of the many similarities that have been discussed above in relation to their respective determinately negative critical tasks, concomitant with non-identity thinking and arguing the value of an individual subject resisting dominant norms, Adorno and Krishnamurti differ in one fundamental respect: aesthetics. As a neo-Marxist, Adorno deems artistic creation at the level of the Marxist superstructure as reflective of inherent contradictions in the material base of society. Such aesthetic creation embodies Adorno’s negative dialectic in a way that discursive logic, necessarily, cannot. It is when aesthetic creations attempt to imitate discursive, reified and instrumental thinking that they fail — for Adorno — as works of art. In imitation, art falls prey to easy communicability and thereby the capitalist mode of production, which renders creations commodified.

Instead, aesthetic creativity may, through concepts, enact Adornian non-identity thinking. In such creation, ‘‘identity and non-identity incessantly fulminate’’. 53 Discursive, logical reasoning results in a paradox, whereby upon recognising the non-identical, the subject necessarily renders it identical. Through aesthetic creation there remains a non-conceptual surplus which has a genuinely critical function. Adorno argues that:

“Art is the intuition of what is not intuitable; it is akin to the conceptual without the concept. It is by way of concepts, however, that art sets free its mimetic, non-conceptual layer […] that which in art is not exhausted by discursive logic, the sine qua non of all manifestations of art. Art militates against the concept as much as it does against domination, but for this opposition it, like philosophy, requires concepts”. 54

For Adorno, aesthetic creation emblematises the ‘‘Kantian principle of purposiveness without purpose and thus they resist, by their form alone.’’ 55 This corroborates Adorno’s materialism, namely, that critical aesthetic expression plays with existent cultural material in terms of its intrinsic value and qualities, rather than attempting to align with the dominant purposes of the capitalist mode of production in which it is enmeshed, and which demands the realisation of surplus value. In an age of contemporary neo-liberal governance, this reading of art is unpalatable, thus substantiating Adorno’s argument in favour of the need of non-conventionally engaged art. This need is corroborated in his Krishnamurti-esque claim that

‘‘it is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads’’. 56

Art is crucial in the Adornian programme, then, insofar as it affords the possibility of aesthetic expression which does not fall prey to the charge of a false sense of permanence in the manner of societal, contingent myths that he criticises. In Aesthetic Theory, for example, Adorno argues that aesthetic expression is marked by its inability to coherently articulate truth content. 57 Art may unsettle the subject’s sense of how things are. In doing so, art may disrupt ‘second nature’. Borrowing from Lukács, Adorno stipulates that second nature is the world of cultural material, produced by social and historical subjects embedded in ‘first nature’, which is necessarily entirely unknowable by the individual subject. In other words, the subject is rendered ever alienated from its object, as first nature ‘‘can only be defined as the embodiment of well-known yet meaningless necessities, and is therefore ungraspable and unknowable in its actual substance’’. 58

Adorno deems problematic that in the age of modernity the ‘enlightened’ bourgeois subject, partaking in second nature through reason, has a reified consciousness, which considers nothing to be outside of its potential grasp. As he diagnoses:

‘‘the more relentlessly socialization commands all moments of human and interhuman immediacy, the smaller the capacity of men to recall that this web has evolved, and the more irresistible its natural appearance’’. 59

In doing so, the subject unwittingly further divorces itself from the object, which it mistakenly believes to have fully encapsulated through conceptual reason. This second nature is thus unable to see itself in its entrapment, because the tool of reified conceptual reason which it uses is complicit in the very predicament it, falsely, claims transcendence from. 60 In other words, ‘‘in its conscious control of nature the self becomes opaque to its self-reproduction as second nature’’. 61 Adorno’s second nature thesis echoes Krishnamurti’s pithy dictum that the observer is the observed. Where Adorno differs from Krishnamurti, however, is in ascribing a critical function to art. Adorno’s aesthetic theory provides the alienated subject a means by which to reveal their predicament, and is therefore positive; F. H. Bradley’s assertion above that ‘when things are bad, it is good to know the worst’ is very much expressed through Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

Therefore, the best an individual can do is to use their aesthetic creativity through prevalent cultural material to reveal its contingency. This in itself is a hallmark of a humble memory of nature in the subject that may lead to mimesis; that is, a way by which the subject may create art, inevitably using reason, but in a manner that is non-instrumental and thus non-violent. 62 Amidst dominant, scientific, Enlightenment discourse, Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) assert that the status quo involving the domination of nature results in socialized beings who are opaque to themselves.63 In response to this domination, Adorno and Horkheimer deem that mimesis entails emancipatory potential insofar as it provides the socialized subject with an opportunity for an alternative mode of cultural engagement with nature. In so doing, alternative possibilities may become apparent. Art therefore serves a critical function through affording a paradigmatic shift for the individual willing to engage in non-dominating mimetic expression.

In opposition to Adorno’s aesthetic theory that champions such expression insofar as it may highlight existing ideological violence, Krishnamurti argues that receptivity to such aesthetic creation is a sign of modern malaise:

“Someone writes great music, someone plays it, interpreting it in his own way and we listen to it, enjoying it or criticizing it. We are the audience watching the actors, football players, or watching the cinescreen. Others write poems and we read; others paint and we gape at them. We have nothing, so we turn to others to entertain us, to inspire us, to guide us or save us. More and more, modern civilization is destroying us, emptying us of all creativeness. We ourselves are empty inwardly and we look to others to be enriched and so our neighbour takes advantage of this to exploit, or we take advantage of him”. 64

Whilst the above demonstrates Krishnamurti’s aversion to art and entertainment as fulfilling a critical function, crucially, he does not disavow the value of aesthetic creation absolutely. Rather, he is against dull passivity and receptivity. Paradoxically, intrinsic to the discipline, music is based upon repetition and practice of particular structures such that the artist may then be able to transgress them. That notwithstanding, Krishnamurti muses: ‘‘have you noticed that in moments of creativeness, those rather happy moments of vital interest, there is no sense of repetition, no sense of copying’’? 65 So, whilst aesthetic creation is not ruled out completely in Krishnamurti’s oeuvre, he does not proffer an aesthetic theory in any way comparable to the exacting one found in Adorno. Once again, Adorno helps to flesh out hunches which Krishnamurti shares somewhat cryptically. There is, then, a clear pattern that has been distilled from the oeuvres of Adorno and Krishnamurti: the former continually helps sharpen to the musings of the latter.

Conclusion

In sum, Krishnamurti’s thesis that the observing subject is the observed, and that political demonstration and the possibility of the socialised subject thinking their way out of a problem via ratiocination is rendered complicit in the very conditions it responds to, withstands scrutiny. Krishnamurti’s thesis is strengthened and rendered more robust when read along with Adorno’s critical theory, and, in particular, the latter’s notions of negative dialectic and non-identity thinking. As the first published piece to explicitly explore the relationship between Krishnamurti and Adorno, it is hoped that this paper contributes to responses which develop upon the themes articulated here. This may lead to further research into the coincidental links between the thought of Krishnamurti and his peers from different intellectual traditions to his, not least of all the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School. This meeting of ideas raises the possibility for creative responses to contemporary socio-political challenges over and above either political demonstration, or, intellectual retreat.

notes

1 Kalsi, ‘‘The ending of nihilism’’.

2 The Theosophy organisation was founded in New York, USA, in 1875 by Russian émigré Helena P. Blavastsky (1831–91). Combining tenets of Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions, as of 2019, Theosophy’s mission statement is: “To serve humanity by cultivating an ever-deepening understanding and realization of the Ageless Wisdom, spiritual Self-transformation, and the Unity of all Life.’’ Theosophical Society in England, ‘‘Mission Statement’’.

3 Krishnamurti Foundation of America, ‘‘Truth is a pathless land’’.

4 The Observer Effect dictates that observing a phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon.

5 I am reading Positivism after the system of Auguste Comte (1789–1957), which recognised only empirical facts and scientifically observable phenomena, and rejected metaphysics and theology.

6 I read the ‘subject’ after Stuart Hall (1932–2014), who argued that under modern social norms, individuation could not occur. Rather, the individual is subject to myriad forces, which seek to shape and control it. See Hall, ‘‘The Question of Cultural Identity’’ 285.

7 Müller-Doohm, Adorno 28.

8 The ouroboros is an ancient symbol that depicts a snake eating its own tail.

9 Adorno, ‘‘Aldous Huxley and Utopia’’ 115–16.

10 Adorno, Negative Dialectics 32.

11 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics 85.

12 Ibid. 75.

13 Adorno, Minima Moralia 83.

14 Like the forefather of Western Philosophy, Socrates, Krishnamurti never formally penned his thoughts.

15 Krishnamurti, The awakening of intelligence 358.

16 Krishnamurti, Facing a world in crisis 51.

17 Adorno, Negative Dialectics 406.

18 Ibid. 25.

19 Adorno, ‘‘Critique’’ 288.

20 Rose, The Melancholy Science 150.

21 Krishnamurti, The awakening of intelligence 63.

22 Adorno, ‘‘The Essay as Form’’ 158.

23 Adorno, ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society’’ 34.

24 Ibid. 34.

25 Krishnamurti, The impossible question 65.

26 Ibid. 140.

27 Krishnamurti, The limits of thought 122.

28 Rose, The Melancholy Science 131.

29 Rose, The Melancholy Science 141. Rose in turn quotes Adorno, Negative Dialectics 31.

30 Adorno juxtaposes ‘truth’ in philosophy as actually the remainder, or ‘dregs’, with the hitherto sacrosanct Platonic ideal. See Adorno, Against Epistemology 15. Also, see note 34.

31 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics 62–63.

32 As Yvonne Sherratt puts it: ‘‘A paradox occurs in that the direct presence of the Object can appear in the system, but not in a way that can be articulated. This leaves the system unfulfilled in its own terms. It can only attain the direct presence of the Object by denying its own voice. The conceptual system is caught in a paradox: it can either articulate the Object but not grasp it fully, or it can grasp it fully but not articulate it’’. Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic 188.

33 Krishnamurti, The first and last freedom 67

34 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics 63: ‘‘Whereas Freud remarks that psychoanalysis is concerned with ‘the dregs of the phenomenal world’, we might say that in its own approach philosophy generally finds its object precisely in what it denies itself: the dregs of the concept, in other words, in what is not itself concept’’. See also Adorno, Against Epistemology 15, and, note 30.

35 Krishnamurti, Limits of thought 97.

36 Krishnamurti, The awakening of intelligence 305.

37 Krishnamurti, The limits of thought 60.

38 Jayakar, Krishnamurti 114.

39 See, for example, Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism.

40 Krishnamurti, The first and last freedom 23.

41 Cook, ‘‘Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique’’ 15–16.

42 Adorno, Minima Moralia 156.

43 Ibid. 103.

44 Ibid. 157.

45 Adorno’s thesis has heavily influenced, and been explicitly referenced by, contemporary anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan. See, for example, Zerzan ‘‘Why Primitivism’’.

46 Adorno, Minima Moralia 39.

47 Geuss, A World Without Why 185.

48 Adorno, Minima Moralia 26.

49 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics 107.

50 Ibid. 107.

51 Adorno, Negative Dialectics 46: ‘‘[T]he isolated individual unhampered by any ukase may at times perceive objectivities more clearly than the collective, which is no more than the ideology of its functionaries, anyway’’.

52 Krishnamurti, The first and last freedom 154: ‘‘Man is not important — systems, ideas, have become important. Man no longer has any significance. We can destroy millions of men as long as we produce a result and the result is justified by ideas’’.

53 Coole, Negativity and Politics 182–183.

54 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 96.

55 Hellings, ‘‘Messages in a Bottle’’ 89.

56 Adorno, ‘‘Commitment’’ 180.

57 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 45.

58 Lukács, The theory of the novel 62.

59 Adorno, Negative Dialectics 357–58.

60 Adorno, ‘‘The Idea of Natural History’’ 105.

61 Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Adorno’s Idea of Natural History,’’ 99.

62 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 187.

63 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment 42–43.

64 Jayakar, Krishnamurti 268.

65 Krishnamurti, The first and last freedom 27.

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